When democracy is in trouble, the thoughts of the nation turn to Abraham Lincoln. He saved the Union once, perhaps he can do so again. But is statesmanship possible at a distance, removed from the unique circumstances that gave rise to its redemptive deeds? Certainly, the statesman expects his influence to give form and shape to the future, but can the influence be perpetual, or at least periodically renewable? Lincoln himself in his 1858 “Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions” spoke of writing—which he called “the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye”—as a permanent resource. He described its effect as “great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space.”
It seems that historians, political scientists, and journalists have all had the same idea of seeking help from Lincoln. On the heels of other recent titles, last year saw the publication of Michael Zuckert’s A Nation So Conceived: Abraham Lincoln and the Paradox of Democratic Sovereignty and James H. Read’s Sovereign of a Free People: Abraham Lincoln, Majority Rule, and Slavery (both very fine books recently reviewed in the CRB). The almost Shakespearean fecundity of Lincoln’s language is on display in each title: A Nation So Conceived from the Gettysburg Address and Sovereign of a Free People from the First Inaugural. And now, in Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment, whose title is taken from the 1854 Peoria Address, Allen C. Guelzo explicitly directs his defense of Lincolnian democracy against its “cultured despisers,” whether the Left’s woke progressives or the Right’s integralists and national conservatives. The primary threat to our politics doesn’t arise from the non-college educated, little inclined to reading, but rather from the longstanding miseducation of our elites, who need to learn the path back to the foundational teachings of equality, rights, and consent, strengthened by a set of supportive mores (Guelzo avails himself of Alexis de Tocqueville, as well as Lincoln and the American Founders).
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Guelzo, already familiar to CRB readers, is the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar at Princeton University and director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. In this, his eighth book on the Great Emancipator, Guelzo takes as his proof text Lincoln’s only attempt to define democracy. The passage is an undated snippet whose ultimate purpose is unclear. There are many such scraps of paper in Lincoln’s hand, which scholars refer to as “Fragments”—inaccurately, because the thoughts expressed are usually beautifully complete. Were they drafts to be inserted into speeches or purely private ruminations? The Fragments often have a crystalline quality, so sharp, so relentlessly logical that Lincoln may have found them unsuited for the purpose of public persuasion. They seem more like exercises to clarify and make firm his own understanding, and perhaps to indulge his lawyerly love of refutation. This is especially true of those squibs that skewer the reasoning of the slavocracy (see the “Fragment on Slavery” and the piece entitled “On Pro-Slavery Theology”). While lawyers do need to “Skin def’t [defendant],” as Lincoln put it in a famous note sketching his closing argument to a jury, politicians benefit from a little more verbal restraint.
In the intriguing passage Guelzo features, Lincoln specifies what democracy is not, what it disallows. “As I would not be a slave,” he avers, beginning from his own self-interest in the matter, “so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” Arguing by exclusion is a characteristic feature of Lincoln’s reasoning. Democracy is understood in contradistinction to despotism. Although this passage never appeared in a public speech, in 1854 at Peoria, Illinois, Lincoln denounced Senator Stephen A. Douglas’s white supremacist notion of democracy which differed—diametrically—from Lincoln’s and was thus “no democracy.” As Lincoln explained, “When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism.”
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Starting from rejection of one’s own enslavement, Lincoln states that one must also reject mastery. Equality is presented as the option that remains after rejection of the ranked pair, slave and master. Whereas both Zuckert and Read begin their books with Lincoln’s positive statements about the nature of popular sovereignty, Guelzo begins his from this “negative” definition, which is a statement about democracy’s limits. The three authors end up agreeing about much, but the several points of departure are interesting and not unconnected, I suspect, with the tonal difference conveyed in their titles. Guelzo’s points at least toward political religion and maybe to the higher kind as well. Another sign of the difference is that Guelzo indexes both “natural law” and “natural rights”; Zuckert and Read only “natural rights.”
Our Ancient Faith is a short book with a clever organizing feature: each chapter ends with a riff on that opening definition of democracy. So, for example, the first chapter, after explaining the centrality of consent, closes by acknowledging Americans’ inconsistent application of consent, as “there were too many who were only too happy to be masters, and to have others as slaves.” In refusing to recognize the reciprocity of rights, they abandoned the democratic premise or promise of “Liberty to all” (as Lincoln called it in his 1861 “Fragment on the Constitution and Union”). Largely through a reading of Lincoln’s 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, on “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” the second chapter examines the source of this “fatal weakness” that afflicts democracy, closing with a grim question: “Is it passion which will make some of us slaves, and others of us masters?”
In Chapters Three and Four, Guelzo turns from the high-toned solution of reason and law-abidingness to what might seem a distinctly lower facet of Lincoln’s solution: namely, political economy. Guelzo, however, argues that commerce was viewed by Lincoln as a “full partner” in democracy: “Dollars were the denomination of reason and logic.” Setting forth Lincoln’s case for market economics as anti-privilege and anti-passion, Guelzo explains that “[a]gainst every notion of a static, rooted society of inalterably polarized classes, Lincoln saw economic self-transformation as the great gift of democracy.” Free labor, the opposite of enslaved labor, made aspiration and advancement possible. It was a system founded on hope. These chapters are especially valuable, especially now that there are so many on the left who associate slavery with capitalism, thereby attempting to harness the animus against slavery into an assault on free market economics. Guelzo’s knowledge of history is superior:
The hidden hand in Democratic and agrarian resistance to commerce and markets was slavery. Slavery depended on the stability that resulted from an immobilized and unconsenting workforce, and the principal product of that workforce was agricultural—the cotton grown by the Southern states of the Union. Capital formation scarcely existed as a goal; every ounce of profit was turned into more land and more slaves to satisfy the demand of the Liverpool cotton markets, and by the eve of the Civil War, the state of New York alone had more banking capital on its books than all the slave states that would make up the Southern Confederacy.
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just as he refutes the anti-American ideologies of slave apologists John C. Calhoun and George Fitzhugh as well as the Marxist 1619 Project, Guelzo exposes the mistakes of right-wing libertarians who regard Lincoln’s presidency as the harbinger of Bismarckian modern bureaucracy. The regulatory state and centralized administrative despotism are not part of the 16th president’s legacy. Guelzo shows how Lincoln’s view of governmental obligation “was geared toward an economy of democracy for upwardly aspiring free laborers.” To those who are convinced, but who might nevertheless regard such an agenda as now sadly obsolete, Guelzo points to the continued reality of the United States as a nation of small producers: “There remain over 30 million small businesses in America, as opposed to just 18,500 large ones…and of those 30 million, an astonishing 73 percent are sole proprietorships.” The burden of these two chapters is that “[i]n Lincoln’s world,” and in ours, “there need be no slaves and no masters except the self-driven and the self-mastered.”
Chapter Five on “Democratic Culture” describes the attitudes that underlie democracy. The habits and practices that sustain democracy must be both individual and collective. The components of self-mastery (things like sound morality and the spirit of toleration) create an “inner moral gyroscope” that then guides what Lincoln called “public sentiment” but which we now call “public opinion.” Democracy fares well when those sentiments are salutary, but they can also become corrupted, invidious, and illiberal. Lincoln was required to navigate the “shoals of American ‘sentiments’ and mores,” as he sought to prevent the American experiment from foundering on misunderstandings of the founding ideas. The most dangerous of those misunderstandings was Stephen Douglas’s popular sovereignty—or “Pop Sov,” as Lincoln sometimes referred to it—which transformed government based on the consent of the governed first into indifference to the enslavement of others and eventually, as Lincoln told the crowd in Edwardsville, Illinois, in 1858, into “the right of the white man to breed and flog n-ggers in Nebraska.” In this brutally frank statement of the terminus of this downward spiral, Lincoln warned:
Now, when by all these means you have succeeded in dehumanizing the negro; when you have put him down, and made it forever impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul, and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out in darkness like that which broods over the spirits of the damned; are you quite sure the demon which you have roused will not turn and rend you? What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence?… Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, every where. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises.
Lincoln’s use of the n-word in this speech demonstrates that the objectionable label can be employed for powerful moral effect, as he derides the brazen anti-human racism of his opponent. Guelzo, by the way, has a footnote showing that Lincoln’s supposed free use of the term in other speeches is a misimpression created by “secondhand reports of Lincoln’s comments, frequently from hostile newspapers who routinely employed the epithet whenever anyone referred to blacks, whether or not the epithet was even actually used.”
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The second half of Our Ancient Faith takes up the main contemporary challenges to Lincoln’s reputation: his wartime handling of civil liberties and his lifetime record on the matter of race. The first charge, that Lincoln was a tyrant or at least an abrogator of civil rights, is not new. In Chapter Six, Guelzo gives a strong summary of the case for the prosecution. Arguing that Lincoln disguised his “lust for power” in the ever-adaptable language of “necessity,” the Lincoln-haters denounce him for having subverted the rule of law through crimes such as
the use of the State Department to conduct arrests for suspected treason, the purging of government employees through the use of loyalty oaths, the creation of military commissions to conduct trials of those arrested in defiance of habeas corpus, the creation of networks of special agents and officers to spy on civilians, the use of the military to influence elections, the silencing of the courts, and even emancipation, all of which presumably set the American republic on the road to statism and tyranny.
In Lincoln’s defense, Guelzo puts great stress on “this quiet fact”: whatever the violations were (and Guelzo does admit an element of truth in the complaints), “they really did turn out to be ‘temporary.’”
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Delving into the nitty-gritty, Guelzo provides the numbers and discusses specific cases. What he shows is that there was “no pattern, much less a nefarious plan.” What emerges instead is the haphazard, local, and mild character of the infringements that occurred. In a fact worth remembering, Guelzo indicates that “Lincoln’s management of the war was actually a boon to federalism.” Keeping in mind what could have been done had Lincoln had the impulses of Oliver Cromwell or Maximilien Robespierre, what is surprising “is how few such dents were made in civil liberties…in the context of four years of bloody civil war.” Lincoln did not attempt to jail his political opponents (e.g., the Democratic governors of New York and New Jersey) and he absolutely refused to consider delaying or canceling the 1864 election. His constitutionalism went beyond mere obedience to law. Bound by his inaugural oath, as president Lincoln embodied the solution that he had put forth more than two decades earlier in the Lyceum Address: reverence for the Constitution and laws—a reverence that led him at every step to reflect thoughtfully and publicly about the dilemma posed by civil war. In his first address to Congress on July 4, 1861, he formulated the question this way: “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” Lincoln threaded his way through these perils remarkably well. Guelzo concludes: “For all that we today laud Abraham Lincoln for his other virtues, it is this fundamental hesitation to quash law and democratic liberties which is the most important gift we inherit from him. As he was not a slave, so he was not a master.”
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While dissatisfaction with Lincoln’s use of executive power is longstanding, the view of Lincoln as a racist is entirely new. Adulation of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator has been replaced by “Thirteentherism”—the view that the 13th Amendment, “which Lincoln navigated through Congress to abolish slavery once and for all,” was basically a plot to shift white control over the “black body” from the plantation to the carceral state. Calling this “one of the greatest shifts in historical self-consciousness that has occurred in American life,” Guelzo traces it to the rise of “Afro-pessimism.” Without endorsing the view that democracy is hopelessly incapable of accommodating racial difference, he does present a measured version of the case against Lincoln, declaring him “an unhappy example of how opposition to slavery did not necessarily guarantee any sort of enlightenment on race,” and adding that “there is an uncomfortable zigzag in much of Lincoln’s thinking on racial issues.” This chapter on “Democracy and Race” is the only one that does not undertake a vindication of Lincoln. It ends on a note of doubt, stressing Lincoln’s failure to welcome civil equality: “Is it possible now only to conclude that Lincoln really did prefer to keep at least some people, at least in some measure, as slaves?”
This is not Guelzo’s last word, however. The next chapter, “Democracy and Emancipation,” responds to the charge of Lincoln’s “backwardness on race.” After calling out the “cheap skepticism” of the modern age, Guelzo presents a complex counter-argument. He patiently explains such matters as how natural law relates to man-made law, and Lincoln’s democratic obligation to reform defective laws through more adequate, more enlightened, expressions of majority will. Guelzo reminds readers of the line between federal and state jurisdiction, a line that was at the time drawn to give great scope to the states in determining political and civil rights. Despite those diverse articulations of civil rights, he argues that Lincoln’s insistence on the universality of natural rights points toward a desideratum: over time, the gap between natural and civil equality ought to narrow. Stephen Douglas rightly foresaw this consequence of Lincoln’s reasoning—and he denounced it. Here is Guelzo’s summary of their confrontation: “No one should be fooled by Lincoln’s distinctions between natural and civil rights, Douglas insisted; grant Lincoln the first, and the second would come inevitably, and soon.”
“Soon,” of course, is a relative term. Lincoln’s understanding of constitutional and legal restraints, as well as his confidence in the ameliorative effects of widening economic opportunity, made him a gradualist. Even after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day 1863, Lincoln continued to believe, as he wrote to John M. Schofield, that “gradual can be made better than immediate for both black and white.” Yet always he looked forward to a fuller democratic future—witness his inclusion of public education in his preferred plans for emancipation. And Guelzo notes: “Education, whether anyone noticed it or not, was an imperative for citizens.” As to black citizenship, Lincoln had indicated in the First Inaugural that free blacks were citizens when he called for enforcement of the privileges and immunities clause—a striking reproof to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), spoken right after the author of that decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney, had administered the presidential oath. The right to vote, to be secured through new post-slavery state constitutions, was another element of Lincoln’s plan for Reconstruction; it was, moreover, a requirement of democracy that he had clearly stated as early as his Peoria Address. In a move that was utterly unprecedented, Lincoln held discussions with “a stream of black visitors to the White House.” Jonathan White in his A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House (2022) estimates the number of black visitors to have been in the hundreds, including black leaders like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, as well as black dignitaries from abroad. Despite the strong case that Guelzo makes, his verdict is ambivalent: although not a racist himself, Lincoln “can be judged too passive and acquiescent in the racism all around him.” For a more forceful take on Lincoln as hostile to racism, see Michael Burlingame’s The Black Man’s President: Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Equality (2021).
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In his final chapter, Guelzo confronts a final misconception—not about Lincoln but about democracy itself. Lincoln saw this misconception in Stephen Douglas’s version of popular sovereignty; Guelzo espies it in Rawlsian liberalism. Both Douglas and John Rawls have a purely procedural view of democracy. Lincoln, however, as Guelzo notes, was an absolutist of sorts; he believed there was a “bedrock of principle beyond the mechanics of democratic process.” Channeling Harry V. Jaffa, I might restate this a little differently, linking principle and mechanics more tightly together. The mechanisms of democracy (government by consent, which entails the right of constitutional majorities to win elections and pass legislation) are required by the foundational principle of equality. In turn, this means that consent should not be used in ways that deny or violate the natural equality of all human beings. Consent that veers off the bedrock steps onto quicksand and soon enough into the chasm of majority tyranny. Guelzo is right to criticize unmoored consent; however, he goes too far in this final chapter when he claims that “Lincoln had no quarrel with majority rule in every instance where simple process was relevant, but slavery was not a legitimate subject for process. It was a violation of natural law and natural right, and no majority vote, or any vote, could blur that violation.” I fear that Guelzo’s formulation here does not get Lincoln exactly right. Yes, slavery was a violation of the truths of the Declaration of Independence. Nonetheless, Lincoln recognized the binding character of the U.S. Constitution which included a “fugitive slave” clause and a “manifestly unfair” three-fifths clause (see Lincoln’s discussion at Peoria). Furthermore, the Constitution lacked any authorization to interfere with slavery in the slave states. Lincoln did not think that the Constitution enshrined a right to property in man, but it did, out of necessity, make certain accommodations to the legal existence of an unjust institution. Subsequently, slavery remained “a legitimate subject for process.” The conclusions reached by those processes, even when Lincoln disagreed with them, were regarded by him as sacredly obligatory—that is, in fact, the most painful requirement of “our ancient faith.”
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Lincoln’s understanding of the connection between equality and consent is identical to that sketched by Thomas Jefferson in his First Inaugural: “Though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” Jefferson’s statement captures the permanent dilemma of self-government. We have no way of proceeding other than by majority will, and yet majorities are frequently unreasonable. Because of the equality principle itself, there is no recourse to any other principle of rule (rule by the wise, or by God’s agents on earth, or some other special few). Thus, the will of the majority must prevail even when it is not rightful, until such time as the majority comes to its senses and the law is changed, or until the majority tyranny is adjudged so vicious as to warrant revolution by some portion of the people willing to risk it.
Lincoln’s reverential acquiescence in unjust majority decisions regarding slavery was the point on which he disagreed with William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists. Frederick Douglass argued that, because unjust law is no law at all, the friends of the slaves would be fully justified in killing those (whether hired slavecatchers or federal marshals) who attempted to return runaways to their masters. Douglass thought he could selectively nullify this specific “law” without declaring revolution against the government altogether. Lincoln, despite his excruciating suffering in witnessing fugitives “hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils,” as he wrote in a private letter to his slaveholding friend Joshua Speed, nevertheless told his friend, “I bite my lip and keep quiet,” because of “your rights and my obligations, under the Constitution.” Moreover, he actively worked to keep opposition to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law off the Republican platform, instead placing sole emphasis on Congress’s power to ban slavery in the territories and its moral obligation to wield that constitutional authority.
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I don’t want to seem captious, but I think it crucial to be very clear about the line that Lincoln mapped, and then to try to hew to it ourselves. The natural law (in this case, the principle of human equality) both authorizes self-government and, properly understood, sets boundaries to its exercise. Whereas Stephen Douglas said that majorities (at least white majorities) can do whatever the heck they like, Frederick Douglass came pretty close to saying that Henry David Thoreau’s “majority of one” can do whatever his conscience tells him is right and wise. Lincoln regards both positions—both despotic majoritarianism and anarchic moralism—as destructive of civil government. In avoiding the frying pan of nominalism, one does not want to jump into the fire of antinomianism; the suggestion (which I understood Guelzo to be making in that one sentence) that a majority vote approving of a violation of natural rights is illegitimate (and presumably non-binding) carries risks. Try it out with our most contentious current matter of public policy: abortion. Both sides are certain that there is a natural right at stake. I happen to regard it as wrong to argue that the fetus is reducible to the status of property and that, therefore, the maternal property-holders may do as they like with entities that have no rights which the full-grown version of such entities must respect. Nonetheless, I’m not prepared to follow Douglass’s “eternal law of justice” and its counsel to “kill the kidnappers”—although I might move out of Maryland if it becomes once again a “slave state” by acknowledging a “right to abort” in its constitution. (Douglass’s language is strangely and uncomfortably apropos. He insists that the killing of slavecatchers is “as innocent, in the sight of God, as would be the slaughter of a ravenous wolf in the act of throttling an infant.” What then of the abortionists who do throttle the littlest of us, by the millions?)
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In his epilogue, Guelzo treats the reader to that favorite thought experiment: “What If Lincoln Had Lived?” Guelzo’s handling of the question is the best I’ve seen. He sketches a Lincoln-led Reconstruction that would have included such items as the expansion of voting rights, a focus on economic independence and integration, provision for education and routes to land ownership, and a new breed of Southern leaders. He admits, as one must, that Lincoln would have encountered grave difficulty implementing such plans, not least because they would have likely required a prolonged federal military presence in the Southern states. For all his patient prudence, Lincoln might well have failed. At the same time, it is hard to imagine anything worse than what did happen.
Reflecting the author’s extensive acquaintance with the existing Lincoln scholarship, Our Ancient Faith contains an extraordinarily useful set of endnotes—54 pages containing references to what seems to be nearly every volume on Lincoln written over the last century and a half. But more than the scholarship, Allen Guelzo’s attention is on Lincoln’s words and their meaning for us today. He closes not with what might have been, but with what might still be if we proceed in the spirit of a revived Lincolnian democracy. Detailing some of the threats unique to our era (new forms of mastery, one might say), Guelzo shows how the main elements of Lincoln’s vision—consent, equality, virtuous citizenship—are still worthy of our pursuit. The final riff on his prooftext reads: “And there would be neither slaves, nor masters.”
