The Saint and Soil of Democracy: Idolatry of Abraham Lincoln as an Intersection of Christian Nationalist and Settler Nationalist Identities

“The Saint and Soil of Democracy: Idolatry of Abraham Lincoln as an Intersection of Christian Nationalist and Settler Nationalist Identities” explores Protestant perceptions of Abraham Lincoln in late nineteenth- and early twentieth century America. Born-and-raised in Illinois, the “Land of Lincoln,” I grew up surrounded by a community that revered Lincoln and associated his memory with the history and landscape of the state. My upbringing prompted me to explore how Protestant Americans understood themselves as both Christians and settlers, through Lincoln. Employing an archive of sermons, church bulletins, poems, newspaper articles, scrapbooks of clergy, and the papers of Gutzon Borglum, “The Saint and Soil of Democracy” marks the role historical memories of Lincoln played in marrying settler and Christian identities into one American identity.

The poster will be split into three columns. The top of the first column will place the project in recent historiography pertaining to cultural histories of Abraham Lincoln’s legacy. While Richard Wightman Fox’s Lincoln’s Body (2015) and Martha Hodes Mourning Lincoln (2015) capture historical memories and memorializations of Lincoln after his death, both works omit discussion of Lincoln’s association with the frontier. Ned Blackhawk’s Rediscovery of America (2023), Robert Michael Morrisey’s People of the Ecotone (2022), and Stephen Kantrowitz’s Citizens of a Stolen Land (2023), all mark Lincoln’s dominating role in the historical consciousness of Americans; in celebrating and venerating Lincoln, historical narratives have erased, forgotten, or justified his participation in wars of Indigenous removal.

The bottom of the first column will analyze sermons and eulogies produced immediately after Lincoln’s assassination, that posit Lincoln as the “First American,” and associate his glory both to his faith in God and origin in the frontier. The contents of the second column will pull this thread into the twentieth century, with sermons, church bulletins, and poems celebrating Lincoln’s participation in the Black Hawk War as an early mark of his leadership. Moreover, these works canonize Lincoln as a martyr, with one poem asserting that “His blood is freedom’s eucharist.” This column will also evaluate Lincoln’s association with the biblical King David, as Christian communities posited the United States as God’s new Israel—a land for His chosen people.

The third and final column will discuss sites in which these communities asserted spatial religious authority in the American West via shrines to Lincoln. These shrines include pews Lincoln once worshiped in, the Lincoln Tomb in Springfield, Illinois, and Mount Rushmore, in Keystone, South Dakota. Particularly, the papers of Gutzon Borglum—the sculptor of Mount Rushmore—reveal notions of religious reverence and associations with civilization attached to Lincoln. Borglum regularly spoke of Lincoln in a religious capacity, claiming he could capture Jesus’s suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane through the face and body of Lincoln. Moreover, Borglum framed the Mount Rushmore monument as an effort to capture the United States’ contribution to Western civilization and discussed the settlement of the frontier and displacement of Indigenous populations as natural progress.