“Providence in the Thought of Douglass, Brown, Lincoln and Brownson” - Dr. Adam Seagrave

Our academic retreat on The American Republic concluded with Dr. Adam Seagrave’s lecture on how Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and Orestes Brownson each conceived of providence. While the four thinkers differed in their articulations of providential action, their shared belief in divine destiny exhorts modern Americans to think on a higher plane.

Transcript

In his book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville offered a bold claim about the importance of theological reflection to human life. He said, and I quote: "There is hardly any human action, no matter how particular you assume it to be, that is not born out of a very general idea that men have conceived of God, of God's relationships with humanity, of the nature of their soul, and of their duties toward their fellows. You cannot keep these ideas from being the common source from which all the rest flows."

The truth of this claim was especially evident in the antebellum United States—not coincidentally, the very time and place out of which Tocqueville's statement arose. An 1857 article in Harper's magazine, which attempted to describe the American mind, identified a conviction in divine providence as the most general, pervasive, ineradicable feeling in the hearts of our countrymen. As one historian recently put it, "the Lord willing" was far more than a figure of speech for Americans at the time.

What Tocqueville thought was true of humanity in general was particularly true of antebellum America. And what was particularly true of antebellum America was even more manifestly true of a few of the most influential Americans of the time: Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and Orestes Brownson. Each of these prominent public figures thought that they were cooperating with God's will, or divine providence, in helping the United States through the crisis of the Union. On this point they converged. They parted ways dramatically, however, on the next question of how exactly God's providence worked, and subsequently on how they were respectively called to work with it.

So I'll start with Frederick Douglass. Douglass believed that God generally provides for the entire universe through orderly laws of nature, and for humanity through a natural moral law. When it comes to divine particular providence—the ways in which God intervenes to specifically influence particular events in human history—Douglass believes that God has an intelligible and recognizable agenda to rescue the oppressed from injustice. Douglass thought that God did this for Douglass himself when he escaped from slavery, and that God would do the same thing for all enslaved black Americans in the United States in time.

For Douglass, God's will was discernible and inexorable, bringing about the good for the American people in general and especially for the enslaved. This made Douglass an inveterate optimist and informed his lifelong approach to ending slavery and achieving equal civil rights for black Americans. While many others who fought for the same goals did so through elected public office or through extralegal activism, Douglass chose instead to speak and write. Though this was undoubtedly due in part to personal proclivity, it was also due to his view of how divine providence works. Because Douglass was convinced that a benevolent providence would bring about his desired outcomes with or without him, he saw his role as something of a prophet, awakening consciences and preparing minds for the inevitable progress of God's providential plan. Douglass was one of the most influential Americans of the 19th century, but always from the sidelines. Secure in the belief that he knew what divine providence wanted and that it would come to fruition in time, he didn't see the need to enter the fray of politics or extralegal activism or war that attracted so many of his friends throughout his life.

We can see this in Douglass's reflection on the formative experiences of his early life, in both his 1845 and 1855 autobiographies. In his first autobiography, Douglass refers to his removal from Colonel Lloyd's plantation to Baltimore as "the first plain manifestation of that kind Providence which has ever since attended me, and marked my life with so many favors." This event was, at least to Douglass's mind at the time, a special interposition of divine providence in his favor—that's a quotation.

According to Douglass's view, God created nature in such a way that everything in the world reflects the divine. The ordered system of the universe—within which he explicitly includes human beings themselves, so we know he's not just thinking of things like gravity—is eternal and perfect all by itself. Our job as humans is to be aware of, or acknowledge, this eternal and perfect order, not to actually bring it about ourselves.

Despite this apparent downplaying of the role of human agency in accomplishing God's purposes, Douglass thought that the natural human right to liberty is a very important part of God's broader providential government. Douglass thought that God would intervene in human history on behalf of people who were being treated in ways that conflicted with the way he created them. In the case of antebellum America, this meant that God would intervene on behalf of the enslaved.

This can be seen in Douglass's argument against the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott, where he outlines the dimensions of God's providential government in clear rhetorical terms as "the Supreme Court of the Almighty." Chief Justice Taney, according to Douglass, cannot bail out the ocean, annihilate the firm old earth, or pluck the silvery star of liberty from our northern sky. He cannot change the essential nature of things. Douglass believed in the God of the oppressed and embraced a liberating theology that emphasized the divine agenda to free the enslaved.

The intelligibility and benevolence of God's providence stand behind and justify the indomitable optimism of Douglass's famous Fourth of July speech, which he actually delivered on the 5th of July in 1852. In this speech, Douglass begins by focusing on the gross deprivations of natural rights he himself has experienced, the horrific inhumanity of the domestic slave trade, the national inconsistencies that have plagued America from its beginnings, the hypocrisy and complicity of American Christian churches, and the general moral blindness of the American people, as he put it. Few, if any, American public figures have ever painted such a damning and depressing picture of the United States. At the end of his speech, however, he introduces a deus ex machina, consisting in the fact that "the fiat of the Almighty, 'Let there be light,' has not yet spent its force." He ends it in hope. Douglass's optimism stems directly from his conviction in a benevolent divine providence that will ensure the abolition of slavery regardless of what morally blind human beings might do.

Douglass's good friend John Brown was different—not just different from Douglass himself, but as a kind of general description. The strange guy. A lifelong abolitionist and zealous evangelical Christian who pursued peaceful efforts to help black Americans for most of his life, playing an important role in the Underground Railroad, Brown decided at the age of 55 that the time for moral persuasion and underground efforts had ended, and that the time for forceful action had come. So he did what any 55-year-old with 10-plus kids would do. He packed a wagon full of weapons and ammunition and traveled to the Kansas Territory to lead the anti-slavery guerrilla forces that were fighting to make Kansas a free state.

Brown became a legendary military leader in the Kansas Territory with a reputation for violence, fueled particularly by his retaliatory execution of five pro-slavery men with broadswords at Pottawatomie. Shortly thereafter, however, he also freed thirteen enslaved people from a farm in Missouri and escorted them. One of the freed people even gave birth to a child during the journey. After his exploits in Kansas, Brown led a small group of men in a long-planned raid on the Federal Armory at Harper's Ferry in Virginia—what he's most well known for. He successfully captured and held the armory for two days before a group of United States Marines, led by none other than Robert E. Lee of future Civil War fame, arrived and captured him. Brown was severely injured, but survived long enough to be tried and hanged for treason. His words and actions while in prison and at his trial secured him lasting renown as a hero for the abolitionist cause.

Like Douglass, Brown believed that God willed to end slavery in the United States. Unlike Douglass, Brown also believed that God issued clear and direct commands to individuals such as himself to carry out his providential plan. Brown knew the Bible extremely well, much of it by memory, and quoted it almost every time he spoke or wrote, no matter the context. Brown thought God's word applied unequivocally to the situation of the enslaved in the United States, and that he was duty-bound as a Christian to do whatever he could to free them. For Brown, divine providence was intelligible, and it also contained intelligible commands directed to individual readers—like a general's clear and direct orders that Brown felt obligated to follow.

In Brown's interview shortly after being captured at Harper's Ferry, Ohio member of Congress Clement Vallandigham posed the following question to him: "Who sent you here?" Brown answered, "No man sent me here. It was my own prompting and that of my Maker. I acknowledge no master in human form." Asked later, "Upon what principle do you justify your acts?" Brown answered simply, "Upon the golden rule." Then he explained further: "I hold that the golden rule—do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you—applies to all who would help others to gain their liberty."

According to Brown, it was a simple matter of putting two and two together. God said in the Bible that one should do unto others as you would that others should do unto you. Brown reflected that he himself would want to be freed from slavery, and therefore there was a divine command that Brown should free others from slavery. Brown restated and summarized this train of thought in his address to the Virginia court upon receiving his sentencing. He explained and justified his actions at Harper's Ferry by directly referencing the law of God, which he identified with the Bible. "The Bible," Brown said, "teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me further to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction."

In Brown's mind, God had given him a clear instruction: free the enslaved. Brown and other abolitionists had tried persuasion for decades, to no avail. Force was the only remaining method of obeying the divine command, and so force was what Brown thought he must use. Brown's law of God is different from Douglass's Supreme Court of the Almighty. It is not a natural moral law nor a general providential benevolence, but the revealed word of God as recorded in the Bible's text—not a setting of eternal rules that can be known through observing nature, or a benevolent hand guiding the outcomes of events. Brown views the divine will as issuing direct commands in plain language. As Frederick Douglass later recounted, John Brown used to say, "Whenever there is a right thing to be done, there is a 'thus saith the Lord' that it shall be done."

This distinctive view of how divine providence works—that God controls actions and events through a system of direct commands to individuals, expressed in his revealed word in the Bible—determined Brown's life choices, and through them significant developments in American history, including the timing and direction of the Civil War. As his first biographer, James Redpath, put it, John Brown saw himself as the American Moses, predestined by omnipotence to lead the servile nations in our southern states to freedom.

Of course, Brown's self-conception as a man predestined to emancipate the enslaved ended up being realized historically by the man known as the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln. Although Lincoln dismissed John Brown publicly as a madman in his Cooper Institute speech before his election to the presidency in 1860, by the end of Lincoln's life the two had more in common than he would have cared to admit. The most consequential disagreement they had was in fact over the workings of divine providence.

Lincoln, like Brown, was highly idiosyncratic in his view of providence. Lincoln was that rare theologian who doesn't profess any religion. Unlike Douglass, and in sharp contrast to Brown, Lincoln never professed belief in any form of Christianity as an adult, publicly or privately. As a child, he was raised in a separatist Baptist household and went to church with his parents. Lincoln's childhood was spent in an atmosphere of a Calvinism that would have "out-Calvined Calvin," as one historian puts it. And Calvinist beliefs in predestination certainly made a lasting impact on Lincoln's mind. But after he left his parents, he was never a member of any church, and was indeed publicly criticized by political opponents—as I mentioned the other day—for being a freethinker who rejected religion entirely.

Although this criticism was too strong, and Lincoln was more accurately described by a friend as a "well-wisher to the Christian religion," Lincoln never affirmed Christian theology or made a show of attending church even in response to such critics. Although he quoted the Bible frequently, Lincoln seems not to have believed that it was the revealed Word of God.

Lincoln's persistent hesitancy to embrace Christianity or any other specific religious belief system was not, though, due to principled skepticism, hyper-rationalism, or anti-clericism. He wrestled so intensely and personally with theological questions throughout his life that his mind could never rest in any settled religious belief. And if his mind couldn't genuinely embrace any settled religious belief, Lincoln had too much respect for religion to pretend, or to go through the motions. Though he wasn't religious, Lincoln took religion much more seriously than most religious people do.

Beyond these biographical facts and speculations, it's difficult to say very much with any certainty about Lincoln's personal religious beliefs. It's less difficult, however, to talk about Lincoln's views of divine providence. It is not too much to say, in fact, that Lincoln was preoccupied with the concept of providence throughout his life, and especially during the Civil War. Perhaps due in part to his Calvinist upbringing, Lincoln frequently expressed belief in a kind of fatalism—"the doctrine of necessity," as Lincoln himself called it—that he also elaborated in theological terms as the judgments of the Lord or the purposes of the Almighty. In his 1863 Thanksgiving, Lincoln even referred to God as "the great disposer of events."

The most distinctive feature of Lincoln's interpretation of divine providence was his belief in its thoroughgoing inscrutability. Where John Brown thought that he could know specific details of God's providential plan with absolute certainty, and Douglass was convinced that this providential plan was a straightforwardly benevolent one, Lincoln thought that it was impossible to know almost anything about God's providential plan, except that he has one, and that he is in fact working in particular ways to bring it about. He even speculated in his second inaugural address that God may have specifically willed the introduction and continuance of the institution of slavery in the United States. But Lincoln firmly believed that neither he nor anyone else could know God's intentions or the plan of divine providence. "The Almighty has his own purposes," as Lincoln said in the second inaugural, and he thought it possible or even likely that those divine purposes were different from the purposes of any of the human agents involved.

Lincoln's God is more like a chess player than a general. He clearly believed in a human nature that had certain inherent laws of motion and moral rules for action, presumably given to it by a creator. Chief among these moral rules was the natural right to liberty, with its cognate of the doctrine of self-government. Lincoln referred to the doctrine of self-government as "absolutely and eternally right." This moral cornerstone of human nature was a constant amid the vicissitudes of historical circumstance, like furniture bolted to the floor of a storm-tossed ship. It remained in place even in the face of the institution of slavery.

In his speech on the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln disagreed with Justice Taney's contention that the history of racial slavery disproved the Declaration's principles. According to Lincoln, the authors of the Declaration meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which could be familiar to all and revered by all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and—even though never perfectly attained—constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.

The principles of natural rights and self-government articulated in the Declaration of Independence are, for Lincoln, eternal dictates of divine providence. They exist not because of social conventions, positive legislation, or even the Constitution. The latter, in fact, was made by the Framers to do just that—to frame the pre-existing and eternal moral principles of the Declaration, whose origin lies explicitly in the Creator.

Lincoln's decision to pursue elected public office was at least partly the result of his idiosyncratic beliefs about the workings of providence. He did so at least in part because he believed that the will of the American people constituted the best available indication of divine providential purposes. If Lincoln himself could not hope to attain an understanding of the purposes of the Almighty, he at least hoped that the American people would serve as a sort of conduit for, or approximation of, these purposes. Whether or not one agrees with this assessment of the American people, evidence for this interpretation of Lincoln's thought process abounds throughout his writings and speeches.

In his Temperance Address, delivered in 1842, Lincoln cited common opinion as evidence for divine providence itself, saying: "The universal sense of mankind on any subject is an argument, or at least an influence, not easily overcome. The success of the argument in favor of the existence of an overruling providence mainly depends upon that sense." In his Peoria speech in 1854, Lincoln referred, as he did elsewhere, to the fact that "there is a judgment and a feeling against slavery in this nation which cast at least a million and a half votes. You cannot destroy that judgment and feeling." And finally, in his first inaugural address in 1861, which he talked about yesterday, Lincoln expressed deference to the judgment of "this great tribunal, the American people," and asked, "Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world?"

This is not to suggest that Lincoln merely outsourced his own thinking to majority opinion on any of these issues, but he did look to the American people for guidance and validation throughout his career. And I would argue that he did so as a direct result of his epistemological humility regarding the intentions of divine providence. Lincoln didn't have the confidence—or perhaps the hubris—of John Brown, and he didn't have the indefatigable optimism of Frederick Douglass. His pursuit of elected public office was influenced by the theological-existential crisis of knowing he was a part of God's plan, but not knowing what that plan was. Lincoln's career, like Douglass's and Brown's, was profoundly guided by his views of divine providence.

In the months after Lincoln's assassination, with the Civil War safely behind us and apparently nothing but blue skies ahead—little did we know—Orestes Brownson published The American Republic. Providence is a key protagonist throughout Brownson's book, and is at least mentioned in nearly every chapter. It becomes the primary focus of the book's concluding chapter and drives Brownson's narrative as it hurtles toward his remarkable concluding sentence: "Let them"—the American people—"devote their attention to their internal destiny, to the realization of their mission within, and they will gradually see the whole continent coming under their system, forming one grand nation, a really Catholic nation, great, glorious, and free." That's the last sentence of the book.

Brownson defines providence at the beginning of Chapter 11 as God operating through historical facts. With respect to the United States in particular, Brownson says in the introduction that every living nation has an idea given it by Providence to realize, and whose realization is its special work, mission, or destiny. The United States, he says, has a mission and is chosen of God for the realization of a great idea. Its idea is liberty, indeed—but liberty with law and law with liberty, as we said. He then goes on to correct himself, clarifying that its mission is not so much the realization of liberty as the realization of the true idea of the state, which secures at once the authority of the public and the freedom of the individual.

Brownson's view of providence is vastly different from Lincoln's, and more similar to Frederick Douglass's in its intelligibility, or the degree to which he thinks he can actually know what God's providential purpose is. The content of God's providence in Brownson's view is, to be sure, quite different from Frederick Douglass's, in that Brownson emphasizes the idea of balancing authority with freedom.

One of the most important concepts in Brownson's work is the idea of the providential constitution. At the beginning of Chapter 7, Brownson distinguishes between the constitution of the government, which involves a people designing a particular form of government for themselves, and the constitution of the state, or the people of the state, which is, in its origin at least, providential—given by God himself, operating through historical events or natural causes. God has to make a people or state through his providential action in history before that people can give themselves a particular political constitution.

Brownson's concept of providence, though similar to Douglass's in its intelligibility and benevolence, also seems to allow more space than Douglass thought for variation through the action of human free will. Brownson says that God governs the nation by the nation itself, through its own reason and free will. In speaking of the Romans a bit later, Brownson says that the Roman people, had they chosen, could have given a different direction to the developments of their constitution. There was providence in the course of events, but no fatalism. Individual and collective free will acts as a second cause, on Brownson's view, acting within certain fixed parameters to apply God's providential will to their own situation.

Brownson is supremely confident, though, that despite the contingency resulting from human free will, God's providential purpose for the United States will come to fruition. In one of his most sanguine moments near the end of the book, Brownson says that the success of what he calls the real American people in the recent Civil War proves to all that what prior to the war was treated as American arrogance or self-conceit was only the outspoken confidence in their destiny as a providential people, conscious that to them is reserved the hegemony of the world. This isn't simply moral callousness on Brownson's part. It results from his deep conviction in the superintendence of God's omnipotent providence, and his confidence that he knows what this providence intends for the United States.

On the question of divine providence, Brownson combines Douglass's optimism with John Brown's supreme confidence in knowing exactly what this providence intends, and knowing that it will come about apparently no matter what. Brownson's optimism and intellectual confidence make him, in important ways, the anti-Lincoln on the issue of providence. Brownson was an intellectual's intellectual, and was able to view concrete events with a detached, abstract perspective of which Lincoln was utterly incapable. Lincoln, on the other hand, was able to view these same events with a humanity and realism of which Brownson, I think, was incapable.

This is particularly clear in their respective views regarding slavery, which I talked about a bit yesterday. Brownson's work is remarkable for its dismissiveness of slavery. Brownson's moral sense, as Lincoln might say, was relatively unaffected by slavery. If the Civil War itself was a mere bagatelle, the institution of slavery was an intermezzo within the great story of providential American progress.

Despite the major differences between each of these four Civil War–era figures and how they thought about divine providence, they shared a firm conviction in the existence of providence, and allowed this conviction to guide their thinking and action in profound and pervasive ways. In this way, all four of them are completely alien to the modern United States.

There are many possible reasons for this, which we can discuss further. But the concluding point I'd like to make is that this decline in the relevance of providence to political discourse in the U.S. has potentially important consequences. Our collective belief in divine providence is connected with our collective sense of national purpose. Our collective sense of national purpose in the U.S. has accordingly faded along with our collective belief in divine providence. A sense of national purpose is important for any political community, and particularly for the United States, since we have historically seen it as our responsibility to remind humanity of higher human goods like freedom and justice.

In recent decades—and indeed for more than a century, I would argue—the U.S. has seemed to pursue material well-being, including wealth generation and technological improvement, with the single-mindedness of a hedge fund manager. Material well-being is a good thing, but it's a low goal for humans, and we know it. And materialism, on either the individual or collective levels, can't coexist with a commitment to higher and better human purposes. The American Revolutionary era was defined by boycotts, military conflict, and—not at all coincidentally—the high watermark of devotion to principles of natural justice and the idea of the United States as a divinely ordained city upon a hill. A nation preoccupied with material prosperity, as we in the United States seem to be today, can only be held together by force.

Douglass, Brown, Lincoln, and Brownson remind us, then, that we should be thinking of ourselves, individually and collectively, on a higher plane: as beings with divinely ordained destinies, working together to accomplish purposes bigger than any and all of us. If they were here with us, they would exhort us to try to be on the right side of providence—not working blindly for material benefits, as the antebellum slaveholders were doing in their own way, but rather with a watchful eye to discerning what the great disposer of events is up to in our lives and at our moment in human history.

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