Abraham Lincoln: A Life of Suffering and God's Purpose

After learning of the crushing Union defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, President Abraham Lincoln said that “if there is a worse place than hell I am in it.” When Pennsylvania Governor Andrew G. Curtin described the terrible scenes of slaughter from that battle, Lincoln, his face “darkened with pain,” “moaned and groaned in anguish,” “showed great agony of spirit,” and “walked the floor, wringing his hands and uttering exclamations of grief.” In that grief, Lincoln repeatedly asked, “What has God put me in this place for?”

The place that Lincoln occupied was the highest position of power in all the land, president of the United States. Unlike his fifteen presidential predecessors, however, Lincoln faced a task more daunting than any American commander in chief before him. With the nation ripped apart by a bloody Civil War, the fate of the United States rested on his shoulders. Fully realizing that the entire world was watching and waiting to see if the American experiment in self-government would survive, Lincoln knew that the Civil War was about more than just saving the Union forged by the Founding Fathers in 1776. He understood that the bitter, brutal conflict also stood as a test before the world, a world in which the vast majority of people had long lived under the rule of kings and sovereigns, of whether America’s system of free government, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, could long endure. As Lincoln famously said, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”

The weight of difficulty that resulted from Lincoln’s efforts to preserve the Union, safeguard American liberty, and abolish slavery were trials more intense than almost any man could bear. His own personal struggles during the Civil War, which included the tragic death of his 11-year-old son Willie, the second child Lincoln and his wife Mary had lost during their marriage, only added more pain to his daily reality. As one contemporary put it, Lincoln was “a man who carried a load too great for human strength; and, as the years went on and the load grew heavier, it bowed him into premature old age.” As Lincoln himself said in despair after receiving news of yet another significant Union defeat at the Battle of Chancellorsville, which was fought only four months after the loss at Fredericksburg, “I am the loneliest man in America. There is no one to whom I can go to unload my troubles, assured of sympathy and help.”

Considering the unfathomable pressure he was under and the suffering he endured in the execution of his duties as the 16th president of the United States, one can understand why a distraught Lincoln would ask, “What has God put me in this place for?” In attempting to answer that question, one must examine the long road of adversity that led Lincoln to the presidency. His entire life had been consumed with one difficulty after another. Lincoln was born into a life of crippling privation, an existence filled with so much hardship that one observer explained that at one point in his early life, Lincoln lived “amid want, poverty and discomfort that was . . . about on the plane of the slaves he was destined to emancipate.” From that crushing early period to the time he became president, Lincoln’s life never got any easier. Despite a life filled with the tragic deaths of loved ones, career failures, bouts of crippling, suicidal depression, and scores of other challenges, Lincoln developed a mental and a moral fortitude that equipped him with the spirit of perseverance necessary to lead the United States through the unparalleled turbulence of the Civil War.

And so, to return to Lincoln’s question, “What has God put me in this place for?” Perhaps the reason God put Lincoln in that place was because he was the only man capable of taking on so tall of a task. Lincoln’s life of struggle prepared him for the indispensable role he was destined to play during the American Civil War, instilling him with an indomitable will, which when coupled with his immense wisdom, sincere devotion to duty, honesty, integrity, and his deep personal sense of the great responsibility placed on him, made him the right man at the right time in history to guide America through its greatest crisis. By preserving American liberty, sparking “a new birth of freedom” for the United States by abolishing slavery, and ensuring that government of the people, by the people, and for the people did not perish from the earth, Lincoln left the world a far better place with a more hopeful future for the freedom of mankind. As the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy said, Abraham Lincoln “was a Christ in miniature, a saint of humanity,” a man who “lived and died a hero, and as a great character he will live as long as the world lives. May his life long bless humanity!”

Source

Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame