'My Policy Is To Have No Policy'

First of 45 excerpts from Lincoln by David Herbert Donald:

From his earliest days Lincoln had a sense that his destiny was controlled by some larger force, some Higher Power. Turning away from orthodox Christianity because of the emotional excesses of frontier evangelicalism, he found it easier as a young man to accept what was called the Doctrine of Necessity, which defined as the belief "that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control."

. . . From Lincoln's fatalism derived some of his most lovable traits: his compassion, his tolerance, his willingness to overlook mistakes. That belief did not, of course, lead him to lethargy or dissipation. Like thousands of Calvinists who believed in predestination, he worked indefatigably for a better world -- for himself, for his family, and for his nation. But it helped to buffer the many reverses that he experienced and enabled him to continue a strenuous life of aspiration.

It also made for a pragmatic approach to problems, a recognition that if one solution was fated not to work another could be tried. "My policy is to have no policy" became a kind of motto for Lincoln -- a motto that infuriated the sobert, doctrinaire people around him who were inclined to think that the President had no principles either. He might have offender his critics less if he had more often used the analogy he gave James G. Blaine when explaining his course on Reconstruction: "The pilots on our Western rivers steer from point to point as they call it -- setting the course of the boat no farther than they can see, and that is all I propose to myself in this great problem."

Image: Earliest known Lincoln photo, a Daguerreotype
by Nicholas Shepard taken ca. 1846-47