Dr. Allen Guelzo on "Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment"

Steve Light: Good evening, everyone. Nice to see you all here this evening. My name is Steve Light, I'm the Associate Vice President for Guest Experiences here at Monticello. And I'm very excited to welcome you all to our fourth and final installment of our 2024 Pursuits of Knowledge series. I want to say a big thank you to everyone for coming out and supporting this series this year. Thank you for joining us as we've explored big ideas with some remarkable authors. I'm going to tease at the end of tonight's program that we will have a sneak preview of what's in store for the Pursuits of Knowledge series in the spring of 2025. So you have to stay till the end. But first, we have a truly special conversation to wrap up the series for '24.

In his timely book, Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment, Dr. Allen Guelzo holds up the actions and ideas not of our nation's third president, but of our nation's 16th president, as the model by which we are to set a path toward our democracy and its future. At its heart, this is a book about Abraham Lincoln's unwavering belief in democracy's potential. As Dr. Guelzo writes in his introduction, "To all who have despaired of the future, or whose lives have been ruined by the failures of the present, I offer this man's example."

And while this book focuses on Lincoln, you all might not be surprised here at Monticello tonight, that Thomas Jefferson does appear throughout its pages. For Lincoln, the principles of America's experiment wins in self-government were separable from Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. As Lincoln wrote in 1859, "All honor to Jefferson, to the man, who in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth applicable to all men in all times." Dr. Guelzo's scholarship will allow us to consider both men as thinkers who grappled with the tensions inherent in democracy. His work challenges us to ask what their ideas can mean for us today as stewards of the Democratic experiment which they labored to advance.

We are delighted to have Dr. Guelzo here with us tonight for this conversation. He is the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, and one of the nation's foremost historians of the Civil War era and Abraham Lincoln, having authored 15 books. Among a long list of accolades and achievements, Dr. Guelzo is a three-time winner of the prestigious Lincoln Prize, awarded by Gettysburg College. And I mention not just because I'm a proud alum of Gettysburg College, but because 20 years ago, I had the fortune to be a student in Dr. Guelzo's classroom in his capstone seminar on the Civil War era. I doubt you remember my paper on Charles Grandison Finney, but we'll overlook that. But it is my pleasure now to turn things over to my esteemed colleague, Dr. Jane Kamensky, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, and Dr. Guelzo as they lead us in our conversation tonight.

Dr. Jane Kamensky: Thank you all for coming out tonight. We're going to talk mostly about Lincoln and a bit about Jefferson, but this is a bit of a reunion for me and Allen Guelzo. And I wanted to share a bit about how we met, the work in which we met, and then ask his perspective on that work. So, in 2019 and 2020, Allen and I worked together on the American History Task Force of an initiative called Educating for American Democracy, which asserted and which still asserts the importance of political pluralism among other dimensions of American diversity.

What this meant on our task force, was that Allen had the experience of being the lonely little petunia in an onion patch as our ranking constitutional conservative on this task force. I can recall very clearly what gave me hope in having you at that table, but I've never had the chance to ask about it from your perspective, and I suspect that there are a lot of such appearances for you. So, talk a bit about pluralism and Educating for American democracy to kick us off.

Dr. Allen Guelzo: Democracy itself thrives on pluralism. Pluralism is the lifeblood of it. Because what does democracy fundamentally say? Sovereignty belongs in the hands of the people, not in the hands of kings or dukes or princes or whatnot, who then let a little bit of what they have been given trickle down to other people. Rather, in a democracy, sovereignty belongs to the people themselves, and they can delegate some parts of that, but it flows upwards.

Now, when you say that, then you're taking a large group of people, not a small group of great nobility who are all related to each other, and probably inbred. What you're doing, is you're taking a large body of people on their own terms. A large body of people who may not know each other, may not be related to each other, may not be doing the same things, may not have grown up in the same town, the same village, the same county, the same shire.

Nevertheless, they are the people who possess that sovereignty. And that sovereignty respects the differences among the people themselves, and vouches a certain confidence, that despite all the differences they may bring to the table, there is a consistent desire on the part of those people to get along with each other, to talk to each other, to understand what to do and how to move forward, and then what direction they want to give to the people who aspire to be their leaders.

In that respect, democracy and pluralism walk together hand in hand, because democracy, it has a certain, I guess what you could call a mixture of confidence and humility. It has confidence in the sense that it really does believe that the people who possess that sovereignty can get along with each other, and that there are ultimately no overarching fundamental reasons why they can't resolve whatever differences there are and recognize all the things that they have in common. So, there's this confidence. Democracy is about confidence.

Democracy is also about humility. Democracy recognizes that there's no one small cadre of people who are born with authority to see everything the way it should be seen. Democracy recognizes that a majority has the right to rule, but it doesn't have the right to take the minority and put it up against a barn wall and shoot it. And why? Because majorities are not always right. They may be powerful, they may have numbers, but they just might be wrong, and the wrongness of what they're pursuing as a majority, sooner or later, will manifest itself.

So, a majority limits itself. It doesn't do what it might have the power to do to a minority, because the minority might be right. And over time and over experience, that minority might be so persuasive that it becomes a new majority. Democracy backs off and says, "Don't jump too quickly to conclusions. Don't have too much overconfidence that you know all the answers, because there's liable to be some voices, sometimes some very annoying ones, but sometimes some voices that actually have got the truth on their side. And you might want to listen very carefully to what the truth has to say to you."

So democracy has confidence in people, but it also is an exercise in humility. And that to me, it seems to me those are two of the building blocks of anything that we want to talk about when we talk about pluralism and civic education. It has the confidence to see what is right. It has the confidence to admit when it has been wrong.

Dr. Jane Kamensky: That's beautiful. Thank you. So of course, we need to talk about the Declaration here at Monticello. We have the guy who wrote the thing. And I wanted to talk a bit about Lincoln's Declaration and Jefferson's Declaration, the evolution of the document between the 1770s and the 1830s. You note in the book, that the American people, as Lincoln described us in 1838, had developed, by that time, a profound attachment to an ideal of its peoplehood, rooted in a couple of founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration whose authors, and I'll quote you here, "Were guided by what they had read in a dozen or so treatises on political theory." So talk to us, if you would, about Lincoln's reinvention of the Declaration. Did he venerate it? Did he reanimate it? Did he distort it? Did he do all of these? What did he mean when he called the Declaration, "An electric cord that bound Americans as one people?"

Dr. Allen Guelzo: Jane, venerate really is the word for Lincoln that way, and talking about his perception of the Declaration of Independence. That reference to the electric cord. When we say something an electric cord, we think it's something we plug into the outlet. Well, there were no outlets and there were no cords in 1858 when Lincoln gave that. What did he mean by? He is talking about something that almost resembles a lightning strike. An electric cord, something that is almost living and fluid, almost like those 18th century experiments with electricity and bell jars and whatnot.

And he uses that image, this is a speech he gives at the very opening of the Lincoln-Douglas campaign, July 10th, 1858 in Chicago, and he says, "What gives us coherence as a people? Is it our economic success? Well, yes, that helps. Is it the success of our armies? Well, yes, that helps, too. We wouldn't have had a successful revolution without them." But fundamentally what it really comes down to is this, "The people living in Lincoln's day," he said, "The people living in his time had only the most distant relationship to the revolutionary generation."

In 1858, yes, there was still a number of a handful, but a number of survivors and veterans of the Revolution. But he said, "Look around. Look around the population of the United States. Half the people in the country have come from someplace else. They've come from Scandinavia, they've come from Germany, they've come from France. They don't know anything about George Washington. They didn't have great-grandpa at Valley Forge. They didn't have an ancestor who served and followed Lafayette or any of the other great revolutionary generals. They might've had no one who was even close to the battlefields of the Revolution."

"What is going to guide people like that who are going to participate in this civic order, this American democracy, if they don't have that living connection to the Revolution?" He says, "They don't need to have genealogy for the Revolution?" Why? Because no matter where they've come from, when they read in that Declaration, Lincoln said, "That all men are created equal," then they feel that they are flesh of the flesh and bone of the bone of those old men that wrote the Declaration, and so they are." He said, "That is the electric cord that runs through all lovers of liberty." That is what unites them.

What then can take someone who is a candidate for the Sons of the American Revolution, which didn't quite exist yet, someone who can trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower or to Jamestown. What unites someone like that with someone whose father just got off the boat from Ireland, maybe months or a few years before? What unites them? That electric cord, that conviction, that proposition, as he said at Gettysburg, because what else is the United States? It is a nation dedicated to a proposition that all men are created equal, that proposition from Jefferson's Declaration.

Think for a moment of how utterly absurd that statement was. I mean in the context of the 19th century. Because in almost every other place worth taking account of, everyone believed that a national identity, a nation itself had to be something that was built up over centuries. It was a product of culture, it was a product of race, it was a product of religion, it was a product of language.

Dr. Jane Kamensky: Of blood.

Dr. Allen Guelzo: Yeah. It was something which just had to have this long lineage to it. And that was what made a nation. The idea that you could have a nation dedicated to a proposition, "That you mean anybody who ascends to that proposition can get in?" And Lincoln's answer is, "Yeah, yeah." It was somewhere said, and I have borrowed this shamelessly, because it's true, that it takes 1,200 years to make a Frenchman, but you can become an American in 20 minutes.

And here's my testimony to that. My great-grandfather, John Anderson, which was not his real name, and that's a story in its own right, which I won't get into. He came to the United States as an ordinary seaman. He wanted so badly to abjure the king of Sweden. He wanted to be an American so badly, he copied out, in pencil, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address. He had no use whatsoever for kings, monarchy, people who thought they'd been given some divine right to rule. He had read that proposition and he said yes to it. And so he was in, fully as American as anyone who could trace their lineage back to John Winthrop or Captain John Smith.

And for Lincoln, that is the most remarkable aspect of what is going on in America, that this democracy, it's built upon propositions. No other entrance fee is required you as sent to the proposition, you are in. And that works because everybody who reads that proposition, everybody who reads that first paragraph of the Declaration reads it and says, "Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that everyone is born with certain natural rights. And that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Everyone says, "I want to be part of that." And Lincoln says, "Okay, come on board, this is the place."

And when you remember how much that baffled people in the 19th century in other places. They scratched their heads, they couldn't believe that you could make a nation out of a proposition. And in truth, there was a lot to convince them that they were right, because all right, you had the American experiment beginning in 1776, and then you had the French. Yeah, except that it didn't quite turn out the same way. It corkscrewed downwards. It became the tyranny of Bonaparte. And all around, all the monarchs and kings and princes and Dukes shook their heads and said, "See, you concede to the people that kind of authority and look at what you get."

And by 1860, the United States is really the last major, large-size freestanding democratic experiment left in the world. And in 1860, what were we proceeding to do? Blow our own brains out. And all the monarchs applauded. They loved watching that because they could turn to their own peoples and say, "See, is what happens." This is why Lincoln thought that what was going on was a test in the Civil War, a final exam, Steve, okay? It was a final exam on Jefferson's Declaration. Was Jefferson right? Or was Jefferson wrong? And the Civil War was going to prove it. And Lincoln takes our attention to that. July of 1858, November of 1863. That's for him. That's veneration.

When he was on his inaugural tour before his inauguration in March of 1861, that tour brought him through Philadelphia, my hometown. He stopped at Independence Hall, spoke briefly at Independence Hall, and then outside where he raised the flag, as it was Washington's birthday, February 22nd. Enormous crowd, there's a wonderful picture that was taken of that event. And Lincoln said inside Independence Hall that he had never had a thought politically that did not rise from the Declaration of Independence. That was what guided him. That was his pole star that he steered by politically. "Rather than surrender that," he said, "Rather than surrender that, I was almost about to say," he said, "That I would rather be assassinated on the spot." And four years and two months later, he lay in state in that same Independence Hall, but he would rather have been assassinated than let that down. Yeah, veneration, that's the word.

Dr. Jane Kamensky: So that's a poignant segue to talk about a thread that runs through the book, which is the tension between reason and passion in American politics and public life. And I wanted specifically to ask you about the populism of the second quarter of the 19th century. You write about popular passions in the Jacksonian era in a way that sounds almost like you are quite deliberately crafting a parable of our own times.

Noting the, quote, "Calculated havoc" that Jackson wrought in many areas of American public life, you ask a kind of pregnant question, was democracy inevitably the victim of the passions? So, I'd love to have you draw out Lincoln's answer to that question, and if you're willing to share a bit of your own. And to think with us about how Lincoln's almost religious belief in elections, which you also tease out in the book, squared with his anxieties about human passions and fallibility.

Dr. Allen Guelzo: Is passion a threat to democracy? He feared that it was, he feared that it was. Now, the question that this poses is, is that inevitable in a democracy? The answer to that is no, it's not inevitable. But passion was something that Lincoln was very, very anxious about. Today, when we talk about passion, we do it sometimes, I hear this all the time in job searches, where someone's being interviewed for a job, and of course the question is, "Well, what's your passion?" And when I hear that, I think "Lincoln would not give them the answer they wanted to hear." But that's because a great change has occurred in the way we use that particular word. Today, we use it almost interchangeably is, "What is it gets you up in the morning? What really energizes you? What brings out the best in you? All right, I'll leave that to a side.

In Lincoln's dictionary, passion was something dangerous. Passion was what happened when people forgot to be reasonable. Understand that Lincoln, in this respect, is very much like Jefferson, in that both of them were men of the Enlightenment. They considered themselves men of reason. And that's not terribly surprising, when you remember that when Lincoln is born in 1809, Thomas Jefferson is still President of the United States, and Jefferson will live on until 1826. And that means that Lincoln, the young Lincoln growing up, is doing it with Thomas Jefferson as a real contemporary for him. He's very much a man of reason. That reason is what keeps passion at bay. Passion is about impulse, passion is about revenge. Passion is about fury that doesn't think, that strikes out without consideration, because it's so angry or because it's so agitated, because it's been pushed in a certain way or pulled in a certain way. And without reckoning the consequences, passion takes over, and you do things in heat and in anger that you would never think of doing in moments of coolness and of approachability.

And he feared that that was a problem in a democracy, because if sovereignty arises from the people, a number of those people are not all going to be the same in their temperament, in their education, in their attitudes. And there will be some people who will be governed by impulse, and they'll take their impulses into political forums and they'll let those impulses rule. This is one thing which made Madison anxious about the whole project of democracy. Madison makes this comment, I think it's in Federalist 14, where he says, "If every Athenian," talking about the Athenian democracy, "If every Athenian had been a Socrates, the assembly in Athens would still have been a mob."

And there was a fear that democracy was going to yield to mob violence, and it would yield to mob violence because it was being captured by the passions. And Lincoln is very dicey about the passions. So he will say repeatedly that he's not a man of passion, he's a man of reason. He will say in his first great public speech in 1838, the Lyceum Speech, he says, "We cannot be governed by passion. Passion is what is going to lead us into making the most awful mistakes. And when those mistakes get made, the price we're going to pay for them is so drastic, that people in desperation will turn to dictators and despots to find a solution."

And he'll say again when he's talking about alcoholism, gives a very long speech about alcoholism. He was a teetotaler. He was a teetotaler, but most of his family were, ah, yes, they were captured by spiritus fermenti. He had seen it on the frontier. He didn't have any illusions about the frontier. No. Someone once tried to press him. "What was it like growing up, Mr. Lincoln?" His response was, "I have seen a great deal of the backside of the world." He was dicey about passion 'cause he had seen how people could get carried away with almost a kind of a drunken fit. And it would lead people to lynch mobs, it would lead people to murder, and politically, it would lead people to make all kinds of remarkably unwise decisions that would lead them back into the hands of tyrants and dictators.

And because he was that suspicious about passion, he wanted to stay as far away from it as possible. And even in his first inaugural address, the way he concludes it speaks about how, "Passion has helped us, but it can't help us any further." We have to be guided now by reason. We have to hear the reasoning of what he calls, "The better angels of our nature." So in that respect, Abraham Lincoln's not a populist. Andrew Jackson, yes. Jackson was a man of such passions that even Thomas Jefferson, that one visit he pays to Jefferson here at Monticello, even Jefferson was a little bit unhinged by Jackson. He said, "This man has no control over his passions. This is a man who kills another man in a duel."

Dr. Jane Kamensky: Jackson, not Jefferson?

Dr. Allen Guelzo: Jackson, not Jefferson. More likely Jefferson would've shot himself in the foot. Jackson kills a man on a duel, challenged several others to duels. This is a man, give you a case in point, during the great nullification crisis of 1832, Jackson threatens to cross the state line into South Carolina and hang the first man he meets from the nearest tree that he can find. A nervous South Carolina senator approached one of Jackson's allies, Thomas Hart Benton, and said, "Did Jackson really mean that?" And Benton replied, "When Andy Jackson starts talking about a hanging, men start looking for a rope." He was, yes, exactly that sort. And whether it was the Trail of Tears, whether it was his political opponents, or whether it was Charles Dickinson in that duel, he was a man of passion. And Lincoln feared that. Lincoln belonged to an entirely different species of political thinking than Jacksonian populism.

And yet, I add this too. He's also not an elitist. He's neither an elitist nor a populist. Because where is he born? He's not born with any silver spoon in his mouth. I'm afraid, he's not born with the advantages Jefferson had. And Jefferson had a classical education from the age of five, puts in two years in the College of William and Mary. Lincoln had none of those advantages. He grew up on that hard scrabble frontier. In most cases, he had to teach himself. That was a very different experience.

So he's not an elitist, he's not impressed and overwhelmed by the top rank of society. And people who heard him talk would be put off that way by him. There are a lot of testimonies of people, elite New Englanders, who would visit Lincoln in the White House and be put off by the way this man talked. This man Lincoln, according to one observer, in this case, Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic, she visits Lincoln in his office and she says something, and his response is, "I heared that." She says, "What? This man is the President of the United States?" And she wasn't the only one. George Templeton Strong, who was a New York lawyer, kept his marvelous diary.

Dr. Jane Kamensky: Great diarist.

Dr. Allen Guelzo: Oh, that Diary of the Civil War is a wonder. Templeton Strong visits Lincoln in his office, and he takes down a sort of, oh, it's a kind of transcript of the way Lincoln talked, trying to reproduce this thick border state accent of Lincoln's. And it comes out in Templeton Strong's diary, something like this, "Well, I never cross a river until I come to it." And people like Strong thought, "What? Where did they get this guy?" And Lincoln knew that they were saying that, and he let them think that way.

Leonard Swett, who practiced law with Lincoln out on the old Eighth Judicial Circuit in Illinois, said what I think is really one of the smartest things, wisest things ever said about Lincoln when he said that, "Any man who took Abe Lincoln for a simple-minded man would soon wake up with his back in a ditch." There were a lot of people in that ditch. They underestimated this man. And before they knew it, they were all trussed up like chickens in the shop.

And he knew that they underestimated him, and he let them make that mistake. And over and over again, they tumbled right into that ditch. He's not an elitist. If anything, he almost makes fun of them. He is, in that respect, a walking embodiment of a democracy governed by reason. Democracy, which because it's governed by reason, is open to anyone born at any level of economic strata or educational certification. Anyone, it's open to anyone to make of themselves what they will.

For him, self transformation is one of the great gifts of Jefferson's Declaration. Because if we are, in fact, all equally equipped with those natural rights, then all we have to do is to use them. And we can transform ourselves the same way that Mr. A Lincoln transformed himself from the son of a back woods farmer into a successful railroad lawyer in Illinois, and then eventually 16th President of the United States. This dizzying, almost dizzying capacity in one generation to see people transform themselves. To Lincoln, that was one of the greatest gifts of American democracy.

Dr. Jane Kamensky: So, Lincoln's abhorrence for the passions is a natural segue to talking about his views on slavery and on race. And you take great pains in the book to be candid about Lincoln's complex racial views and the ways that they intersected with his moral and philosophical revulsion for slavery. You also lay out for your reader, his conviction before the war came that, "Slavery must and would wither away." In parts of your seventh and eighth chapters, I found myself wondering how far we might push an analogy between Lincoln and Jefferson on questions of race and slavery. Were their views, not their practices, but their philosophies as far apart as they appear on the surface?

Dr. Allen Guelzo: That requires a plunge into the psyche of these two men. It's always a perilous adventure for historians. So, let me preface anything I have to say on that point by saying this is speculation. I have never met Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Jefferson. And if I had, I'm not entirely sure I would even then be able to say that I'd confidently figured either of them out. But in the case of Jefferson, you have someone who knew one thing and who looked away and looked in another direction.

It is inevitable that you ask the question, how can a man who writes what he writes in that marvelous preamble, that opening paragraph of the Declaration, in one paragraph captures almost the entirety of Enlightenment political theory. How can he say what he says there and hold other human beings in chattel bondage? Worse than that, how can he treat some of those of individuals as though they were simply experiments for him to play with? Or were still commodities to be sold so that he could pay his debts or finance his wine cellar? How do you reconcile something like that?

And I wish I could say, "Oh, well obviously, there is no reconciliation. The man's a living, walking hypocrite." That's the simple explanation, except that human beings are more complicated and unpredictable that way. And there are moments when a certain approach to a question, to a problem, to a dilemma seems to be perfectly suitable, only to discover 50 years later, that in fact, it is riddled with so many holes that the wonder is that it didn't collapse in on itself.

And Jefferson is, in many ways, an example of this. He knew. He knew very well that this was wrong. He would even say that, "The United States can't even stand the judgment of God because of slavery." And then he turns around and says, "Well, look, we do have the tiger by the ears. We can't ride it and we can't get off." And what's going to happen? He speculates that there could be a racial bloodbath, there could be a race war. He dies five years before Nat Turner. But in that paragraph that he writes, it's almost as though he is seeing, "This is what's going to happen." How does he live with himself that way? I don't know.

And there were people who asked him that question. His secretary, the one who goes off to Illinois says, "You can't live with contradictions that severe." And so off he goes to Illinois on the flat boat, and while he's there, he's reading these letters of manumission to the people who had been the property of his family. Jefferson can't do it. He pleads with Jefferson, "Come to the West with me." And Jefferson backs off with the worst of all possible excuses, "That's great for you young people. But you know, old people like me, we were stuck in our way." No, I'm sorry. There is no such thing as it being too late or too early to do what is right. That doesn't exist.

I don't have an easy algorithm for understanding Jefferson that way. And to a certain extent, neither did Lincoln. Because Steve, you read that wonderful letter that Lincoln wrote to Henry Pierce in 1859, when Pierce and his Boston friends invited Lincoln to come to Boston and speak at this Jefferson festival they were holding in April of 1859. And Lincoln has to beg off, and that's where he says, "Nevertheless, Jefferson, the author of the Definitions and Axioms of Democracy." It's a letter. Curious enough, it gets printed in a lot of newspapers in the north. Because Lincoln's already made headlines from the year before for the debates with Douglas. So now, when Lincoln writes a letter like that, people want to pay attention to that.

How does someone reconcile this? And Lincoln sees these two sides because he praises Jefferson, praises Jefferson as what he calls, "The most distinguished politician of our history." Yet, at the same time, and Herndon knew this, William Henry Herndon was Lincoln's law partner of many years, and Herndon said afterwards, "Lincoln really hated Jefferson, hated Jefferson." But he said, "Hated Jefferson as a man," because he knew all about the Sally Hemings business. And there're floated rumors that Lincoln, in fact, in the 1840s, had given a speech and address condemning Jefferson for what he had done with Sally Hemings.

And Lincoln is supposed to have gone on to have said, "Jefferson not only took advantage of Sally Hemings, but the children that were born of Sally Hemings were then sold, and one recently came up for auction in New Orleans." Now, people threw this back at Lincoln in 1860 and Lincoln said, "Well, I didn't really write that, I didn't really say that," but Herndon knew better. He said, "He understood Jefferson as the politician and the political idealist, but he also understood that there was another Jefferson, and that was the Jefferson of weakness, of inconsistency, of hypocrisy." Indeed, almost one can say passion. That Jefferson Lincoln detested.

So Lincoln himself has to deal with this divergence, but Lincoln has divergences of his own he has to cope with. Lincoln is the man who says in 1864, "I've always hated slavery. Can't remember a time when I didn't so think and feel." And yet, this is a man who never gets on the campaign hustings about slavery before 1854. Oh, he has some things that he says from time to time about it, but it's not a campaign for him. He doesn't become a major figure in opposition to slavery in America until the great Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, and that's when he becomes public. That's, in fact, when he begins talking about the Declaration of Independence.

Lincoln is also willing to accept slavery as a legal institution. Now, he'll say, "It was wished on us. Wished on us by the British in colonial days, wished on us by law today. And we can't overthrow those laws or else we're actually no better than the people he criticized for passion. So, what are we going to do? Well, we have two ways of dealing with slavery. One is that we can seal it off in the places where it's legal. Those states down below the Mason-Dixon line, down below the Ohio River, don't permit any further expansion or legalization of slavery into the Western territories." So that's one way. That means that slavery will asphyxiate on its own.

And then, when it has sufficiently expired, then you take those who had been slaves and you send them someplace else. "Send them," he said in 1854 in the great Peoria speech of October of 1854, "Send them to Liberia, to their own native land," as though they were the cause of the problem rather than the victims of it. You look at that in Lincoln, "What? I thought this man was the great emancipator. Now of course, he immediately follows up on that and says, "Well, that really is impractical, isn't it?"

Well, that's what he said in 1854. And yet, in 1862, he will make an overture to Black leaders in the White House, asking them to sign on to a plan for colonization. Why? Why colonization? Because he says, "Look, let's be frank, Black and white races cannot live together. Now," he doesn't say it's because one is racially superior to the other. No, he says, "It's because you have no reason to love us white people. We have inflicted the greatest harm that could possibly be inflicted on anyone. You have no reason to love us. That's going to create such tension, that we're not going to be able to move forward. So let me try to persuade you, voluntary colonizer. Not deportation, voluntary colonization."

And the leaders of the Black community in Washington whom he invited to hear this, went back, consulted with each other and said, "No, this is crazy." Frederick Douglass almost lost it completely when he read newspaper accounts of this. He was like, "What? Is this what this great civil war is being fought about?" But this is also the same Lincoln who will, a only a few months later... In fact, the very time when he is making that address to that delegation, at the very same moment that he writes to Horace Greeley and says, "Look, if I could save the Union by freeing all the slaves, I'd do it. If I could save the Union by freeing some of the slaves, I'd do it. If I had to save the Union by freeing none of the slaves, I do that. What I'm doing is to save the Union."

And people read that letter to Greeley from August 1862 and they say, "This is a half-hearted, he's only interested in saving the Union." Of course, without thinking that of course the idea that a President of the United States would even hint at the idea of freeing slaves, it would be enough to make half the country clutch their chest and fall over. Lincoln did have this underestimated way of slipping something in. And yet, people read that and they're troubled, "Is this the same Lincoln that we're talking about? This Lincoln who hates slavery yet is willing to have it continue?"

This is also the same Lincoln who is willing to see that the circumstances of the war are changing the landscape, so that by the time we get to the spring of 1865, he goes to Richmond, after the fall of Richmond to Union Forces, he goes to Richmond, and there, he is hailed as the second coming by Black Richmonders. And he says, "No, no, no. "No, don't give me any credit. Thank God, don't thank me." And he says to a regiment of Black volunteer soldiers, a Connecticut regiment, and he says to them, "If anyone tries to tell you that you do not have the same rights as everyone else, show them your bayonets."

So, when the landscape shifts, he shifts with it. I think you could sum up the difference with Lincoln and Jefferson by saying that for Jefferson, slavery induces helplessness. Trying to find a solution, it induces helplessness, whether it's realistic or otherwise. It's like, "What can we do?" For Lincoln, its aspiration. "What can we do if these circumstances change?" He asked the question in one of his addresses to Congress, 'Can we not all do better?" And he used the image from the Gospels, where it said, "Be ye perfect as your father in heaven is perfect." And he said, "Now, no one claims to be perfect, but you aspire to it. You work hard at it. You try to follow those teachings."

Well, he says, "That's what we should be doing politically. We should understand we're not perfect now. We're not probably going to attain perfection, but we can aspire to it. And when we see" what he called, "The signs of the times changing, we change with them." He upbraided the representatives from the border states who were still clinging to slavery, said, "Will you not read the signs of the times?" He says this in March of 1862, "Will you not see, slavery is doomed? You can't resuscitate this thing. This war is killing it and this war will end with it dead. Sign off on it now. Sign on to the plans I'm offering about emancipation. Read those signs."

Of course, their response is, "Mind your business." Literally, that's what one of the delegations said, "Mind your business." So what does he do? He said, "All right, I will mind my business. I'll go and write a unilateral military emancipation proclamation. There, how do you like that?" Aspiration. For Lincoln, you deal with the problem of slavery, not with helplessness, but with aspiration. You watch for the signs and the times to change and the landscape to change and you move with that.

Both of them have a fundamental, and I think a real aversion to the notion of someone controlling someone else without their consent, because that really is the nub of slavery. When you're in a position you can make somebody do something that they don't consent to do, that that is slavery. And that, of course, is what makes slavery so near akin to monarchy because that's how monarchy functions, too. And Lincoln says in that Peoria speech in 1850, "What is the sheet anchor of American Republicanism? The consent of the governed." Where does he get that phrase from? Our friend Jefferson. "That," he said, "That is the basis on which this American democracy is built." He said, "That is our ancient faith, the consent of the governed." To the extent that Jefferson and Lincoln both understood that and articulated that they were at one. Where they differed? Aspiration and helplessness. Two different men.

Dr. Jane Kamensky: So, I'm going to ask you one last lightning round question. We're going to turn it over and leave some time to the audience. You've already alluded to Lincoln's passion for union and the extraordinary measures that it took to defend it. It's not a concept that we hear a lot in 21st century politics, is the defense of our federal union. Should we be talking more about union and what might that sound like, in 30 seconds?

Dr. Allen Guelzo: In 30 seconds. For Lincoln, union was bound up with democracy. The American democracy was a federal union. If you want to shatter the American democracy, shatter that union because when you shatter that union, what are you really saying? People can't get along. You can't trust those common people. You can't trust them to be anything else but common.

When Lincoln looked out at that cemetery at Gettysburg, he saw the graves of 3,500 soldiers, a third of whom were unknowns. Very ordinary little clerks, farmers, sometimes people just off the immigrant boat, who had seen what Paul Berman once called a rainbow in the sky in American democracy, and who were willing to make that ultimate sacrifice for it. That, for him, that was what union was about. Union was what supported democracy, and the sacrifices for union are what make it possible to continue.

We voted on November 5th, my wife and I went to the polling. We got up at 6:00 in the morning. We wanted to be sure we were there. We got in line, we were second in line at our polling place. And for all the time it took us to prepare and to get there and to stand in line, we went in, we voted seven minutes, we were out. And I said to her as we walked out of the polling place, "We did that in seven minutes. And how much blood and treasure has been shed over how many decades and in how many wars to make it possible for us to walk in and vote in seven minutes?" Yeah, preserve the Union, you preserve democracy, fail to preserve the Union, democracy will have a black eye because it will say, "If you can't get along in a union, then the people themselves, their sovereignty is an illusion."

Dr. Jane Kamensky: Floor is yours, you're self-governing. A microphone is circulating, Leslie has a microphone. Questions for Dr. Guelzo. They train us to wait.

Speaker 4:

Quick question. You talked a lot about preserving the Union. After the war, the Union had to be brought back together. How was Lincoln thinking about that, and how would it have evolved, in your opinion, if he'd not been assassinated? What was the path he was going down to reconstitute the Union?

vI think that that is the question I'm asked more than any other, what would've happened if Lincoln had lived? What kind of a union would we'd be living in? Lincoln himself had great hopes for the future. He'd endured the agony of the war, a war which at moments made him cry out, "Why has God put me in this place?" And in the closing weeks of the war, that visit, he paid to Richmond, he said to a New Jersey politician who was accompanying his entourage, he said that, "With the end of the war and the end of slavery and the end of people selling each other like cattle, now is the time for the American experiment to blossom." He said, "It would bloom like the valley of Jehoshaphat." He had great confidence for the future.

But what plans did he have to make that happen? Oh, how we wish we knew. Lincoln was a very private man. Herndon once said that, "Lincoln kept half of himself back from everybody." And even from his best friends, he kept half of the remainder back. And anyone who confidently told you that they knew what Abe Lincoln thought about something, automatically understand, that was a lie. No one could predict Lincoln, very private. You wouldn't want to play poker with this man. You'd never be able to read him. So we don't know. He didn't lay out a plan in advance, because of course, he didn't plan to be assassinated.

I think we can guess certain things. One thing I think we can guess from some of his policies and some of his advice, is that he wanted the freed slaves brought into the mainstream of the American economy. And the way to do that was through land, and through the redistribution of land in the south. Especially because the slaves themselves had been the people who worked that land. What else did Locke make clear in the Two Treatises and Government, that when you work the land, the land becomes yours. That mixing your labor with the land is what creates property. All right, we want to emerge from this civil war as a new and united nation, then we should open the way to property and the ownership of property to the freed slaves who were the ones who worked it. That's one thing. Secondly, there must be the vote.

In the last speech he gave on April 11th, 1865, he said, "I want to recommend, as we move forwards, the bestowal of the franchise." Now, he conditioned it, he said, "On the very intelligent and those who have served our country in uniform." But the very fact that he would suggest that at all was radical in the ears of people who heard it. One of the people who heard it was an actor named Booth who was in the crowd that night, and he turned to his associate and he said, "I know what that means. I'll put him through, the vote." To Lincoln, this is critically important because elections are the warp and woof of a democracy.

I think in the longest sense, he would've looked to an American economy free from entanglements and dependence on European dominance, and he would've looked to an America that enjoyed self-sufficiency. That was what his political life before slavery and the slave issues had been dedicated to, to Henry Clay's American system. He would've favored the development of infrastructure. He signs the biggest infrastructure bill in American history up to that point, the Transcontinental Railroad. And he privatizes. The biggest privatization act in American history was the Homestead Act. So, what he is looking for is the creation of more opportunities of self-transformation, similar to those that he enjoyed. But I end all this by saying this is speculation on my part. I am guessing, which is the worst thing a historian can do, and Jane is probably over there grimacing while I'm saying all this, but that's speculation.

Dr. Jane Kamensky: I'm thinking of a world with a reanimated Lincoln and it sounds pretty good. I think we are at time. I want to thank all of you for coming out tonight for a remarkable Lincolnian set of orations from Dr. Guelzo. You've heard how wide-ranging this easy to carry book is for sale. Right over in the gift shop, we'll be signing in a moment. So please give it up for Dr. Allen Guelzo.

vDr. Allen Guelzo: Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you, Jane.

Dr. Jane Kamensky: As Steve promised, we have our spring Pursuits of Knowledge lineup to share with you, featuring a wide range of conversations, linking past and present to help us think about the relationship between history and the modern world. We will take January off, people in Virginia seem to think it's cold down here. I come from Massachusetts, you're wrong. Dr. Kerry Greenidge will speak in February on the Grimke Sisters, and perhaps on descendant of the mountaintop, William Monroe Trotter.

We will have, in March, Women's History Month, Smithsonian Directors, Anthea Hartig from the National Museum of American History and Dr. Elizabeth Babcock from the coming Smithsonian Museum of Women's History in America, to talk about their efforts to elevate women's stories at the Smithsonian, Dr. Jonathan Gienapp on the Constitution and originalism in April, and then our own Bill Barker as Thomas Jefferson in the three-person play Jefferson Adams in May. And we will also have a June program, but we're not disclosing that until we roll out civic season early in the new year. So, look forward to seeing you all back here early in the new year, and please make your way over to the shop and have some more time with Dr. Guelzo. Thank you all.