Lincoln, Churchill & Faith in Wartime

Abraham Lincoln’s Faith
Abraham Lincoln and the Bible

Abraham Lincoln and Winston S. Churchill were not conventional men.  Their religious faith were not necessarily conventional Christian faiths.  Neither were conventional church goers but they certainly had more than a conventional knowledge of scripture and religion and an extraordinary ability to mobilize the faith of their countrymen to confront evil.

As a president, Abraham Lincoln grew to believe that only Providence could or would solve the nation’s problems.  For Lincoln, the will of Providence weighed heavy on his soul and directed his leadership during the Civil War.  John Todd Stuart, his wife’s cousin, told President Lincoln: “I believe that Providence is carrying on this thing.”  Lincoln replied: “Stuart that is just my opinion.”1  Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed: “Lincoln’s religious convictions were superior in depth and purity to those held by the religious as well as by the political leaders of his day.”2 Lincoln scholar Michael Burkhimer wrote: “Lincoln was neither an infidel nor an orthodox Christian.  He believed in the wisdom and the atoning death of Jesus, but did not necessarily believe Jesus was equal to God.  Lincoln was also familiar with the original teachings of Christ through the Q material in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and tried to live according to them.”3

Longtime Lincoln friend Orville H. Browning recalled: “I can’t recollect any occasion on which we have ever had any talk about the Christian religion,” adding: “He was always naturally a very religious man.”4 Another longtime friend, Dr. William Jayne, observed that “Lincoln was by nature a deeply religious man.  But I have seen no evidence that he ever accepted the formulated creed of any sect or denomination.  I should say that all churches had his respect and good wishes.”5 Springfield printer Gilbert J. Greene recalled an incident in the 1850s when he accompanied Lincoln to prepare a dying woman’s will.  Once at the woman’s bed and after the will had been prepared, she asked Lincoln to “read a few verses out of the Bible.”  Lincoln instead read Psalm 23 by heart along with the words from several “familiar comforting hymns” as she passed away.  On the way home, Greene said: “Mr. Lincoln, I have been thinking that is very extraordinary that you should so perfectly have acted as pastor as well as attorney.”  Lincoln replied: “God, and Eternity, and Heaven were very near to me to-day.”6

After Lincoln’s death, some associates attempted to demonstrate that Lincoln’s faith reflected conventional Christianity.  White House aide William O. Stoddard contended that “whatever may have been Mr. Lincoln’s vagaries of opinion in former days, the rubbish of New Salem atheism was burned out of him in the fiery furnace of long trial, great sorrow, and compelled acknowledgment of Divine Power.’”7 Journalist Noah Brooks wrote: “I am glad now  that I never hesitated, when proper occasion offered, to talk with him upon religious matters, for I think that the best evidences of his belief in Christ are those which I derived in free and easy conversation with him….He told me that the prayers of the people had greatly sustained him, and that he had always sought from God, the source of knowledge and wisdom, that strength which he needed.”8

While young Lincoln had accepted the anti-slavery dogma of the Pigeon Creek Baptist Church, he rejected some of its Calvinist tenets.  Reason was a refuge in an unreasonable world.  Abraham was almost as impious as a child as his parents were pious.  As a very young man, he thought reason would solve everything.  In his 30s, Lincoln started attending church with his wife and remained an intermittent church goer for the rest of his life.  Lincoln’s friend Joseph Gillespie remembered: “Mr. Lincoln once told me once that he could not avoid believing in predestination although he considered it a very unprofitable field of speculation because it was hard to reconcile that belief with responsibility for one[‘]s act[.]  After he became President he gave unmistakable indications of being a believer in destiny[.]  I feel quite sure that there was not a moment when he despaired of success in putting down the rebellion and he trusted more in Divine power than in human instrumentality[.]  Mr Lincoln had a strong a faith that it was in the purposes of the Almighty to save this Country as ever Moses had that God would deliver the Israelites from bondage and he came to believe that he himself was an instrument foreordained to aid in the accomplishment of this purpose as well as to emancipate the slaves[.]”9

Lincoln scholar Michael Burkhimer observed that Lincoln believed in “Calvinism without the Deity.  Free will is absent if the mind is in the power of some other force, which Lincoln calls ‘necessity.’”10 Lincoln’s religious beliefs about God’s will evolved.   Historian  Richard Carwardine wrote: “Continuous religious inquiry was a natural ingredient of his broader intellectual quest.  The weight of evidence points to an evolution in his views as an adult.  As a young man in New Salem, freed from the hardshell, hyper-Calvinist milieu of his Baptist parents’ faith and practice, Lincoln found a stimulus in deistic rationalism, but after taking on professional and family responsibilities in Springfield, he encountered and ruminated on a more intellectual Protestantism.  Then, when he was president, the circumstances of war ensured an even more profound, pressing engagement with the meaning of life and death.”11 Lincoln did not believe in making his private faith a public matter.  Lincoln Scholar Lucas E. Morel noted: “Like George Washington, James Madison, and other American Founders, Lincoln did not think the public profession of one’s religious convictions contributed much for the community to consider when deciding on a candidate for office or when discussing the merits of a specific public  policy.”12

President Lincoln grew increasingly concerned with God’s will for his country.  “The will of God prevails,” wrote President Abraham Lincoln in the midst of a military and cabinet crisis in early September 1862.  “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God.  Both may be, and one must be wrong.  God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time.  In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party – and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose.  I am almost ready to say this is probably true – that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.  By his mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants.  He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest.  Yet the contest began.  And having begun He could give the final victory either side any day.  Yet the contest proceeds.”13

Historian Winston Churchill, writing of the Civil War, observed:  “Lincoln treated all his visitors with patience and firmness.  His homely humour stood him in good stead.  A sense of irony helped to lighten his burdens.  In tense moments a dry joke relieved his feelings.  At the same time his spirit was sustained by a deepening belief in Providence.  When the toll of war rose steeply and plans went wrong he appealed for strength in his inmost thoughts to a power higher than man’s strength was certainly given him.”14 Churchill perhaps had his own personal trials of World War I in mind.

The faith of Lincoln, a skeptic as a youth, deepened with age.  His special war message to Congress in July 1861 concluded: “And having thus chosen our course, without guile, and with pure purpose let us renew our trust in God, and go forward without fear, and with manly hearts.”15 Four years later, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural was virtually a theological document:  “Fondly do we hope – fervently do we pray – that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.”  Lincoln’s was not a judgmental morality, as Lincoln made clear in his Second Inaugural.  Historian James L. Huston wrote: “The middle portion of the Second Inaugural dealt with divine wrath at the United States for the sin of slavery, and is almost abolitionist in its condemnation of the peculiar institution.  Here, in the most religious portion of the speech, Lincoln declared that some force, which he could only describe as a ‘living God,’ had determined slavery was to end, and thus the will of God, or simply fate, pushed the North and South into the war and demanded a human sacrifice necessary for its fall.”16

Although not conventionally religious men, mentions of divinity pervaded the public lives of Churchill and Lincoln.  Historian Nicholas Parrillo wrote that “as the bloodshed mounted, Lincoln pleaded less and less for God to end the war.  He began asking God only to preserve the Union so that it could continue to fight and to experience purposeful suffering for as long as God thought necessary.”17 President Lincoln’s beliefs are most often identified with the Old Testament.  Theologian Reinhold Niehbuhr wrote: “Lincoln’s faith is closely akin to that of the Hebrew prophets, who first conceived the idea of a meaningful history.  If there was an element of skepticism in his grand concept, one can only observe that Scripture itself, particularly the Book of Job, expresses some doubts about giving the providential aspects of history exact meanings in neat moral terms.”18 After analyzing both Lincoln’s writings and historians’ commentary on those writings, Lincoln scholars Samuel W. Calhoun and Lucas E. Morel concluded that “the mature Lincoln believed in a personal, sovereign God.”  They wrote: “The historical record contains considerable raw data pertaining to Lincoln’s religious beliefs: his words, both written and spoken, and his actions.”19

Lincoln friend Leonard Swett summed up Lincoln’s faith: “The religious views of Mr. Lincoln were simply a reflex of his own character.  He believed in God, as the Supreme Ruler of the world, the guider of men, and the controller of the great events and destinies of mankind.  He believed himself to be an instrument and leader of the forces of freedom.  He knew the toils of the slave and of the poor whites at the South.  Their sufferings and privations were his personal experiences, and he felt their burdens to be his own.  He believed that the Declaration of Independence, ‘that all men are created equal,’ was not, as said by Rufus Choate, ‘a glittering generality,’ but was a standard political truth.  Our Savior said in the closing sentences of His Sermon on the Mount: ‘Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect,’ not that He expected perfection in the persons to whom He addressed these words, not that He expected perfection of us in our day and generation, but he laid down a religious standard which no one can surpass and to which all nations might aspire.”  Despite Lincoln’s strong inclination to favor reason over emotion, Lincoln told sculptor Leonard Volk: “I don’t like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he wore fighting bees!” And he extended his long arms, at the same time suiting the action to the words.”20

In September 1862 responding to Chicago ministers pressing for emancipation, President Lincoln said “it is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter.  And if I can learn what it is I will do it!”21 In mid-1864, President Lincoln responded to a minister who said he “hoped the LORD was on our side” by saying that “I know that the LORD is always on the side of the right.  But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the LORD’s side.22 When an elderly man at a White House reception told the president, “Up our way, we believe in God and Abraham Lincoln,” President Lincoln responded: “My friend, you are more than half right.”23

Winston Churchill followed a different faith journey.  Before entering Harrow School, young Churchill won a prize for his knowledge of the Bible.  But the teenage Churchill change at Harrow and Sandhurst, according to biographer William Manchester: “His auto didacticism precipitated a religious crisis.  At Harrow he had attended daily prayers and Sunday services; in the army he participated in church parades.  Until now he had never doubted their value.  The anticipation of a hereafter, he had assumed, justifiably disciplined the lower classes and served as an incentive for middle-class morality.”24 Churchill decided “quite early in life a system of believing whatever I wanted to believe, while at the same time leaving reason to pursue unfettered whatever paths she was capable of treading.”  Churchill wrote: “I did not worry about the inconsistency of thinking one way and believing the other.  It seemed good to let the mind explore so far as it could the paths of thought and logic, and also good to pray for help and succour, and be thankful when they came.  I could not feel that the Supreme Creator who gave us our minds as well as our souls would be offended if they did not always run smoothly together in double harness.”25

Churchill, a declared agnostic as a young man, remained deeply skeptical although he had imbibed the language of the  King James Bible and the hymns of the Anglican faith.  Still, the dangers of eluding Boer soldiers in 1897 seemed to have impacted the young British reporter in South Africa.  “I found no comfort in any of the philosophical ideas which some men parade in their hours of ease and strength and safety.  They seemed only fair-weather friends.  I realized with awful force that no exercise of my own feeble wit and strength could save me from my enemies, and that without the assistance of that High Power which interferes in the eternal sequence of causes and effects more often than we are always prone to admit, I could never succeed.  I prayed long and earnestly for help and guidance.  My prayer, as it seems to me, was swiftly and wonderfully answered,” wrote Churchill of his escape from a South African jail.26

As a prime minister over four decades later, noted biographers William Manchester and Paul Reid, Churchill saw little of the hand of Providence in his life.  They noted that Churchill “did not begin his speeches with pleas to the almighty for guidance, nor did he end them with supplication for divine blessing.  He did not ask Providence for the strength of wisdom to win the war.”27 Still, the language of the King James Bible resonated.  “I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return,” said FDR confidant Harry Hopkins to Churchill in early 1941.  “Well, I’m going to quote you one verse from the Book of Books in the truth of which…. my own Scottish mother [was] brought up: ‘Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.’”  Hopkins added: “Even to the end.”  Churchill’s personal physician wrote: “I was surprised to find the P.M. in tears.  He knew what it meant.”28

Lincoln and Churchill were adept at quoting scripture.  Illinois attorney Henry C. Whitney recalled: “It was the characteristic of Gen. McClellan…that he always regarded bad weather as exceedingly injurious to him, but as never injurious to the other side; so Lincoln once said of him: ‘He seems to think, in defiance of Scripture, that heaven sends its rain only on the just, and not on the unjust.’”29 Lincoln tended to weave scriptural allusions into important speeches.  “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting,” said Churchill in his speech, quoting the book of Daniel, in the aftermath of the Munich agreement of 1938.  General Hastings Ismay wrote that at the end of the Teheran conference of December 1943, “I was sitting alone in my office feeling very unhappy at the thought that for the first time in the war the Americans and ourselves were separating in an atmosphere of discord.  Suddenly the telephone bell rang.  It was the Prime Minister.  ‘He that ruleth his spirit is greater than he that taken a city.’  I had no idea what he meant, but after a pause, he explained that the President had given way over BUCCANEER.  He then rang off.”30

On his 75th birthday, Churchill was asked if he was prepared to meet his maker.  “I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”31 When Churchill had met President Franklin D. Roosevelt off Newfoundland in August 1941, the prime minister devoted himself to planning the church service that was celebrated aboard the Prince of Wales.  “The PM had given much thought,” wrote Churchill’s private secretary, “to the preparations for his Service (which he said should be fully choral and fully photographic), choosing the hymns (O God Our Help in Ages Past, Onward Christian Soldiers, and Eternal Father Strong to Save), and vetting the prayers (which I had to read to him while he dried after his bath).”32

After Allied victories in North Africa, he insisted that bell peals ring out over Britain on Sunday November 15.33 Although Churchill disdained much of conventional religion, he did see a role for the ringing of church bells – after the prohibition on their ringing exception in case of invasion was reversed.  When Churchill ordered the bells rung, wrote MP Harold Nicolson, “Some hesitation is expressed by all of us. ‘Not at all,’ says Winston, ‘not at all.  We are not celebrating final victory.  The war will still be long.  When we have beaten German, it will take us two more years to beat Japan.  Nor is that a bad thing.  It will keep America and ourselves together while we are making peace in Europe.  If I am still alive, I shall fling all we have into the Pacific.’”34 Even Churchill critic George Orwell observed in his diary: “Church bells rung this morning – in celebration of the victory in Egypt.  The first time that I have heard them in over two years.”35 In a BBC broadcast on November 29, 1942, Churchill declared: “Two Sundays ago, all the bells rang to celebrate the victory of our desert Army at Alamein.  Here was a martial episode in British history which deserved a special recognition.  But the bells also carried with their clashing joyous peals our thanksgiving that, in spite of all our errors and shortcomings, we have been brought near to the frontiers of deliverance.”36

South African Prime Minister  Jan Smuts once told Churchill that his Indian nemesis, Mohandas Gandhi “is a man of God.  You and I are mundane people.  Gandhi has appealed to religious motives.  You never have.  That is where you have failed.”37 As prime minister Churchill was more isolated than President Lincoln who regularly met with religious delegations or religious leaders like Quaker Eliza P. Gurney or Methodist Bishop Mathew Simpson.  Lincoln wrote Gurney on September 4, 1864: “In all, it has been your purpose to strengthen my reliance on God.  I am much indebted to the good christian people of the country for their constant prayers and consolations; and to no one of the, more than to yourself.  The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we, erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance.  We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this; but God knows best, and has ruled otherwise.  We shall yet acknowledge His wisdom and our own error therein.  Meanwhile we must work earnestly in the best light He gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends He ordains.  Surely He intends some great god to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay.”  The next day, he replied to a delegation of black men from Baltimore who presented him with a Bible: “All the good the Saviour gave to the world was communicated through this book.  But for it we could not know right from wrong.  All things most desirable for man’s welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it.  To you I return my most sincere thanks for the very elegant copy of the great Book of God which you present.”38

On May 18, 1864, President Lincoln responded to a Methodist delegation visiting the White House: “Nobly sustained as the government has been by all the churches, I would utter nothing which might, in the least, appear invidious against any.  Yet, without this, it may fairly be said that the Methodist Episcopal Church, not less devoted than the best, is, by it’s greater number, the most important of all.  It is no fault in others that the Methodist Church sends more soldiers to the field, more nurses to the hospital, and more prayers to Heaven than any.  God bless the Methodist Church – bless all the churches – and blessed be God, Who, in this our great trial, giveth us the churches.”39 When Churchill visited Washington in late 1941, FDR took him to Foundry Methodist Church for Christmas services.  (On January 18, 1863, President Lincoln attended a service at Foundry Methodist – but it was then located at 14th and G, closer to the White House.)  “It is good for Winston to sing hymns with the Methodies,” said the American president.  “I am glad I went,” said the British prime minister.  “It is the first time my mind has been at rest for a long time.  Besides, I like singing hymns.”40

In the second half of 1863, President Lincoln issued three calls for thanksgiving for Union successes.  When a national day of prayer for the D-day invasion was proposed in the spring of 1944, Churchill responded: “In my view there is no need for a national day of prayer or thanksgiving at this time.”41  After Churchill addressed Parliament on May 8, 1945, his physician asked poet John Masefield about the prime minister’s failure to mention God.  “I’d rather have the honest utterance of Winston than the false rhetoric of a lesser man.”  Dr. Moran responded that Lincoln “would have struck a deeper note.”  Masefield agreed but noted that the sixteenth American president “was a man of deep piety.”42

Indeed, throughout the war, Lincoln welcomed the prayers of the faithful.  He responded to Quaker leader Gurney in October 1862: “I am glad of this interview, and glad to know that I have your sympathy and prayers.  We are indeed going through a great trial — a fiery trial.  In the very responsible position in which I happen to be placed, being a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out his great purposes, I have desired that all my works and acts may be according to his will, and that it might be so, I have sought his aid – but if after endeavoring to do my best in the light which he affords me, I find my efforts fail, I must believe that for some purpose unknown to me, He wills it otherwise If I had had my way, this war would never have been commenced.”43

While President Lincoln periodically attended New York Presbyterian or other Washington churches, Prime Minister Churchill seldom attended religious services during World War II – except on special occasions.  Returning to Britain aboard the HMS Renown after a summit with Churchill in Canada, Churchill attended church services on September 21, 1943.  At the Tehran summit with FDR and Stalin in late November 1943, Churchill said: “I believe that God is on our side.  At least I have done my best to make Him a faithful ally.”  Stalin responded: “And the devil is on my side.  Because, of course, everyone knows that the devil is a Communist – and God, no doubt, is a good Conservative.”44 In August 1944, Churchill visited Rome after it had fallen to the Allies, where he had an audience with Pope Pius XII.  According to his personal physician, Churchill “felt that there must be something in a faith that could survive so many centuries and had held captive so many men.”45

With the end of the war in Europe, Churchill told the House of Commons on May 8, 1945: “I recollect well at the end of the last war, more than quarter of a century ago, that the House….did not feel inclined for debate for business, but desired to offer thanks to Almighty God, to the Great Power which seems to shape and design the fortunes of nations and the destiny of man; and I therefore beg, Sir, with your permission to move ‘That this House do now attend at the church of St. Margaret, Westminister, to give humble and reverent thanks to Almighty God for our deliverance from the threat of German domination.’”46

After World War II, Churchill observed: “I wonder what God thinks of things His creatures have invented.  Really, it’s surprising He has allowed it – but then I suppose he has so many things to think of, not only us, but all His worlds.  I wouldn’t have his job for anything.  Mine is hard enough, but his is much more difficult, and – umph – He can’t even resign.”47

For Further Reference

  1. Michael Burlingame, editor, An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln, John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays, p. 14 (Conversation with John Todd Stuart, June, 1875).
  2. Kenneth L. Deutsch and Joseph R. Fornieri, Lincoln’s American Dream: Clashing Political Perspectives, p. 78 (“Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Religion of Abraham Lincoln”).
  3. Michael Burkhimer, Lincoln’s Christianity, p. 154.
  4. Michael Burlingame, editor, An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln, John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays, p. 5 (Conversation with Orville H. Browning, June 17, 1875).
  5. Rufus Rockwell Wilson, editor, Lincoln Among His Friends, p. 81 (William Jayne speech to Springfield chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, February 12, 1907).
  6. Rufus Rockwell Wilson, editor, Lincoln Among His Friends, pp. 143-144  (Charles T. White, “Lincoln the Comforter, McClure’s, December 1922).
  7. Boston Daily Evening Transcript, May 23, 1870.  Stoddard was responding to comments by Lincoln law partner William H. Herndon about Lincoln’s religious beliefs.
  8. Michael Burlingame, editor, Lincoln Observed, pp. 195-196 (Letter from Noah Brooks to Isaac P. Langworthy, May 10, 1865).
  9. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, editors, Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews and Statements About Abraham Lincoln, p. 506 (Letter from Joseph Gillespie to William H. Herndon, December 8, 1866).
  10. Michael Burkhimer, Lincoln’s Christianity, p. 25.
  11. Eric Foner, editor, Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, p. 227 (Richard Carwardine, “Lincoln’s Religion”).
  12. John Y. Simon, Harold Holzer, and Dawn Vogel, editors, Lincoln Revisited, p. 21 (Lucas E. Morel, “Lincoln’s Political Religion and Religious Politics”).
  13. Roy P. Basler, editor, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (CWAL), Volume V, pp. 403-404 (Meditation on the Divine Will, ca. September 2, 1862).
  14. Winston S. Churchill, The Great Democracies, p. 215.
  15. CWAL, Volume IV, p. 441 (Special Message to Congress, July 4, 1861).
  16. James L. Huston, The Lost Cause of the North,”  Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Winter 2012, p. 36.
  17. Nicholas Parrillo, “Lincoln’s Calvinist Transformation: Emancipation and War, Civil War History, Fall 2000, p. 227.
  18. Kenneth L. Deutsch and Joseph R. Fornieri, Lincoln’s American Dream: Clashing Political Perspectives, p. 379 ( “Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Religion of Abraham Lincoln”).
  19. Samuel W. Calhoun and Lucas E. Morel, “Abraham Lincoln’s Religion: The Case for His Ultimate Belief in a Personal, Sovereign God,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Winter 2012, p. 53, 39.
  20. Henry Clay Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, pp. 564, 544.
  21. CWAL, Volume V, p. 420 (Reply to Emancipation Memorial Presented by Chicago Christians of All Denominations, September 13, 1862).
  22. Francis B. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House With Abraham Lincoln, p. 282.
  23. Michael Burlingame, editor, At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings, p. 135 (“Life in the White House in the Time of Lincoln”).
  24. William Manchester, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory, p. 245.
  25. Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission, pp. 116-117.
  26. Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission, p. 276.
  27. William Manchester and Paul Reid, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, p. 783.
  28. Charles McMoran Wilson Moran, Churchill, Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran: the Struggle for Survival, 1940-1965, p. 6.
  29. Henry C. Whitney, Life on The Circuit with Lincoln, p. 184.
  30. Hastings Lionel Ismay,  Memoirs of General Lord Ismay, p. 342.
  31. John Perry, Winston Churchill, p. 148.
  32. John Martin, Downing Street: The War Years, p. 58 (August 10, 1941).
  33. Private Secretary John Martin “Many grim people say it is premature and ‘tempting Providence’ (as the PM said, it is strange to describe ‘thanksgiving’ as ‘tempting Providence’).” John Martin, Downing Street: The War Years, p. 90.
  34. Nigel Nicolson, editor, Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters, 1939-1945, p. 260 (November 6, 1862).
  35. George Orwell Diaries,  http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/15-11-42/
  36. Winston Churchill,  BBC broadcast, November 29, 1942,
  37. Charles McMoran Wilson Moran, Churchill, Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran: the Struggle for Survival, 1940-1965, p. 57 (August 7, 1942).
  38. CWAL, Volume VII, p. 452  (Reply to Loyal Colored People of Baltimore upon Presentation of a Bible).
  39. CWAL, Volume VII, 351 (May 18, 1864).
  40. Charles McMoran Wilson Moran, Churchill, Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran: the Struggle for Survival, 1940-1965, p. 14 (December 25, 1941).
  41. William Manchester and Paul Reid, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, p. 816.
  42. William Manchester and Paul Reid, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, p. 927.
  43. CWAL, Volume V, p. 478 (Abraham Lincoln’s Reply to Eliza P. Gurney, October 26, 1862).
  44. Anthony Eden, The Reckoning, p. 427.
  45. Charles McMoran Wilson Moran, Churchill, Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran: the Struggle for Survival, 1940-1965, p. 186.
  46. Richard Langworth, editor, Churchill by Himself, p. 287.
  47. Richard Langworth, editor, Churchill by Himself, p. 463.
Posted in Essays