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.Not for Lincoln would there be thestraightforward acceptance of a world of new horizons, but rather a complexstruggle to assimilate the expansion of what could be accomplished with thediminution of what one could be responsible for.His antislavery convictionsmay have had less to do with embracing the new consciousness of the marketthan with an ambivalent effort to contain it.He did not live to see how futilethat effort would have been in the Gilded Age, but perhaps that would not, inthe end, have greatly shocked a fatalist like Lincoln.Why should the spirit ofmortal be proud, Lincoln asked, in reciting his favorite poem; and why shouldit expect to accomplish more than the purposes the Almighty had laid downfor it? Perhaps that realization, more than any other single factor, left him noother explanation for human action but the Doctrine of Necessity. NotesThis essay first appeared in Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Winter 1997.1.Isaac Arnold, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (1884; repr., Lincoln, NE, 1994),81; Henry Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln (Boston, 1892), 267, 276; abrahamlincoln and the doctrine of necessity 43Herndon to Jesse Weik, February 6, 1887, in Herndon-Weik Papers, Group 4, reel10, Pö2031-34, Library of Congress; Herndon, Lincoln s Philosophy and Religion, in The Hidden Lincoln: From the Letters and Papers of William H.Herndon, ed.Emmanuel Hertz (New York, 1937), 406.2.Herndon to Weik, February 25, 1887, in Herndon-Weik Papers, Group 4,reel 9, Pö1893-96.3.Lincoln, Reply to Oliver P.Morton at Indianapolis, Indiana, February 2,1861, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed.Roy P.Basler (New Brunswick,NJ, 1953 55), 4:194.4.William H.Herndon and Jesse W.Weik, Abraham Lincoln: The True Storyof a Great Life (New York, 1917), 1:70; Josiah Blackburn, in Conversations withLincoln, ed.Charles M.Segal (New York, 1961), 336.5.Joseph Gillespie to Herndon, December 8, 1866, in Hertz, Hidden Lincoln,322-23; Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (Urbana, IL,1994), 237, 239.6.Lincoln, To Albert Hodges, April 4, 1864, in Collected Works, 7:282.7.Herndon to Weik, February 6, 1887, in Herndon-Weik Papers, Group 4,reel 10, Pö2031-34; see also Herndon to Weik [no date], Group 4, reel 11, Pö2906.8.J.G.Randall led the way in dismissing Lincoln s fatalism as simplya function of his melancholy and therefore impervious to explanation inLincoln the President: Springfield to Gettysburg (New York, 1945), 2:28, 48; CarlSandburg, in similar fashion, wrote it off as an expression of Lincoln s mysti-cism, in Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (New York, 1939), 3:370-82, as did oneof the early attempts at Lincoln psychobiography, L.Pierce Clark s Lincoln: APsycho-Biography (New York, 1933), 531-32, 540-42.Stephen B.Oates deals withit as an expression of Lincoln s depression over the deaths, first of Ann Rutledge,and then of William Wallace Lincoln, in With Malice toward None: The Life ofAbraham Lincoln (New York, 1977), 29, 293.9.For surveys of the problem of fatalism and free will, see Vernon K.Bourke, The Will in Western Thought: An Historico-Critical Survey (New York,1964); Bernard Berofsky, ed., Free Will and Determinism (New York, 1966); SidneyHook, ed., Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science (New York,1958); Maurice Mandelbaum, Purpose and Necessity in Social Theory (Baltimore,1987); Gary Watson, ed., Free Will (New York, 1982); and Linda Zagzebski, TheDilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (New York, 1991).10.Lincoln, Response to Evangelical Lutherans, May 13, 1862, in CollectedWorks, 5:212-13; Herndon, Lincoln s Philosophy and Religion, 407-8.11.Henry Whitney, A Life of Lincoln, ed.M.M.Miller (New York, 1908), 1:105-6.12
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