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What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America's Greatest President
Countless books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, yet few historians and biographers have taken Lincoln seriously as a thinker or attempted to place him in the context of major intellectual traditions. In this refreshing, brilliantly argued portrait, Michael Lind examines the ideas and beliefs that guided Lincoln as a statesman and shaped the United States in its time of great crisis.In a century in which revolutions against monarchy and dictatorship in Europe and Latin America had failed, Lincoln believed that liberal democracy must be defended for the good of the world. During an age in which many argued that only whites were capable of republican government, Lincoln insisted on the universality of human rights and the potential for democracy everywhere. Yet he also held many of the prejudices of his time; his opposition to slavery was rooted in his allegiance to the ideals of the American Revolution, not support for racial equality. Challenging popular myths and capturing Lincoln’s strengths and flaws, Lind offers fascinating and revelatory insights that deepen our understanding of this great and complicated man.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
About the author
Michael Lind
40 books76 followersCurrently Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation in Washington, Michael Lind has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic and writes frequently for The New York Times and the Financial Times. He is the author of more than a dozen books of history, political journalism, and fiction, including a poetry chapbook, When You Are Someone Else (Aralia Press, 2002), Bluebonnet Girl (Henry Holt and Co. (BYR), 2003), a children’s book in verse, which won an Oppenheimer Toy Prize for children’s literature, and a narrative poem, The Alamo (Replica Books, 1999), which the Los Angeles Times named as one of the best books of the year. His first collection of verse, Parallel Lives, was published by Etruscan Press in 2007.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 9, 2007
Lincoln was an atheist. If you weren't already aware of this fact, then you should probably read this book. It's definitely an eye-opener into who Lincoln was. I'm not even so much a history buff but I really enjoyed it. And I think it's important that we understand as much about our presidents as possible. Plus it's like gossip and slightly addictive.
May 31, 2025
Michael Lind’s What Lincoln Believed is a sharp, provocative, and deeply researched examination that cuts through the mythology of the “Great Emancipator” and repositions Abraham Lincoln within the ideological frameworks that actually shaped his life. This isn’t the Lincoln of Spielberg’s Lincoln, nor the moral crusader of our school textbooks. It’s Lincoln the Whig, Lincoln the nationalist, Lincoln the colonizer and most of all, Lincoln the disciple of Henry Clay.
Lind argues convincingly that Lincoln’s political North Star wasn’t Jeffersonian liberty, but Clay’s American System, a fusion of Hamiltonian economics and Jeffersonian racial hierarchy. Lincoln adored Henry Clay, and from the 1830s onward, he essentially adopted Clay’s platform as his own: protective tariffs, a national bank, massive internal improvements, and a vision of national greatness driven by industrial growth. But Clay’s program also included a white-settler society and the “solution” of colonization for emancipated blacks, something Lincoln not only supported but repeatedly advocated in favor of, even during the Civil War.
One of the most revealing threads Lind weaves throughout the book is Lincoln’s lifelong commitment to colonization. From his support of the American Colonization Society to concrete efforts to relocate freed blacks to Haiti, Central America, and even Texas, Lincoln saw colonization as both a solution to slavery and a safeguard for white republicanism. His fear wasn’t just of slavery’s immorality, it was of black freedom destabilizing the social order. His frequent references to “racial amalgamation” and concerns over free blacks competing with white labor paint a picture of a man who wanted slavery ended on terms that protected white society, not integrated it.
Lind doesn’t dodge the racial issues, if anything, he runs straight at them. Lincoln, he shows, was no abolitionist. He never supported black suffrage in Illinois, defended the state’s Black Codes, made racial jokes in private, and repeatedly emphasized that whites and blacks could never live as equals. The war, to Lincoln, wasn’t initially a war for emancipation, it was a war to preserve the Union. Even emancipation itself, when it came, was a strategic military measure, not a moral reckoning. The Union, in his own words, “shall not be dissolved” and preserving it, more than any other objective, was Lincoln’s animating cause.
There’s also a fascinating economic subtext to this book. Lind traces how Lincoln and the early Republican Party envisioned industrializing the South, especially the highland regions as a way to break the power of the planter aristocracy. It’s a vision that, had Lincoln lived, might have connected poor Southern whites, immigrants, and freedmen into an industrial workforce anchored in the national economy. But with Lincoln’s assassination, that vision died too and the South fell back into the hands of the very elites who had pushed it into war.
What Lincoln Believed is a necessary read, especially for those who want to understand the real ideological currents that shaped Lincoln’s mind. Lind doesn’t set out to destroy Lincoln’s legacy. He reframes it. In doing so, he gives us a Lincoln who is more fascinating, more complex, and perhaps more disturbing than the sanitized version we’re used to. This is not the story of a saint, it’s the story of a strategist, a nationalist, and a deeply American product of the 19th century.
It’s a smart, revisionist take that challenges comfortable myths. Not always compelling in its prose, but essential for readers interested in Lincoln’s real political worldview, not the moral fable.
Top Quotes
“Lincoln's God was the God of the philosophers, not that of Moses and Jesus, an abstract Providence whose will could be known, if at all, only through the events of history such as the Civil War.”
“More than any other president before or since, Lincoln served as theologian of America's civil religion.”
“Thomas Lincoln 'realized in his daily experience and observation how slavery oppresses the poorer classes, making their poverty and social disrepute a permanent condition through the degradation which it affixes to labor.'”
“More than most people, Abraham Lincoln was a product of the books he read.”
“Lincoln was introduced by his reading to the dominant secular tradition of early American society: the tradition of republicanism.”
“Instead of abandoning belief in the divine, many ancient thinkers posited the existence of what Jefferson would call 'Nature's God' an abstract being responsible not only for the physical universe but for universal laws of morality that transcended local customs.”
“The true heretics are those who base religion on supernatural revelations rather than on natural science.”
“Lincoln's implicit rejection of supernatural religion in favor of reason as the basis of the 'moral freedom' that is the corollary of republican freedom is clear.”
“The government is not to promote Christian morality; rather, the Christian 'seminaries' and 'the pulpit' are to be enlisted to promote the 'political religion' of secular law and republican government.”
"By adopting the 'free trade, or British system, we place ourselves side by side with the men who have ruined Ireland and India, and are now poisoning and enslaving the Chinese people.'"
"Those whose pride, whose abundance of means, prompt them to spurn the manufactures of their own country, and to strut in British cloaks, and coats, and pantaloons, may have to pay a few cents more on the yard for the cloth that makes them. A terrible evil, surely, to the Illinois farmer, who never wore, nor never expects to wear, a single yard of British goods in his whole life."
“Rebutting Jeffersonian arguments that the Constitution forbade federal aid to private enterprises, Lincoln argued that 'no one, who is satisfied of the expediency of making improvements, needs be much uneasy in his conscience about its constitutionality.'”
“In his support for a strong federal government and government-encouraged industrial capitalism, Lincoln, like Clay, followed Hamilton, not Jefferson. However, he sought to appeal to voters whose political culture was Jeffersonian, so it was politic to quote Jefferson for Hamiltonian ends.”
"Although Mr. L is, or was, a Fremont man, you must not include him with so many of those who belong to that party, an abolitionist. In principle he is far from it. All he desires is that slavery shall not be extended, let it remain where it is."
“The historic Abraham Lincoln was not just 'Anti-Slavery'; he was 'a Tariff, River and Harbor, Pacific Railroad, Free Homestead man.'”
"'Stand firm,' he declared on December 10, 1860. 'The tug has to come, and better now, than any time hereafter.' On another occasion he said: 'I will suffer death before I will consent or will advise my friend to consent to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege to take possession of this government to which we have a constitutional right.'”
"The very existence of a general and national government implies the legal power, right, and duty of maintaining its own integrity.”
"Are the black gown and wig to be the protection of traitors?"
"Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”
“The Radicals had what might be called a 'sociological' theory of the Southern problem, the South was an aristocratic, agrarian region in a middle-class, industrial nation-state. The problem was not just formal slavery, but the entire Southern caste and class system, which degraded poor whites as well as blacks. The mere abolition of slavery was not enough; the quasi-feudal social structure of the South needed to be revolutionized, if necessary with the help of Yankee colonists who would bring middle-class virtues into a postwar South.”
“To create a laboring class without civil and political rights would be 'the overthrow of republicanism and the establishment of imperialism.'”
“Radical Reconstruction, for any purpose, was doomed to fail because of the lack of adequate federal force.”
"These poor white men of the South, who are our brothers, and our natural allies, must be taught... that we are battling for their rights. They will learn in time, that by acting with us, they will cease to be the 'mudsills of society.’”
“Theodore Roosevelt, wrote in 1895: 'Thank God I am not a free-trader. In this country pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of free trade seems inevitably to produce fatty degeneration of the moral fibre.'”
"The lines have been drawn by America's workingmen against the indiscriminate admission of aliens to this country. It is simply a case of the self-preservation of the American working class."
“In the beginning of the twenty-first century the core territory of the Republican Party consisted of the states of the former Confederacy. Dominated by conservative whites in the Deep South, the Republicans now stood for states' rights and Christian fundamentalism. Republican presidential candidates felt compelled to endorse, or avoid criticizing, official displays of the Confederate flag by Southern state governments. The party of Abraham Lincoln had become the party of Jefferson Davis.”
“In his lifetime, Lincoln never had to confront the conflict between the equality of opportunity he favored and the industrial capitalism he promoted. But the issue moved to the center of American political life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in doing so it split the Republican Party into conservatives and progressives.”
“In his diary, Lincoln's private secretary John Hay recorded Lincoln's statement that the 'central idea' of the Civil War was to prove that democracies can defend themselves against insurrection.”
“The challenge to American democracy, with all its implications for the future of democracy in the world, did not begin with the secession of the Southern states; it began with the mere threat that the South would use violence to achieve goals that it had failed to achieve by peaceful political action.”
“The Civil War was about law and order in the service of democracy.”
"Some assure that in order to walk to one's death and sacrifice one's life, it is necessary to be stimulated by a narrow patriotism or inebriated by hatred for a given race. No, it is rather the lofty promise of final progress which leads the true men to give their blood.”
Lind argues convincingly that Lincoln’s political North Star wasn’t Jeffersonian liberty, but Clay’s American System, a fusion of Hamiltonian economics and Jeffersonian racial hierarchy. Lincoln adored Henry Clay, and from the 1830s onward, he essentially adopted Clay’s platform as his own: protective tariffs, a national bank, massive internal improvements, and a vision of national greatness driven by industrial growth. But Clay’s program also included a white-settler society and the “solution” of colonization for emancipated blacks, something Lincoln not only supported but repeatedly advocated in favor of, even during the Civil War.
One of the most revealing threads Lind weaves throughout the book is Lincoln’s lifelong commitment to colonization. From his support of the American Colonization Society to concrete efforts to relocate freed blacks to Haiti, Central America, and even Texas, Lincoln saw colonization as both a solution to slavery and a safeguard for white republicanism. His fear wasn’t just of slavery’s immorality, it was of black freedom destabilizing the social order. His frequent references to “racial amalgamation” and concerns over free blacks competing with white labor paint a picture of a man who wanted slavery ended on terms that protected white society, not integrated it.
Lind doesn’t dodge the racial issues, if anything, he runs straight at them. Lincoln, he shows, was no abolitionist. He never supported black suffrage in Illinois, defended the state’s Black Codes, made racial jokes in private, and repeatedly emphasized that whites and blacks could never live as equals. The war, to Lincoln, wasn’t initially a war for emancipation, it was a war to preserve the Union. Even emancipation itself, when it came, was a strategic military measure, not a moral reckoning. The Union, in his own words, “shall not be dissolved” and preserving it, more than any other objective, was Lincoln’s animating cause.
There’s also a fascinating economic subtext to this book. Lind traces how Lincoln and the early Republican Party envisioned industrializing the South, especially the highland regions as a way to break the power of the planter aristocracy. It’s a vision that, had Lincoln lived, might have connected poor Southern whites, immigrants, and freedmen into an industrial workforce anchored in the national economy. But with Lincoln’s assassination, that vision died too and the South fell back into the hands of the very elites who had pushed it into war.
What Lincoln Believed is a necessary read, especially for those who want to understand the real ideological currents that shaped Lincoln’s mind. Lind doesn’t set out to destroy Lincoln’s legacy. He reframes it. In doing so, he gives us a Lincoln who is more fascinating, more complex, and perhaps more disturbing than the sanitized version we’re used to. This is not the story of a saint, it’s the story of a strategist, a nationalist, and a deeply American product of the 19th century.
It’s a smart, revisionist take that challenges comfortable myths. Not always compelling in its prose, but essential for readers interested in Lincoln’s real political worldview, not the moral fable.
Top Quotes
“Lincoln's God was the God of the philosophers, not that of Moses and Jesus, an abstract Providence whose will could be known, if at all, only through the events of history such as the Civil War.”
“More than any other president before or since, Lincoln served as theologian of America's civil religion.”
“Thomas Lincoln 'realized in his daily experience and observation how slavery oppresses the poorer classes, making their poverty and social disrepute a permanent condition through the degradation which it affixes to labor.'”
“More than most people, Abraham Lincoln was a product of the books he read.”
“Lincoln was introduced by his reading to the dominant secular tradition of early American society: the tradition of republicanism.”
“Instead of abandoning belief in the divine, many ancient thinkers posited the existence of what Jefferson would call 'Nature's God' an abstract being responsible not only for the physical universe but for universal laws of morality that transcended local customs.”
“The true heretics are those who base religion on supernatural revelations rather than on natural science.”
“Lincoln's implicit rejection of supernatural religion in favor of reason as the basis of the 'moral freedom' that is the corollary of republican freedom is clear.”
“The government is not to promote Christian morality; rather, the Christian 'seminaries' and 'the pulpit' are to be enlisted to promote the 'political religion' of secular law and republican government.”
"By adopting the 'free trade, or British system, we place ourselves side by side with the men who have ruined Ireland and India, and are now poisoning and enslaving the Chinese people.'"
"Those whose pride, whose abundance of means, prompt them to spurn the manufactures of their own country, and to strut in British cloaks, and coats, and pantaloons, may have to pay a few cents more on the yard for the cloth that makes them. A terrible evil, surely, to the Illinois farmer, who never wore, nor never expects to wear, a single yard of British goods in his whole life."
“Rebutting Jeffersonian arguments that the Constitution forbade federal aid to private enterprises, Lincoln argued that 'no one, who is satisfied of the expediency of making improvements, needs be much uneasy in his conscience about its constitutionality.'”
“In his support for a strong federal government and government-encouraged industrial capitalism, Lincoln, like Clay, followed Hamilton, not Jefferson. However, he sought to appeal to voters whose political culture was Jeffersonian, so it was politic to quote Jefferson for Hamiltonian ends.”
"Although Mr. L is, or was, a Fremont man, you must not include him with so many of those who belong to that party, an abolitionist. In principle he is far from it. All he desires is that slavery shall not be extended, let it remain where it is."
“The historic Abraham Lincoln was not just 'Anti-Slavery'; he was 'a Tariff, River and Harbor, Pacific Railroad, Free Homestead man.'”
"'Stand firm,' he declared on December 10, 1860. 'The tug has to come, and better now, than any time hereafter.' On another occasion he said: 'I will suffer death before I will consent or will advise my friend to consent to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege to take possession of this government to which we have a constitutional right.'”
"The very existence of a general and national government implies the legal power, right, and duty of maintaining its own integrity.”
"Are the black gown and wig to be the protection of traitors?"
"Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”
“The Radicals had what might be called a 'sociological' theory of the Southern problem, the South was an aristocratic, agrarian region in a middle-class, industrial nation-state. The problem was not just formal slavery, but the entire Southern caste and class system, which degraded poor whites as well as blacks. The mere abolition of slavery was not enough; the quasi-feudal social structure of the South needed to be revolutionized, if necessary with the help of Yankee colonists who would bring middle-class virtues into a postwar South.”
“To create a laboring class without civil and political rights would be 'the overthrow of republicanism and the establishment of imperialism.'”
“Radical Reconstruction, for any purpose, was doomed to fail because of the lack of adequate federal force.”
"These poor white men of the South, who are our brothers, and our natural allies, must be taught... that we are battling for their rights. They will learn in time, that by acting with us, they will cease to be the 'mudsills of society.’”
“Theodore Roosevelt, wrote in 1895: 'Thank God I am not a free-trader. In this country pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of free trade seems inevitably to produce fatty degeneration of the moral fibre.'”
"The lines have been drawn by America's workingmen against the indiscriminate admission of aliens to this country. It is simply a case of the self-preservation of the American working class."
“In the beginning of the twenty-first century the core territory of the Republican Party consisted of the states of the former Confederacy. Dominated by conservative whites in the Deep South, the Republicans now stood for states' rights and Christian fundamentalism. Republican presidential candidates felt compelled to endorse, or avoid criticizing, official displays of the Confederate flag by Southern state governments. The party of Abraham Lincoln had become the party of Jefferson Davis.”
“In his lifetime, Lincoln never had to confront the conflict between the equality of opportunity he favored and the industrial capitalism he promoted. But the issue moved to the center of American political life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in doing so it split the Republican Party into conservatives and progressives.”
“In his diary, Lincoln's private secretary John Hay recorded Lincoln's statement that the 'central idea' of the Civil War was to prove that democracies can defend themselves against insurrection.”
“The challenge to American democracy, with all its implications for the future of democracy in the world, did not begin with the secession of the Southern states; it began with the mere threat that the South would use violence to achieve goals that it had failed to achieve by peaceful political action.”
“The Civil War was about law and order in the service of democracy.”
"Some assure that in order to walk to one's death and sacrifice one's life, it is necessary to be stimulated by a narrow patriotism or inebriated by hatred for a given race. No, it is rather the lofty promise of final progress which leads the true men to give their blood.”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 21, 2020
Some readers will find What Lincoln Believed a well-researched analysis of Lincoln’s true beliefs, while others will be put off by apparent reinterpretation of historical knowledge. Lind clearly believes that Abraham Lincoln was a white supremacist and documents how he arrives at this conclusion. His documentation is not entirely persuasive, though he does provide enough research material to make those who have unrealistically idealized Lincoln more than a bit uncomfortable. Lind also calls Lincoln a liar based on decisions other people made years later after Lincoln had been assassinated. Jumps in logic such as these do take away from the credibility of the book and could lead some readers to dismiss other, better supported, analyses.
The book is much more than those controversial suppositions, however, and the reader would miss out by making snap judgments. Lind generally does a good job describing how Lincoln emulated Henry Clay and other Whigs on a variety of topics, including his support for internal improvements, protective tariffs, and national banks. In “The Slave Power,” Lind carefully describes Lincoln’s abhorrence of slavery and conviction to stop the spread of it into the territories, but also his support of colonization. It is here that he asserts Lincoln wanted a “white America” and attributes this as the reason Lincoln wanted to stop slavery’s expansion. In “Lincoln and the Union” and elsewhere Lind discusses the dynamic between slavery and Lincoln’s ultimate goal, which was to save the Union; a goal that had both nationalistic and global repercussions should it not be attained.
Reception to this book has been mixed, and Lind in my view stretches beyond his material in attributing to Lincoln ingrained convictions that remain unsupported. That said, I found that the book challenges some of the more mythical perceptions of Lincoln and offers significant insights not found in other books. In that regard, I recommend the book to serious Lincoln scholars.
The book is much more than those controversial suppositions, however, and the reader would miss out by making snap judgments. Lind generally does a good job describing how Lincoln emulated Henry Clay and other Whigs on a variety of topics, including his support for internal improvements, protective tariffs, and national banks. In “The Slave Power,” Lind carefully describes Lincoln’s abhorrence of slavery and conviction to stop the spread of it into the territories, but also his support of colonization. It is here that he asserts Lincoln wanted a “white America” and attributes this as the reason Lincoln wanted to stop slavery’s expansion. In “Lincoln and the Union” and elsewhere Lind discusses the dynamic between slavery and Lincoln’s ultimate goal, which was to save the Union; a goal that had both nationalistic and global repercussions should it not be attained.
Reception to this book has been mixed, and Lind in my view stretches beyond his material in attributing to Lincoln ingrained convictions that remain unsupported. That said, I found that the book challenges some of the more mythical perceptions of Lincoln and offers significant insights not found in other books. In that regard, I recommend the book to serious Lincoln scholars.
December 16, 2025
Offers a different, if contradictory, look at Abraham Lincoln.
May 21, 2008
although Lincoln's legacy has left countless volumes of books out there, this one gives unique insight into (imho) our country's greatest president. letters and small stories provide the backdrop to some of the little things that made him tick. it goes well beyond the well known Gettysburg address and explores his friendships and struggles. a definite read for any Lincoln fan.
July 7, 2016
If you want to challenge your history lessons from high school and beyond this book will do it. The author builds a case that Lincoln and his contemporaries were more interested in preserving the Union than in freeing the slaves. The free slaves, according to the author were to be repatriated to Africa or set in colonies arround Central and South America.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews