Abraham Lincoln and Today’s Trials for Democracy

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Collin Hansen: Did you know that the number of people living in democratic states has fallen by more than half since 2003? I have to admit, I did not. But I learned that statistic and Allen guelzo, his new book, our ancient faith, Lincoln, democracy and the American experiment guelzo rights to renew democracy in what he calls, quote, a time of shadows, by exploring the life and thinking of America’s greatest President Abraham Lincoln. And guelzo is the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar in the James Madison program, and American ideals and institutions at Princeton University, where he teaches courses on Lincoln, the Civil War era constitution and American intellectual history. If you know Dr. guelzo, then you’ve almost certainly encountered his previous works on the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln faced down the greatest threat to democracy in American history, at least so far. And guelzo sees democracy threatened today by income inequality, cultural polarization and bureaucracy that is substituted for representative legislation. I’m most interested though in the relationship between democracy and culture. Dr. guelzo writes this quote, you can have a democracy without the underpinnings of culture, but you will probably not have it very long. And even while you have it, it will be disappointing in its results. Now, we know as Christians that our beliefs provided those cultural underpinnings in many ways, and it’s no surprise that his church affiliation has declined, so has confidence in our political system. Let me turn again, to quote Dr. guelzo. It is the collapse of shared mores, which hasn’t emerged in American minds as the single biggest danger to liberal democracy. For without any underlying set of agreed assumptions. No majority can rule safely. And no minority can sleep quietly. Now, that is the line that will keep you up at night. Now, Dr. guelzo, joins me now and gospel bound to discuss what makes our time unique, when national conservatives are the mirror image of progressives, how to understand Lincoln’s complicated views on race and the Bible. And more. Dr. guelzo, thank you for joining me,

Dr. Allen Guelzo
Colin, very nice to be here with you.

Collin Hansen
Dr. guelzo, you’re you’re a historian, what is unique, or at least particular about our time I mentioned earlier that you said we live in a time of shadows? What do you mean,

Dr. Allen Guelzo
we live in a time that is pervaded by a sense of anxiety, a sense of crisis, about democracy. And some of that is because we’ve actually sustained something of a fall. And by that, I mean, it doesn’t take very much to reflect back only a few decades to what seemed like an era of triumph for democracy. Soviet Union went to pieces, the Berlin Wall came down, it appeared as though democracy really had finally at last established itself as the default position for human societies. There were going to be a few exceptions. But the assumption was those exceptions themselves, we gradually yield we had gotten over the big threat. And now simply democracy, that was going to be the way things were going to move. That at least is what it seemed like, let’s say in the mid 1990s. And then then it all fell apart. It fell apart through the Great Recession of 2008. It fell apart through the rise of China, two major influence both politically and economically in the world. Above all, it was a victim of the resurgence of various kinds of authoritarianism, especially manifest by movements like al Qaeda. And then, of course, the attack on the World Trade Center and elsewhere in the United States on 911. And after that, people looked around and said, Are we really certain that this thing we call democracy really has both feet on the ground? It looks like it’s taken some terrible, terrible shots to the jaw. Is it really as stable as we think, as we reflected on that we also had to deal within ourselves because we moved into a dramatic new environment of security and surveillance after 911 Some of us looked at that and panicked at it. We were afraid of the creation of a national surveillance state. Others of us said, Well, this will be temporary. And in fact, we need to do this right now simply for security. In fact, it hasn’t turned out to be temporary. And what’s even worse, it has now been doubled down by the pervasiveness of the internet, and by social media platforms for increasing that kind of surveillance, even in the most informal ways. So we now are struggling with this sense that maybe democracy is not the inevitable future. And in simply the last few years, that kind of political polarization that has taken hold of American imaginations has made us wonder. I’ve heard it more times than I really liked to hear the question, are we headed ourselves for some kind of new civil war? The very fact that we would ask that question, given the terrible costs of what happened in 1861, to 65, the fact that we would ask that question that we will be afraid of that question, and that some people will be willing to contemplate that question. That in itself is destabilizing. And it’s in that environment that you look around and you say, where can we find some guidance? Where can we find some historical examples that are relevant to the American experience? Is there something in our past? That’s why I have pointed to the figure of Abraham Lincoln. Because Lincoln, of course, presided over a time of enormous polarization, of a lack of confidence in democracy, of hostility to democracy by great powers abroad. Everything seemed to be conspiring in the direction of pulling down the edifice of a democratic republic that had been created in 1776. And what made it worse with even more agonizing was that there were forces at hand within American life that would aid and abet that Lincoln stands at the helm of the ship of state as it enters this period of crisis. he navigates us, skillfully and well and successfully through the storm. And knowing that, that’s why I pose these questions. What did Lincoln think democracy was? What can we learn from Lincoln? How can we reclaim our sense of who and what we are as Americans? Can Lincoln help us that way?

Collin Hansen
It seems that in those 2530 years that you’ve described there, since the, quote, end of history, the people discussed with the triumph of democracy, we’ve also seen a pretty significant shift away from civics education, history, education, the liberal arts in general, in part because of the polarization, and politicization of those liberal arts and of those fields. So one of the things I appreciate about this book is here, continuing to provide any number of historical lessons. You’re also providing civics lessons. Yes,

Dr. Allen Guelzo
yes. The title of the book is, in a way, a kind of heading for a civics lesson. I called it our ancient faith, because it’s a phrase that Lincoln used in the great speech he gives in October of 1854, in Peoria speech, which really contains his whole political philosophy. And in it, he spoke about the American experiment in a democratic republic, as being guided by the principles of the Declaration of Independence. And those principles, he said, form our ancient faith, he cast it in almost religious terms. And what is suggesting, first of all, is that this faith has the power of a faith to transform. But secondly, it is ancient. All right, it only goes back to 1776. But all right, it has lasted even as long as it has to 1854 that no one could easily have expected. And then thirdly, it is it is a faith that Americans can lay hands on and embrace politically speaking, so that it becomes what Lincoln in another earlier speech called a kind of civic religion.

Collin Hansen
I think I know your catalogue well enough to state this, but you can correct me. But we the fact that we see the declaration of independence as the kind of founding document of the United States that it is, is largely owing to Lincoln, is that correct?

Dr. Allen Guelzo
I think that there’s something that can be said for that because Lincoln insisted as many times as he could get people to listen to him. That his starting point politically was the Declaration of Independence. He cites the declaration over and over again, especially through the great contest that he has with Stephen A. Douglas in Illinois for the Illinois Senate seat in 1858. At the start of that campaign, Colin, he gives a marvelous speech in which he says, look, look at Americans today. fully half of Americans today either came from some other place, Scandinavia, Germany, France, he says we’re also the children of those who do. In other words, they don’t have a direct lineage to the American Revolution, that they’re not Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution. If they don’t have that kind of direct, tangible contact with the principles and the experience of the revolution, what were they going to derive any guidance from Oh, says Lincoln here, I will tell you where they will get guidance, they will read the declaration. And they will read in it these words. All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. And among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And Lincoln says, when people no matter where they’ve come from, or when they’ve come from, when they read the words of that declaration, then they feel that they are bone of the bone and flesh in the flesh of those old men that wrote the Declaration. And so they are, that is he said, the electric cord that runs through every lover of liberty, everywhere. He can appeal to the declaration, because the declaration itself lays out universals and fundamentals, drawn directly from natural law, the law that is instilled and hardwired into every one of us, by our Creator. When he’s three years later, on his road to his inauguration, as president, he stops and Philadelphia speaks twice at Independence Hall inside and outside, and he says, I have never had a feeling politically, that was not drawn from the Declaration of Independence. And of course, it’s the declaration that at Gettysburg, he will once again invoke when he asks us to remember that four score and seven years ago 1776, our fathers brought forth this country dedicated to a proposition that all men are created equal. Once again, he’s invoking the Declaration of Independence, that becomes the touchstone to which he returns time and time again,

Collin Hansen
and endowed by their Creator, of course, and explain more of where Lincoln derived his sense for natural law.

Dr. Allen Guelzo
Lincoln is a lawyer to start with a practices law for 24 years. And he’s, he’s quite a good lawyer at it too, as a trial lawyer. He’s not a wills and estates man doesn’t sit and move papers from one pile to the other on his desk. Now he’s, he’s out on the circuit. He’s out on the circuit communicating with people in a very ordinary way. He has to persuade them he has to stand in front of a jury and convince them and he gets very good at that, why he learns how to speak to what principles and ideas are common to everyone. So that when people hear him, they don’t hear someone speaking in abstractions, but they also don’t hear someone speaking in legal irrelevancies, either. They hear someone who wants to appeal to their fundamental senses of things. So he starts out with that, understanding that in order to get decisions, he’s got to be able to appeal to what people understand together and in common. The other root of that is the confrontation with slavery. Because slavery pretended to appeal to a right, the right of property. So owning property had from the days of John Locke and the Two Treatises on Government been understood to be one of those natural rights. Well, if you could transfer the definition of owning property, to a point where it would include owning human beings, you could hide behind that you could claim that you were doing the right thing. Lincoln says, No, you can’t do that. Because everybody knows that trying to claim human beings as property is in fact itself a violation of any kind of natural claim to property. And here’s the proof of it. The proof of it is that even an ant may writes this in a memorandum that it will be part of the whole campaign, he has to wage this way. Even the and it’s like, it’s like the Proverbs. Go to thou sluggard and consider the ant. Oh, he asked to consider the app, the ant will drag a crumb of bread to its nest, and it will furiously fight off the attempt of any other to try and take that Chrome from me, says even an ant knows. It knows automatic Like knows naturally, that that’s a violation. And even even even the least imaginative slave knows that he’s being wronged when the fruit of his labor is taken from him and given to someone else. So he appeals to natural law because he has to he has to appeal away from the kind of reasoning that Stephen Douglas used, which was to say, look, if 51% of the people in a territory or a state want to legalize slavery, that’s okay. All it matters is majoritarian ism, Lincoln says no, majorities are right. majorities are part of a warp and woof of democracy. majorities don’t determine everything, though, there is a circle within which there are certain things which cannot be compromised, there are certain things that you don’t establish by taking a vote. And among those things, are those natural rights within that circle, that Jefferson articulates in the declaration, and which represent the fundamental operation of natural law in human life?

Collin Hansen
So many different directions that we could go from that from that amazing answer. Let’s go back to talk about majority rule. This, I think, is one of the most common civics misunderstandings, in American democracy. We live in a democracy, but we do not live by majority rule. And you write, quote, It is the abiding weakness of democracies to assume that a majority must simply by the way to being a majority, be right and good and therefore have a license to rule. And second to that is the resentment of minorities who believe the majority is neither right nor good, and is therefore illegitimate. Many examples we could cite from history, let’s look at it positively. What are some historical examples where you think this balance has been struck? Well,

Dr. Allen Guelzo
I look over the decades of American life. And I see many points at which great issues had to be decided by being put to votes. And usually it comes indirectly, we don’t have direct referendums on issues. Rather, we have moments of confrontation through the electoral process through electing presidents, through electing members of Congress, through electing governors through electing members of state legislature, even if even electing members of school boards. It is in those indirect ways that majorities establish, this is what the people decide they want to do, because fundamentally, in a democracy, it is the people who rule. And the very gist of democracy is that sovereignty resides in the people. So the people decide this. And they decide these issues in our system, or Republic indirectly through their representatives. Sometimes we have made some serious mistakes. Sometimes legislatures have passed legislation, I think of the Alien and Sedition Acts on her President Adams, which we look back on and we we strike our heads and say, what were they thinking? Because at the moment, you can be carried away by fear, you can be carried away by passion. And yet there has always been a certain resiliency, a certain flexibility, which allows us after a bit to step back and say, Was that really a good idea? Perhaps we should listen to some other voices. And here’s where the interplay of majorities and minorities comes into into place. There is never going to be a democracy, where everybody agrees on everything, there’s never going to be unanimity. And if your link, and Lincoln says this, in one of his early speeches as president, if you’re expecting in a democracy to get unanimous support for one thing or another thing, you’re never going to get it, it’s not going to happen. Well, you will get what the majority is, and what you’ll get will be minorities. Now, in a democracy. A majority has the right to rule has the right to move forward with its agenda and its decisions. But while it has that authority, what it doesn’t have is the authority to take the minority, put it up against a barn wall and shoot it. Alright. All right. So what a majority gets is legitimacy. That is not the same thing as power. Power is what leads to murder. legitimacy is what leads to rule. Very different quantities. Now. That’s the rule concerning majorities. What about minorities, minorities, in a democracy, have the right to dissent. They can say no, we disagree. We think this is wrong. The majority may think We want to go in this particular direction, but we don’t believe it’s going to end well, they have the right to dissent. But they don’t have is the right to subvert. They don’t have the right to obstruct. They do not have the power, again, that question of power. They don’t have the power to MIT to destroy the direction that a sovereign people wants to move in, they can testify against it, they can dissent from it. But at the end of the day, they can not destroy it, because that would destroy democracy itself. If in fact, the minority is right in its dissent. And we have the confidence that given natural law, people will understand eventually, the direction in which things really do need to move, and they will change that way. Have we done that? In the past? We’ve done that multiple times in the past, we’ve we’ve done some foolish things. We’ve made mistakes. are we surprised at that? We don’t we we don’t skate easily over the ice any more than anyone else does. But what has been manifest over and over again, is the realization No, this this, this particular decision that was made at a point in the past is wrong. Now we’re going to go in the other direction. And we’ve seen that not only in very long distance terms to things like the response to the Alien and Sedition Act, but we also see it in terms of the Nullification Crisis. We see it in decisions about the Kansas Nebraska bill, that’s so infuriated and motivated Lincoln in 1854, and we’ve seen it even in in recent times in our own lifetimes, from let us say, the Vietnam War all the way up to the most recent Supreme Court decisions. A democracy is always in movement. Democracy is always trying to discover how can we do this better? How can we do this right. In authoritarian regimes? There’s never a question. Because in an authoritarian regime, first of all, you are governed by power. Right? The second thing is power. makes stupid. Because of course, someone who has power they’re about to do a stupid thing. Who is going to be brave enough to tell them that you object and off goes your head? Well,

Collin Hansen
let me let me interject something there and then keep going on that thought. It’s one reason that democracies tend to be successful in military endeavors, because they extended the authoritarian regimes see them as soft, see them as weak see them as divided with all this different kinds of dissent. And they tend to it takes a little while to get going. But over time, power makes stupid and stupid makes bad military decisions, but democracies can course correct. Harman

Dr. Allen Guelzo
Gehring said that Americans were good at making refrigerators and razor blades. Yeah. Well, he learned the hard way, didn’t he? And in the history of the American republic, he has not been the only one. I was talking to my wife a few minutes ago. And I was saying, you look at this event called the American Civil War. Who were the people it calls to the forefront? Well, for one thing it calls Abraham Lincoln, who, who would have guessed? Who would have guessed this lawyer, someone dismissed this, this county court lawyer from Central Illinois, when he was when he was nominated. And then elected in November of 1861, Illinois editor said, who will write this ignorant man state papers for him? And it’s not only Lincoln, look at some of the other people that that the war presents us with Ulysses Grant. Grant. Yeah, you know, and we were talking about visiting mathematics. And I said, one of the great moments at Appomattox, it’s a moment of great sorrow, a great loss. But it’s also a moment that can really be sublime because grant after exchanging the surrender term letters, Lee of course, leaves gets on his horse grant steps out on the porch of the McLean house, takes off his hat to salute Lee and Lee returns the salute and they ride off in the distance. In the distance, you begin to hear artillery fire. Grant stops and asks, what is that? And his staff explains to him? Well, those are our artillery batteries are celebrating the surrender. Grant says, tell them to stop. The rebels are our countrymen again? Yeah, exactly. Now there there is an extraordinary man. For years before that, Colin almost to the day he had been clerking in his father’s leather goods store, a failure at everything he had tried so much of so much of failure that he actually pawned his watch To buy Christmas presents for his children. And then four years later, there he is at Appomattox. Four years after that is President of the United States. If Lincoln story is an extraordinary American story, how much less Ulysses Grant, and then you go on from the utility talk about someone like William Tecumseh Sherman, this, this man who, who talked like a fire hose, who with this grisly reddish beard, and then the incessant cigar smoking, just a man who exuded nervous energy all the time, when the mayor of Atlanta wrote to him to protest the bombardment of Atlanta. Sherman responded, the only thing you have to do to make this bombardment stop is to return to the national authority. And and if he will do that, I will share my last cracker with you. These are the these are the men whom the exigencies of the Civil War cashed up for us. Some of them I think, had it not been for the war we would never have heard from. And yet, here in this war, when everybody assumed at the beginning or almost everyone assumed at the beginning, especially in Europe, that the American Republic is obviously going to blow itself up now, suddenly, in this American democracy, look what steps forward, Lincoln, Grant Sherman, it is simply extraordinary. The depth, the resources, the resiliency, of democracy, totalitarianism. authoritarian governments always look so strong, so powerful. They’re great parades, and they’re strutting goose stepping soldiers and missiles on truck beds. And they look powerful, and they sound powerful. But they’re really fragile, put the slightest pressure on them. They fail, they collapse, whereas a democracy, it gets knocked down right at the beginning of round one. It’s just like Rocky Balboa. It gets up again, he fights. And this is what democracy does. Because it has an inner strength and an inner resiliency that these other regimes simply do not have.

Collin Hansen
I have a feeling you just answered this question. But I thought maybe I’d wait to do all the Civil War discussion till the end. But let’s, let’s go there now. And we can return to some of the other themes. My son is going to be he’s in third grade, he’s going to be dressing up as Ulysses Grant for school. That’s the biography he’s going to he’s going to be doing. We’ll figure that out. We’ve we’ve selected which kind of hat of course, that we’re going to wear and you know, we don’t have to go all out for the for the code, of course, because he wore the old famously at Appomattox. The old worn out, worn out coat. In contrast to Lee. I’ve been I’ve been fascinated with the civil wars. Since I think I think I was three My first memory, which is crazy to imagine my my first dream was related to civil war, probably around age three. I can’t remember how many times I’ve been to Gettysburg. I think cluding, then taking my son a number of times. I think you’ve alluded to this, because certainly it’s one of the reasons I gravitate toward your work on that period, including this book. What is so captivating to you about that period? I think what again, what I’ve learned from you is a lot of what you just said, right there, that’s part of what captivates me about that period, but how would you expand on them?

Dr. Allen Guelzo
There? There are a number of things that I could cite. And And truth be told I got bitten by the bug almost as early as you I think I think it has a I think it has a certain valence for young ages. And, and they the enduring significance of it just never seems to lose its own. The story just just never seems to wear out. Because there’s so many parts to it. I think in the largest sense, the Civil War is compelling for us. Because first of all, it has such extraordinary characters. And I’ve mentioned just some of them already. A few characters that you could not have predicted would would come to the surface of public life. Then there’s the struggle, the contest itself, and the agony of all the suffering that was inflicted by the war. You walk around as I’ve often done at the Soldiers National Cemetery of Gettysburg. And you you look at the semicircular rows of graves. Colin fully a third of them are unknown. Wow. We have no idea who they were because there were there were no dog tags on those days. Graves registration

Collin Hansen
Yeah, and maybe they would so some Think inside their code something

Dr. Allen Guelzo
had most and most of the time, they really had no

Collin Hansen
that often came later as well in the war. Yeah.

Dr. Allen Guelzo
You look at that. And you wonder how many homes how many homes were destroyed. Along with the lives there you you think of how much in the life of one household after another, candles and lamps are put out in the darkness not knowing, never, in fact, hearing whatever might have happened to a brother or a son, father and uncle. And you total up the some of that agony. And sometimes it can almost be too much to think about. Yeah. And yet you reflect on the fact that this sacrifice was made consciously, it was made deliberately, we have to do this. In the years after the war, there were veterans units, which paid periodic visits to Gettysburg. And I remember reading in one regimental history that have up on the shelves here behind me, a New Jersey artillery battery, its veterans met at Gettysburg, along with members of the families. And on one occasion, the father of a boy who had been killed at Gettysburg, broke down crying. He said, my boy, my boy, he was all I had. And one of the veterans took him by the elbow, pointed him to the flag at the center of the cemetery and said, as long as that flag wave was, your boy’s life will be remembered, and he will not have died in vain. And there there is within the pain of that also a constellation, the extraordinary sacrifice but the extraordinary power that met and triumph there. And then I suppose, probably in the biggest context, what continues to fascinate in the war, is how it contradicted everyone’s expectations. You have to think, Colin, that, in the middle of the 19th century, the United States is the only still surviving free standing, large scale democracy in the world. All these other experiments, the French Revolution, the Bulevar, and republics, and South America, all had wandered off, either into failure or dictatorship or whatever. And in terms of a successful, large scale, democracy was only the United States. Every emperor and King and Duke and dictator was sitting around watching and waiting for somebody to point the finger at say, See, they’re going to fail. They can’t succeed. Human beings were born with bits in their mouths and bridles in the mouths of saddles on the backs waiting to be written by us, aristocrats who really know how to make things operate. And when the civil war breaks out, it they rejoice, they think, gee, this is the end of the American democracy. And of course, it didn’t happen that way. It turned out entirely different. It was the Friends of democracy in England and in France who rejoiced. It was it was slaves in Spain, in the sugar fields of Spanish Cuba, who intermingled with their songs, these these words avanza, Lincoln avanza, to aspect Esperanza, advanced Lincoln advanced, you are our hope. It was a message that not only said that the American democracy would survive, but the democracy itself had proven its durability, and would go on from there ever moving upwards. That I think, taken together gives us the source of the fascination the Civil War exerts. For all of us, even today.

Collin Hansen
I will often tell people that no one dislikes history. They just haven’t heard it taught by Dr. Allen guelzo. Yeah. I mean, how could you not be fascinated? How can how can you not be fascinated? There’s endless stories, endless characters, endless drama in history,

Dr. Allen Guelzo
but doesn’t that confirm what we find in Psalm 77? I have considered the days of old the tale of ancient years. Of course, because that is what we look back upon even In the context of the Bible, how do how do the people of God identify themselves? My father was a wandering error man. What does what does the apostle say, in First Corinthians, we have all come through the Red Sea, we have all come through the cloud. Constantly, the reference is to a historical reality. There is a there is a strength there. And it’s a strength that emerges. As we see it in the biblical narrative. It is a strength that emerges as we consult our own national and historical narrative. Because it tells us that this thing democracy is what Lincoln said, the most natural, the most automatic way it is, it is, you might say it’s the default position of human nature and human governance for everyone. This is this is why I am not sympathetic to people who like to identify themselves as nationalists. It’s not because I don’t love my own country. I do. But I remember how Lincoln talked about love of country, in an oration that he gave as a eulogy for Henry Clay, he asked the question, why. And Henry Clegg, he said, was his bow ideal of a statesman. Lincoln, Lincoln said, Clay loved his country, first of all, because it was his country. And that’s a natural impulse. But even in a more larger sense, Lincoln said, Clay loved his country, because it showed that free men could be prosperous. In other words, that democracy is not a self defeating arrangement. So when we say that we love what the American experiment is, what we are saying is, we are loving something that addresses the fundamental needs and realities of human beings in the most general sense of the word. It’s not just the expression of something peculiar to the American landscape, or the or to the tree, even to the American experience itself. But rather, what Americans have helped to realize, is what Jefferson describes in the declaration as something that is common to every human being, and that is those natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And if the Civil War is the story of justifying anything, it is the story of justifying those things.

Collin Hansen
Many listeners, viewers, they may be aware, at the highest level of academic circles, among conservatives, some of the debates you alluded to that they’re national conservatives, another iteration, Integra lifts, is to explain what you mean, by calling national conservatives and integrity lists the mirror image of progressives,

Dr. Allen Guelzo
progressives believe that we are the product of historical accidents, that there are no really fundamental fundamental continuities in the human experience. We are all simply the products of responses to our environment, and the struggle for survival within that environment. And no one environment is really superior to another. So the answer is that one group of people or one tribe, or clan, or race or nation comes up with has no necessary truth to it. It’s simply a response to that particular environment. And you try to cope with that environment as the environment dictates. Ironically, national conservatives don’t say anything that’s really terribly different from that, they say we should not confine ourselves to try to discover universal principles of human behavior. We are all the products of a particular culture of a particular language or a particular ethnicity, even of a particular religious formation. And if, if that is the case, then what we should do is we should cultivate our own gardens. And we should let those particular things rule in our life. And we’ll let others have their rule and we won’t disturb them. But we’ll concentrate on doing our own and making our own way of doing things uniform. Each of those points of view has something, some element in it, which sounds or feels persuasive. And I think both are wrong. I think in the case of the integral list, and the Integralists are people and I won’t drop names, but the integral list of people who are overwhelmingly believe in their their belief is that you need a religious system to inform your culture and the religious system that they would prefer to have is one of a particular religious denomination. If I could be confident that religious people as religious people are always right and good and judge correctly I could be an integral list. But I know better because I know that religious people are people. I know that they make mistakes, sometimes hideous mistakes. And I am leery about putting the kind of power into their hands that their integral ism would ask for. Likewise, the American experiment began with an idea about the nation an idea about its government and idea about democracy, and built its culture around that idea, not the other way around. We didn’t start out with a culture and then build a democracy, or we started out with the ideas, the ideas captured in the declaration, the ideas formulated in the Constitution, and we developed a culture from that, so that the two interact together, yes. But the priority is in the ideas of a formation. So I do have my difficulties. And I have been asked from time to time, are you a national conservative? And I have to say, frankly, no, I am a lung conium. And I look at the example of Lincoln. And I see in this man, virtues of political life, that I have to say I think are admirable. I see in him resiliency, I see in him humility, I see in him a determination to know and understand people in situations. I see in him large elements of compassion, yet compassion combined with a determination to do what is right. Above all, I see a recognition of natural law and natural rights. I think I am content with the democracy that Lincoln saved. And I would like to see that democracy continue on the link conium principles. Does it involve risks? Yes. Will it make mistakes? You betcha. As I hear some of my relatives say to me, it’ll do all those things. It’ll also do tremendously good things, and where it has made mistakes, he will correct those mistakes. Lincoln said, don’t expect don’t expect perfection today, from democracy. Rather, he said, reflect on what is written in the gospels. Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect. Not Lincoln setting up not that anyone claims to be perfect now, but that we have an aspiration that will guide us and motivate us towards doing it better and better. correcting what is wrong, improving on what is right.

Collin Hansen
I’m gonna make my students here at Beeson Divinity School, listen to this podcast to help them understand why I teach Abraham Lincoln in a course designed to train pastors, for ministries, specifically looking through the second inaugural address, which I put with letter from Birmingham jail is the two greatest works of public theology in American history. Now, you write that Lincoln’s command of the Bible was a ready, reference concordance. I mean, no one, no one matches King, certainly not in presidential rhetoric, terms of his biblical references, which you need to know your King James Bible to be able to recognize all those references. And yet, this was fascinating. And everything else I’ve read from you and many others on Lincoln, it did not occur to me that you found only one serious Christian book he ever read. And that’s only because he was friends with the author. So I know you’ve written extensively on this. But in a brief answer, how did Christianity shape Lincoln? I

Dr. Allen Guelzo
think it’s shaped it through some general matters or natural revelation. I mean, the New Testament talks about and the Old Testament as well talks about how the heavens declare the glory of God. And the New Testament, we read about how God has made himself known to all the nations. Now they have sometimes denied that and sometimes covered it up and sometimes blinded themselves, but yet nevertheless, God has revealed himself in a variety of ways. Lincoln understood that kind of Revelation. He did not embrace a particular Revelation, the authority of the Bible for himself personally, he recognized that it was authority and authority in his time. And so he will, in fact, quota and he finds it congenial to read. But he doesn’t read it in the sense that a believer will read the Bible. He will read it as a good book, he will read it as he read Shakespeare, Shakespeare will teach him important lessons. And yet, it is still the Bible that he comes back to and asks people to reflect upon. And in the second inaugural, he will deploy the by Well as a way of rebutting his critics, because you’re nobody, what he says in the second inaugural is not a compliment. He says this, this war came upon us why? Because of slavery. And it is exactly the cost from both north and south. Why the North were the good guys, weren’t they? No, he says, No, we have both been implicated in both profit. At that point, you can almost hear people saying, wait a minute, no, no, no, no, no, we were not implicated, not us. And Lincoln says, If you want to protest that you need to argue with a higher authority, Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? And it is on that basis that he’s able to turn and say, This is why we don’t have malice toward none, and charity for all. Because in a sense, we all have sinned this way. We all need forgiveness. And none of us can sit in judgment on each other.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, that’s, I think the the person who gave me the best context for understanding that was probably Harry stouts, upon the altar of the nation, moral history of the civil war. I didn’t grasp because of the way that we view Lincoln in American history. So exalted, I did not grasp how unique Lincoln was in his time, how magnanimous he was. And we there’s no reason to take that for granted. Because of all people, he would presumably had been the one to, we would expect to be the least, why

Dr. Allen Guelzo
should Animus? Or shouldn’t he have converted the second inaugural into a victory lap? Would anyone have blamed him? If he did? No, no, if anything, he knew he was flying in the face of a lot of opinion by saying, no, no, no, we have to have malice toward non charity for help. But he does that. He does it because he understands two things. He understands the judgment belongs to God. Not not in our hands, ultimately speaking, judgment belongs to God. And God is a judge of us all, and God judges by different rules than the ones we invent for ourselves. And it’s not our it’s not in our gift to, to contradict, to criticize those rules, even if we do not entirely understand those rules. In fact, the very fact that we don’t understand them, means that we need to submit to them. And he knew that he would come into into criticism this way, which which he did. But the other thing that moves in this way is because he understand something about democracy. And that is that vengeance is toxic, toxic because the exercise of vengeance is very close to the exercise of power, is one of the great things that the American founders understood, and it’s reflected in the Constitution itself is that there are two great forces in politics. You might say it’s like a strong force on the weak force in physics. There’s liberty and there’s power. If you have liberty and only liberty, it will become license it will become anarchy. And anarchy will only bring in despotism as a as a cure. But power, power, power helps you keep the lights on power helps to keep things in a regulated fashion. But the use of power has to be very sharply circumscribed, because power is toxic. Power poisons, what it touches, it’s like polonium, you can get a nuclear reaction out of it, you can also be poisoned by it. So the founders worked very hard to maximize liberty, and to minimize power, but not to eliminate power because you have to have some power. Something has to restrain liberty from becoming license. balancing those two, those two forces is one of the genius creations of of the American founders. Lincoln understood that. And because he understood that vengeance is such a near kin to power, he understood it could poison every aspect of the victory that had been won in the Civil War. So he asks us to do something that we almost feel is unnatural, and that is to back off power. If I can draw the analogy to toll cane, and the Fellowship of the Ring, power, as captured in that ring of power. Power is something that distorts power corrupts power makes people into something less than human. You see that all these characters that Tolkien creates, that’s a fundamental piece of wisdom that Tolkien captures and I think it’s awesome. So in a certain way, politically speaking, that’s something that founders captured, and which Lincoln realized?

Collin Hansen
Well, let me expand on that illustration. We don’t know exactly how Lincoln would have wielded power. I mean, at that point in time, I think it would be safe to when he died, I think it would be safe to say that he was the most powerful military and political leader the world had ever seen. At that time, I mean, maybe not in the full swath of the season in terms of territory, but certainly in terms of the military might and the size of the army and things like that. We don’t know exactly how that would have gone throughout a second term. And then who knows, whatever after that. But it seems as though the second inaugural gives us the best glimpse of that.

Dr. Allen Guelzo
Even before the Second Inaugural, you see how cautious he is. He issues the Emancipation Proclamation on the first of January 1863. And the Emancipation Proclamation is a dramatic document column. It is the most dramatic exercise of power by an American president up to that time, he is emancipating, over 3 million slaves at one stroke of his pen. Now he’s doing it with some circumscription. For one thing, the Emancipation Proclamation, only emancipates slaves and the rebellious confederacy right now, slaves in the four border states that remain loyal to the Union, right? He exempts them exempt some of the areas of the South that have been occupied by federal forces. And people ever since have scratched their heads and why does he exempt those areas? Why did he just abolish slavery completely by presidential dicta? Well, his basic answer would look like this. My authority for issuing this Emancipation Proclamation grows entirely out of one provision of the Constitution. The President shall be commander in chief of the army and navy in time of, of actual, actual war rebellion. He is emancipating those slaves as a war measure. It’s not because he didn’t think that slavery was wrong. He just didn’t have any constitutional authority to do more than that. He respects that authority. And then this is the really striking thing. On September 2 1863, he responds to a letter from his Secretary of the Treasury, Selman Chase, Chase was a Chase was an old time card carrying abolitionist when he had been governor and and senator from Ohio. They referred to him as the attorney general for fugitive slaves. Chase writes to Lincoln and urges Lincoln. He’s now nine months since the promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation, expanded, free the slaves everywhere. Lincoln writes back to him and says, I can’t do that. I would be my personal inclination, but I can’t just put my personal inclination on the saddle here. I don’t have the constitutional authority to do that. And if I tried to do it, he says, would I not be in the boundless field of absolutism? Lincoln understands the poisonous nature of power. He would be, as he would say, in another context, he would be effectively giving away the whole issue of the war, to the Confederacy, because what was the Confederacy building, the Confederacy was built upon assertions of power, the power of white people over black people, the power of state governments, to trump the authority of the rest of the American people, that those kinds of inversions of relationships were based upon the seizure of power. And Lincoln saying, Do you really want me to do the same thing? Now? You want me to yield to that same temptation? Do you want me to put the ring of power onto? And so his response to chase is no, I can’t do that. I have to operate within the boundaries of the Constitution and the laws. That’s why That’s why He will put His shoulder to the wheel for a constitutional amendment in 1865, to abolish slavery, because that’s the way to do it, constitutionally, not by the diktat of the President, as well intentioned as that diktat might be

Collin Hansen
and chase as a result in part of that then explores running for president against Lincoln in the Republican primary because of his frustration, Lincoln knows this, but Lincoln keeps him in his cabinet as Treasury Secretary because he’s so excellent at his job, and that eventually Chase unsuccessful in running against Lincoln, ends up with the courts, correct.

Dr. Allen Guelzo
He che trace just took it one step too far. Later on. I mean, he he dared Lincoln one too many times he did. He’s always submitting his resignation if he not getting his way and find the link. Alright, fine. Finally, relationships have finally reached the point of mutual embarrassment. I’m going to accept your letter. So not to say that I’m undoing or unsetting, any of the good things I’ve said about you, or any of the good things you’ve done, but it’s over. And then he appoints Chase as Chief Justice of the Supreme

Collin Hansen
Court, the Supreme Court.

Dr. Allen Guelzo
Some people have said, well, that that really effectively ended chases presidential ambitions by kicking him upstairs. It’s true that No it didn’t. Chase kept thinking about himself for President in 1872, he really coveted the possibility of the liberal Republicans nominating him for the presidency. But Chase was, Chase was an interesting man, in many ways, a man of great integrity, a very sincere religious person. And yet at the same time, as Lincoln once said about him, his principle, his principle, misapprehension, was that he believed that there was a fourth person in the Trinity.

Collin Hansen
And the point that we’re trying to make here is is how Lincoln is the exception, he is the one with the power. And yet he is the exception who does not use it, and wield it in those ways, in part, which is what allows the American experiment that he treasured so much to be able to continue. And there are any number of lessons that can be learned from that, in an era when the Internet gives us so much more. It gives governments so much more power than they had before, as you can see in China and elsewhere. He

Dr. Allen Guelzo
is he’s, he’s the opposite of the mad scientist in the laboratory. He’s the opposite of the Dr. Frankenstein, who uses power to make a nightmare. He’s more in that respect, like, like Thomas Alva Edison. When Edison created the first prototype of his electric light bulb, he handed the ball to an associate who dropped it. And Edison went back and worked up another prototype and the first thing he did is to hand it to the sands,

Collin Hansen
this same person Yeah, yeah. Well, I know I’ve been waiting for this opportunity for many years. Back in the books and Culture Days, Dr. Gills will have reviewed your book on Gettysburg, and, and again, have been a voracious reader of of whatever you write. But for people who are just, you know, learning and seeing Dr. gills of his work now, then you can know that he’s just as good as a writer as he has as a teacher and an interview. Guest which is exceptionally good. So you can pick up his latest, our ancient faith, Lincoln democracy, and the American experiment. Last question, what’s next? What are you writing? What what’s going to be next from you?

Dr. Allen Guelzo
Well, there are a number of things I have under construction, almost ready to go into the bookstores, a new Gettysburg book. That is called Voices from Gettysburg. And it’s anthology. It’s an anthology of primary source materials on Gettysburg and the Gettysburg campaign, the kind of the kind of book that will let you read the original voices of people. At that time, sometimes it’s from published memoirs. Sometimes there are a number of primary manuscript sources that are appearing in print for the very first time. But this anthology will be released officially from Kensington press on May 21. So that’s something that’s coming along. My, my old lifelong friend, James Hankins, of Harvard and I are collaborating in writing a new to volume History of Western civilization, to be called the golden thread. And we’re, we’re cracking on every square inch of sail to get that into port by the end of the year by the end of this year. I’m working right now on a single volume collection of the political writings of Abraham Lincoln, for Cambridge University Press. I’m also going to be committed to writing a new history of the Battle of Antietam and the NCTM compact campaign. And then beyond that, there is there’s a publisher and one of one of that publishers, principal editors, who is working very hard to get me to sign a contract for a book on history and theory. Okay. So perhaps at some point, I just should sing No. Do you think with that,

Collin Hansen
I’m not going to be the one who do encourage you to say no. If I can just read you as fast as you can right? Then I’ll be

Dr. Allen Guelzo
sure that I’m a little bit like the character in the musical Oklahoma, the one who can’t say no. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad, but it does say it does. It does keep me from wandering around at night.

Collin Hansen
Well, Godspeed in that work, Dr. Guelzo. Again, check out his newest book on Ancient Faith, Lincoln democracy and the American experiment. What a delightful hour. Thanks, Dr. Guelzo.

Dr. Allen Guelzo
All right. Thank you, Collin.