[pages 5-6]

Was Abraham Lincoln an Evolutionist?

Thomas F. Glick

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, two towering figures of the nineteenth century, were—as everyone is now aware—born in the same year, 1809, and their lasting influence has been compared in recent books and articles.. So, it is interesting to speculate on whether there might have been any interaction between them. Darwin was a life-long abolitionist, a supporter of the North during the Civil War, and well aware of Lincoln's leadership, which he admired. He was gratified by the Emancipation Proclamation though dubious of its efficacy (Darwin to Asa Gray, October 16, 1862).

But, I wondered whether in the period between the release of the American edition of the Origin of Species in March 1860 and the election campaign of that year, someone might have brought the book to Lincoln's attention.

Lincoln had read the first edition of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a controversial book espousing a theory of the origin of species by the natural operation of nature, similar to, but not as sophisticated as Darwin's theory. It was published anonymously in 1844 because the author, Robert Chambers, feared for his reputation and that of his family. Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon, notes that Lincoln had read the first edition. Herndon explains: "A gentleman in Springfield gave him a book called, I believe, Vestiges of Creation, which interested him so much that he read it through. The volume was published in Edinburgh, and undertook to demonstrate the doctrine of development or evolution. The treatise interested him greatly, and he was deeply impressed with the notion of the so-called 'universal law'—evolution; he did not extend greatly his researches, but by continued thinking in a single channel seemed to grow into a warm advocate of the new doctrine."

I also unearthed an independent source attesting that Lincoln purchased a copy of the sixth edition. This is interesting for three reasons: first, it attests that he took Chamber's evolutionary thesis seriously; 2^nd, Lincoln was known for not being a reader, yet he may have read this work twice; third, the sixth edition of Vestiges was 'The Gentleman's Edition'. Pricey and elegantly printed and bound, it was a status symbol that one could display. It is not unusual to want to own an upscale edition of an author or work that one is fond of. These two copies, the borrowed one (published in Edinburgh, Herndon says) and the purchased one (the 6^th, published in London) were both published in 1847, the former as one volume in a seven-volume set of selected works of Chambers, who, by this time, had gone public. [Note Chambers did not, in fact, reveal his identity as the author of Vestiges. This was only published in a posthumous 12th edition in 1884, also long after the appearance of Origin of species in 1859. John van Wyhe]

So if Herndon is to be believed, Lincoln was an evolutionist. Was he a Darwinian? Herndon, an avid reader, says only that he purchased works of Darwin and Spencer and tried unsuccessfully to get Lincoln to read them. But Joseph Fort Newton, in his 1910 book, Lincoln and Herndon supplies some additional details. Newton (1880-1950), a Baptist minister and freemason, reports:

Often Lincoln would stretch himself on the office cot, weary of his toil, and say, 'Now, Billy, tell me about the books;' and Herndon would discourse by the hour, ranging over history, literature, philosophy, and science….With characteristic zest Herndon plunged into Darwin's Origin of Species when it appeared, but Lincoln refused to follow on the plea that the water was too deep. He was, however, interested in Vestiges of Creation, whose dogma of the universal reign of law fitted into his philosophy in which there were no accidents.

I conclude that Lincoln was an evolutionist and had been for a decade or more, when the Origin burst upon the scene; that he assimilated something about the book, most likely by talking about it with Herndon, who seems not have gotten very far in his daily 'readathons' in the law office. One final point bears consideration: the Vestiges begins with a long disquisition on the so-called 'nebular hypothesis' – Laplace's notion that the sun originated in the contraction of a giant cloud of gas –which was taken broadly as the start of a cosmological evolutionary process, while the first chapter of the Origin is a rather mundane discussion of the 'artificial selection' practiced by animal and plant breeders, which Darwin set up as a context within which he could explain 'natural selection,' in terms familiar to upper class Englishmen. Lincoln might have found the cosmic scale of the Vestiges more appealing than the practices of pigeon fanciers detailed by Darwin.