An Interview with Richard Carwardine
An Interview with Richard Carwardine
by Jonathan W. White
Richard Carwardine is Emeritus Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University and former president of Corpus Christi College at Oxford University. His research focuses on the United States between 1776 and the Civil War, with a chief interest in the interplay of politics and religion in a society that tolerated slavery and lacked a national church establishment. His books include Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (2006), which won the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize; The Global Lincoln (2011), which he co-edited with Jay Sexton; Lincoln’s Sense of Humor (2017); and the recently published Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union (2025). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2006 and was a Founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in 2010. The Lincoln Academy of Illinois elected him in 2009 to the Order of Lincoln, and in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2019 he was made a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George for services to the study of American history in the UK and the United States.
Jonathan White: Your earliest work focused on evangelicalism and politics in early American history. What first attracted you to this field?
Richard Carwardine: My interest in American religion started with my doctoral dissertation. I specialized in U.S. history in my final undergraduate year at Oxford and as a graduate began research on American and British abolitionism. I came to see the essential religious character of the impetus for reform. In this I was influenced by Gilbert Hobbs Barnes’s book on the religious revivalist sources of immediate abolition, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830–1844 (1933), and Whitney R. Cross’s pathbreaking study of upstate New York religion, The Burned-over District (1950). Transatlantic abolition, I discovered, was a well-populated research field, so I stepped sideways into the promising subject of transatlantic religious revivalism. A steady two-way traffic in evangelical ministry brought leading American revivalists to the British Isles throughout the nineteenth century, including the most influential of his era, Charles Grandison Finney. My dissertation was published as Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (1978). It showed how American aggressive conversion techniques, common to Methodism and to the Calvinist churches jolted by Finney and his imitators, fed an appetite among aspirational common people in Britain at a time of rapid social change. The pulses of evangelical church growth on both sides of the ocean demonstrate a powerful community of faith.
My Oxford tutors in medieval and modern history had led me to see religious identity and ideology as a motor for political and social action. What helped, too, was my upbringing in South Wales, where dissenting Protestantism had molded the dominant chapel culture and political engagement. I knew the power of the “Nonconformist Conscience.” As a liberal Anglican (Episcopalian) I know how religion can be a driver of political engagement.
This sensibility encouraged my approach to American politics before the Civil War. In Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (1993) I aimed to show how the power of evangelical Protestantism—the nation’s dominant subculture—fed into party politics and how church divisions heralded and aggravated the ominous sectional split over slavery. Here, of course, I benefited from the work of the so-called “ethnocultural school” of historians who posited some correlation between party allegiance and religious identities. I drilled down into the autobiographical accounts, journals, correspondence, and diaries of individual ministers and lay leaders. They showed how antislavery Whigs and subsequently Republicans drew electoral power from key constituencies within mainstream northern evangelicalism, an engine of modernity, social progress, and economic improvement.
JW: What led you to shift your area of study to Lincoln, a man who appears to have been skeptical of organized religion for much of his adult life?
RC: In my native Wales, Lincoln had been long admired as an embodiment of the democratic republican ideal. After his death, he was sanctified in grief as “our Lincoln” and “our Welsh president,” supposedly descended from medieval Welsh princes(!). He was the lifelong hero of David Lloyd George, British prime minister (1916–1922) and a charismatic influence in Wales. (In my youth, you would commonly hear the boast: “Lloyd George knew my father.” Since he was also a great womanizer, you never heard the claim, “Lloyd George knew my mother.”) “LG” emphasized above all Lincoln’s breadth of humanity. “In his life . . . he was a great American. He is no longer so. He is one of those giant figures, of whom there are very few in history, who lose their nationality in death. They are no longer Greek or Hebrew, English or American; they belong to mankind.”
I encountered Lincoln close up as a student through his 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas. These were a key source for the celebrated Oxford undergraduate special subject, Slavery & Secession, which I took in my senior year. (Allan Nevins, as a visiting professor, devised the course while fire-watching during the Nazi air raids on Britain.) I also read Don Fehrenbacher’s scintillating and forensic book on the pre-presidential Lincoln, Prelude to Greatness (1962). To my good fortune, Fehrenbacher held the visiting Harmsworth Chair in U.S. History that year (1964) and gave unmissable lectures on the coming of the Civil War.
In my first academic post, at Sheffield University, Lincoln took a central place in my courses on the Civil War era. But with my research focused on the religious dimension of the American past, it came as a surprise when a colleague urged me to write a proposal for a short political study of Lincoln. The time (1987) was opportune. Hard though it is to believe, scholarly work on Lincoln and the Civil War had reduced to a trickle in the 1970s and 1980s, partly in the reaction against the Vietnam War and Watergate. In my own teaching at Sheffield, I felt strongly the lack of a brisk and analytical political life, though I warmly recommended Richard N. Current’s brilliant essays in The Lincoln Nobody Knows (1958). When Longman accepted my proposal for Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power, they launched my career as a Lincoln biographer. The protracted route to publication and the Lincoln Prize took many turns along the way!
JW: In Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (2006) you see a spiritual dimension to Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War. Lincoln seems to be one of the hardest people to pin down when it comes to matters of faith. How do you make sense of this aspect of his life?
RC: In interrogating Lincoln’s faith I have relied primarily on his own writings and speeches. Lincoln wrote with care and precision, so it is reasonable to take his words at face value. Taken together, his “Handbill Replying to Charges of Infidelity,” “Farewell Address at Springfield,” “Meditation on the Divine Will,” correspondence with Eliza Gurney, and his Second Inaugural Address—to name just some of the key sources—reveal how Lincoln moved over the course of his life from an early dalliance with deism, and the concept of a remote creator God, to a belief in a mysterious Almighty who intervened in the affairs of humankind and delivered the Civil War as a punishment for national sin. As president he attended the Old School Presbyterian Church on New York Avenue in Washington, D.C., but he made no profession of Christian faith.
Only during the war did Lincoln come to describe slavery as a sin and see emancipation as the working out of God’s will. But he had always considered enslavement a wrong and an impediment to the full realization of the nation’s special purpose. The American Union’s moral, political, and economic mission was to give the whole world an inspiring model of a uniquely durable republic, where citizens deserved the right to rise. The principles of natural rights and human equality, proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence and protected by the U.S. Constitution, should apply to all regardless of color. Free labor encouraged self-improvement and a fluid social order. Slavery stifled enterprise, froze social relations, and deprived men of the just rewards of their labor.
JW: Some biographers have seen Lincoln as a passive leader, but you interpret him quite differently. How do you understand Lincoln’s wartime leadership?
RC: It’s important to distinguish between passivity and fatalism. Lincoln described himself as a lifelong fatalist: “I have found all my life as Hamlet says: ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.’” His law partner William Herndon recalled him asserting that “all things were fixed, doomed in one way or the other, from which there was no appeal”: all conscious human action was shaped by “motives”—that is, self-interested, rational and predictable responses to surrounding conditions “that have somewhat existed for a hundred thousand years or more.”
But a sense of irresistible processes need not encourage passivity. As a leader, Lincoln was active and enterprising. Historians who deem him passive find their key text in what he wrote to Albert Hodges, the Kentucky editor of the Frankfort Commonwealth, in April 1864: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Context is all, however. Through Hodges, Lincoln was reaching out to conservative voters. He understated his own responsibility in the face of an inexorable pressure for emancipation and enrolling Black troops. He added that only God could claim to have brought the nation to its current state. “If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.”
This, though, is only one bit of the episode. What is commonly missed is the brisk, five-word, follow-up telegram which the president sent Hodges when, after waiting eighteen days, his words had still not reached the public: “Did you receive my letter?” Lincoln anxiously prodded. Here was the president who did seek to control events, concerned that his words should have time to work on conservative Unionists in the Border States and beyond. Hodges replied at once, assuring Lincoln that he was simply waiting for the optimum moment. Within the week he had kept his word, and the letter circulated Union-wide.
Overall, Lincoln was an active leader who kept his focus on strategic essentials and could pull surprises. Though ready to leave foreign affairs and the national finances largely to the direction of trusted ministers, he kept control over all decisions bearing upon slavery, emancipation, and race. John W. Forney watched in admiration as Lincoln grew in office to become “that great, wonderful mysterious inexplicable man: who holds in his single hands the reins of the republic: . . . who does his own purpose in his own way no matter what temporizing minister in his cabinet sets himself up in opposition to the progress of the age.”
JW: Lincoln’s Sense of Humor (2017) is one of my favorite books. Tell us about Lincoln as a humorist. How did he develop his penchant for jokes and storytelling? And why was this aspect of his personality so important to his career as a lawyer and politician?
RC: I got special pleasure from researching and writing that book. Lincoln’s humor was a serious business! From his father, an accomplished storyteller, he learned how to tell a joke. Apposite wit and stories peppered his interventions as an Illinois courtroom lawyer and politician. In the White House he became the first president to make storytelling and laughter tools of the office. His humor spanned a spectrum from western tall tales, absurdity, and larger-than-life characters to cerebral delight in the plasticity, ambiguity, and surprises of language. Ecumenical in his tastes, he admired quick wit, irony, logical fallacy, and satire.
Lincoln’s laughter and his attested sadness (the “hypo”) were two sides of the same coin. Recourse to humor gave him relief from, in his own words, “hours of depression.” But there was more to it than that. Humor served him as a creative tool in his professional dealings. He used anecdotes as parables, to teach and illuminate. His jokes and ready wit lubricated his relations with others, often diverting a conversation away from a sticky topic. Notable was his appetite for satirical humor lampooning hypocrisy and ethical double standards. His own reckless efforts at satire as a young man met only limited success and in one case almost led to a fatal duel; subsequently he reined in his impulse for sarcasm, comic hurt, and satirical assault. This made him especially appreciative of the razor-sharp satire of the Ohio newspaperman David Ross Locke, who shredded the anti-administration politics of “Copperheads” through a monstrous creation, the bigoted preacher Petroleum V. Nasby. Lincoln did not use superlatives lightly; in declaring Locke a genius for whose satiric gift he would “gladly” relinquish his office, he registered both unlimited admiration and a note of envy.
JW: What is your favorite joke or story of Lincoln’s?
RC: Will you allow two? They show how much of Lincoln’s humor defies the rule that what amuses one generation is generally lost on another.
Lincoln cited an Illinois preacher who reflected that the scriptures told of only one perfect man, Jesus Christ, having lived on earth, and that they offered no record of a perfect woman. This prompted the intervention of a forlorn voice at the back of the church: “I know a perfect woman, and I’ve heard of her about every day for the last six years.” “Who was she,” the minister asked. “My husband’s first wife,” came the reply.
Titian F. Coffey, an assistant attorney general, recalled a delegation that came to the president seeking the appointment of a friend as commissioner to the Sandwich Islands. They presented their case earnestly, pressing on Lincoln not only their candidate’s fitness for the post but also his bad health, remarking that the balmy climate of the South Seas would be a great boon to his recovery. The president closed the interview discouragingly: “Gentlemen, I am sorry to say that there are eight other applicants for that place, and they are all sicker than your man.”
JW: Were there any downsides to Lincoln’s use of humor during his presidency?
RC: Earthy, bawdy, and “off-color” stories were a mainstay of Lincoln’s humor. Long before his election to the presidency, he attracted the charge of vulgarity. Democrats berated him for his “smutty jokes” during the senatorial campaign of 1858, and in the presidential canvass of 1860 the opposition presses ridiculed a candidate with no qualifications except that he “tells a smutty story in good style—[and] is the ugliest man in the West.” During the war critics in both the Union and Confederacy seized on Lincoln’s humor as a stick to beat him: his appetite for low jokes, they charged, exposed a disabling lack of gravitas and principle, and revealed the cruel disregard of a “heartless buffoon” for the victims of war. In a powerful Harper’s Weekly cartoon, “Columbia Confronts Her Children,” after grievous Union losses at Fredericksburg, a female figure—Columbia—points at Lincoln, and accusingly asks “Where are my 15,000 sons—murdered at Fredericksburg?” Lincoln’s callous answer, “This reminds me of a little joke . . .” prompts an outraged interruption: “Go tell your joke at Springfield!!”
The voices of complaint about the “smutty national joker” in the White House rose to a crescendo of Democratic Party condemnation during the election year of 1864. Lincoln faced the bogus accusation that—when visiting the blood-drenched Antietam battlefield in October 1862—he had shattered its sanctity by asking to hear a vulgar comic song, with bodies “yet warm in their . . . graves.” Accompanied by Ward Hill Lamon and George McClellan, Lincoln, “suddenly slapping Marshal Lamon upon the knee, exclaimed: ‘Come, Lamon! give us that song about Picayune Butler.’ McClellan has never heard it.” With a shudder, the general protested, “Not now, if you please Marshal. . . . I would prefer to hear it some other place and time.” The story was a damaging distortion of a later occasion, when Lincoln had asked Lamon at a site near the battlefield to sing a “little sad song.” The president wrote a detailed rebuttal but on reflection chose not to publish it, telling Lamon: “You know that this is the truth and the whole truth about that affair, but I dislike to appear as an apologist for an act of my own which I know was right.”
JW: How do we square Lincoln’s increasing religiosity during the war with his reputation as a “smutty joker”?
RC: If asked, I doubt he would have thought his quest for religious understanding was incompatible with telling jokes, even smutty ones. Here the insights of Reinhold Niebuhr are pertinent. The influential theologian saw in humor “the capacity of the self to gain a vantage point from which it is able to look at itself.” Those with a sense of humor, he noted “do not take themselves too seriously. They are able to . . . see themselves in perspective, and recognize the ludicrous . . . aspects of their pretensions.” By contrast, egotists and narcissists, supposing themselves the planetary center of life, are guilty of absurd pretension—“and its absurdity increases with our lack of awareness of it.”
Lincoln’s jesting provides an example of the truth that humor yields a perspective on human frailties that enhances political leadership. Throughout his life Lincoln used humor to expose the foibles and absurdities of humankind, drawing attention both to his own peculiarities, through self-mockery, and to the shortcomings of others.
JW: Several years ago you co-edited a collection of essays that explored Lincoln’s legacy around the world. What surprised you the most when you read the essays in The Global Lincoln (2011)?
RC: The heyday of Lincoln’s international standing ran from the worldwide lament over his assassination to the 1920s; indeed, he continued to be widely invoked throughout the twentieth century, as many different “constructed” Lincolns met national or local purposes. Two elements I find particularly striking and somewhat surprising.
First, Lincoln’s authority derived less from his role as emancipator than as the robust defender of the principles of liberal and democratic nationalism. Radicals and nation-builders around the globe cast him as the heroic tribune of the people whose defense of his nation’s integrity was read as devotion to universal democratic principles. In casting American nationalism not in ethnic or racial terms but as a moral force for the improvement of humankind, Lincoln spoke to foreign socialists, radicals, and democrats who combined nationalist aspirations with a program to free the world from monarchical power and aristocratic privilege. He provided the model of how to transcend one’s nation to become a symbol of the common people’s universal struggle. For example, in Spain the progresistas of the Revolutionary Sexennium (1868–1874) paid homage to Lincoln as a democratic hero; Emilio Castelar, president of the First Spanish Republic, saw him as the apotheosis of a free political system that acted as “a school of liberty.” Likewise, Garibaldi’s Italian democrats, German radicals, Japanese modernizers, and the Cuban independence leader José Martí all hailed his example.
The second striking element was that Lincoln never attracted the ire of anti-Americans abroad. Even Fidel Castro claimed that “Lincoln belongs to us.” Given Karl Marx’s explicit admiration for Lincoln as a son of the working-class, Marxist-Leninists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere have not made him a target in their critique of western capitalism. Ironically, the most savage assaults on Lincoln have probably emanated from domestic American critics viewing him from the disparate angles of Black radicalism, white supremacy, and libertarianism. More often, opponents of the United States have made Lincoln their ally. For instance, Spanish statesmen contended that America betrayed Lincoln’s non-interventionist principles in the War of 1898; Latin American opponents of Theodore Roosevelt’s actions in Panama in 1903 compared him unfavorably to his Republican predecessor; Japanese critics of the 1924 Asian Exclusion Act deemed it a repudiation of Lincoln’s principles. Accorded the role of the nation’s conscience, Lincoln has been held up as a mirror to reflect back to the United States the degeneration, even betrayal, of its founding ideals.
JW: Many modern scholars seem to discount the importance of religion in their studies of nineteenth-century America, but in Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union (2025) you place it front and center. Why do you believe it is essential to pay attention to Christianity during the Civil War era?
RC: My book takes what is generally agreed about American society during the Civil War era—that religion in its multiple forms was ubiquitous—to ask, “How did communities of faith in the Union engage with the challenge of war and the fundamental political issues in play?” It seems to me perverse not to address the political engagement of these influential communities!
I use the term religious nationalism to mean the fusion of religious purpose and nationalist vision. Religion in the United States from its founding to the Civil War offered a sacred framework for defining the nation and prescribing its course. First, the book traces how the plural voices of American religion drove the political nation towards the secession crisis of 1860–1861. The drive for separatism by the proslavery religious nationalists of the South exposed the contending value systems inherent in the opposing visions of the republic.
The book highlights, secondly, the neglected but profound religious clash between antislavery and conservative nationalists within the wartime Union. That chronic conflict powered the beating heart of the war’s political narrative, from the shattered optimism of the early months, though the abortive Peninsula Campaign, the Emancipation Proclamation, the unprecedented slaughter of 1864, Lincoln’s re-election, the congressional passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, and eventually to Confederate surrender and postwar Reconstruction. In the binary divide between pro-Union nationalists, each side certain of its own righteousness, emancipators slowly gained the advantage and conservatives railed as they watched their precious world slipping away.
The book’s third purpose is to place Abraham Lincoln within the cultural swirl and political milieu of Civil War religion. The crisis reshaped his own religious thinking, and what he said about faith encouraged others to reflect on the Almighty’s purposes. The trauma of war gave him a new perception of God, whom he came to see as an active force in history. This “providentialist turn” deepened the antislavery ethic that had animated his political rhetoric during the 1850s. Then, the beneficiaries of his Republican program to contain the wrong of slavery were to be the white settlers of the free-soil territories; now, a more capacious moral framework led him to embrace emancipation, “a new birth of freedom,” and equality of civic opportunity for both Black and white men.
JW: Clement L. Vallandigham is a major figure in Righteous Strife—he even appears on the front cover opposite Lincoln. We normally think about Vallandigham as a leading Peace Democrat, not as a religious figure. Tell us about his role in this story.
RC: Of Huguenot ancestry, Vallandigham was raised in Ohio by a pious Scotch-Irish mother and strict Calvinist father. His brother James followed his father into the Presbyterian ministry. Clement chose law and politics, but the influence of his Christian upbringing persisted. In 1854, at Dayton’s First Presbyterian Church, he experienced what he described as “a peace and joy which the world never gave, and which, God be praised, I feel and am assured it cannot take away.” Naturally austere, he embraced a high Calvinist doctrine of “the absolute sovereignty of God’s electing love and the utter depravity and helplessness of man,” resisting the optimistic belief of evangelical reformers that society would be perfected before Christ’s thousand-year reign. He erected an altar at home, and told his mother that “morning and evening sacrifice shall daily be offered up so long as I do live. . . . I feel as if by God’s grace I were . . . able now to do some good truly in the Church and the world.” This was not a passing phase. His earnest wartime speeches quoted purposefully from the scriptures. Belief in his personal destiny under God’s guidance made him resilient against attack. A long-term political supporter attributed Vallandigham’s moral courage when faced with the worst—his military arrest and banishment—to a “firmly seated religious conviction . . . that God ruled the world and provided for the ultimate triumph of the right.” This explained “the amazing energy and unswerving faith” of a steadfast states-rights Peace Democrat.
JW: Over the years, you’ve taught American history to hundreds of British students. What are their impressions of Lincoln and the sectional conflict in the United States?
RC: American history has remained persistently popular at British universities throughout my career. At the time of Vietnam and Watergate, and again during the Iraq War, many students warmed to New Left historians and dismissed the pro-Americanism of their predecessors who had experienced the United States’ generosity after the Second World War through the Marshall Plan. At other times—the fall of the Iron Curtain; the Clinton and Obama presidencies—a more open-minded and sympathetic approach has prevailed. Twentieth-century topics, notably the Cold War and the Civil Rights movements, have attracted most enrollments, but the nineteenth-century white South, racial enslavement, and the struggle for emancipation have attracted many, too. Students are generally mystified (to put it mildly) by historiography that explains the coming of the Civil War as an issue of states’ rights, not slavery. Few British students have been exposed, unlike Americans, to the mythologized Lincoln, so they are not shy to ask hard questions, particularly about his stance on race and slavery. Mostly, though, he emerges more admired than not!
JW: Now that you’ve finished Righteous Strife, do you have a new project on the horizon?
RC: Not yet, though I’m thinking tentatively about a study of Civil War humor.
JW: One final question: I read online that you played the role of Cornelius in the 1967 film Doctor Faustus, alongside Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. What was that experience like?
RC: The story of the stage production in Oxford and filming in Rome is too colorful to tell here! I was a freshman at the time and loved every moment. It remains a rich memory. I’ve continued to act and have just played Cymbeline in the play of that name with the company I helped found in the 1980s, the Abbey Shakespeare Players. We perform each summer in the ruins of a Welsh abbey. I share Lincoln’s love of Shakespeare and know from firsthand experience of the plays he most admired—by taking the roles of (inter alia) Falstaff, Richard III, Claudius, Lear, Julius Caesar, and Wolsey—that Lincoln was an uncannily shrewd and perceptive reader of the Bard.
JW: That’s amazing! Thank you so much for joining us today!
RC: Thank you. I’m honored by the invitation!