Allen Guelzo might very well have had the current state of affairs in his country in mind when he set out to offer this rumination on Abraham Lincoln. It would be hard, if not impossible, to imagine otherwise.
Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment, by Allen C. Guelzo (247 pages, Knopf, 2024)
A rumination rather than a biography, Allen Guelzo has drawn on his wealth of knowledge to give us his summary thoughts about the most significant figure at the beginning and end of the most significant crisis in American history. That he has chosen this particular moment to offer this rumination may simply be an historical accident. After all, it’s quite possible that he might have said something like this to himself as he contemplated contemplating Abraham Lincoln in yet another book: “Well, it’s about time for something like this.” Or this particular rumination might not have been an accident at all. Guelzo might very well have had the current state of affairs in his country in mind when he set out to offer this summation/rumination. It would be hard, if not impossible, to imagine otherwise.
Guelzo also draws upon the thoughts and words of the famous and not so famous who have contemplated either Lincoln, or democracy in general, or American democracy and the American experiment in particular. How else to account for better than fifty pages of notes to buttress a text of barely 170 pages?
While the famous are given ample space in these pages, one of the not-so-famous deserves particular attention for capturing a key element of both Lincoln’s thinking and his persona, as well as his vocabulary, in a few sentences. A cub reporter for an Indianapolis newspaper, one William Smith had occasion to meet Lincoln in 1859. After a long and successful career in business, Smith penned a memoir which included these few words on the lawyer/politician from a neighboring state: “I noticed that he never used the word obedience to the law, but always reverence, seeming to regard that term higher and more comprehensive than the other….”
Not quite finished, Smith recalled that he remembered “very distinctly” that Lincoln “spoke of this reverence for the law as the ‘palladium of our liberties, our shield, our buckler and high tower.’”
At that point Guelzo takes over, and in doing so he reveals key elements of his own thinking, if a bit clumsily at the outset: “For all that we today laud Lincoln for his other virtues, it is this fundamental hesitation to quash law and democratic liberties which is the most important gift that we inherit from him.” Then Guelzo adds a version of a Lincoln line that he repeats more than a few times in the book: “As he was not a slave, so he was not a master.”
In fact, Guelzo returns to a slightly different version of that same line at the very end of the final chapter. Titled, “What If Lincoln Had Lived?, most of this summation of his summation deals with how Lincoln might have dealt with the issues of postwar Reconstruction. Most, but not all. Right near the end, Guelzo pivots to “what may be a more pressing question,” namely whether Lincoln would be as politically “successful” today as had been in his time.
There is good reason to wonder. So Guelzo, quite reasonably, begins his own wonderings. With no particular past or future president in mind, save perhaps for one, Guelzo notes that Lincoln was neither a “charismatic leader” nor a populist “in the Jacksonian template.”
Hmmm…. That narrows things down even more, especially since at this historical moment we have only one past and future president who has also claimed to be a 21st century Andrew Jackson. Lincoln, however, had little time for Andrew Jackson. In fact, Guelzo reminds us that Lincoln’s “beau ideal” of a political leader was Jackson’s great rival, Henry Clay.
There are grounds for suspecting that a young Abe Lincoln might have been tempted to become a Jacksonian Democrat–except that he apparently wasn’t. Promoted as the party of the common man, the Democratic party was increasingly seen as the party of slavery and slave expansion, and even as a very young man Abe Lincoln knew that if slavery wasn’t wrong, well, then “nothing was wrong.”
The Whig party, which came into being to oppose “King Andrew,” was divided on the slave issue, but northern Whigs were solidly anti-slave. In addition, Whigs supported Henry Clay’s American System of internal improvements and high tariffs, and young Mr. Lincoln was very much in favor of commerce-inducing railroads, canals and toll roads. So a Whig he became and a Whig he remained until the Republican party came into being in the middle of the 1850s.
Besides all of that, Guelzo tells us that Lincoln had his issues with populism. But then one suspects that Guelzo has his issues with populism as well. Or at least with politicians as popuLISTS, especially those who “assume that they already know the mind of a dissatisfied people and are authorized to speak for those people without the trouble of discussion, debate or deliberation….”
That certainly wasn’t Lincoln. Then again, that’s surely a loaded definition of a populist. In any case, there are always going to be various shadings of difference, let alone differing descriptive terms, when it comes to capturing the relationship between a politician and “the people,” especially when it comes to deciding who is leading whom. Lincoln no doubt thought he knew the mind of a potentially very dissatisfied group of people when he took the lead in speaking out against the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the possibility that large tracts of the American midwest would be given over to slave plantations. Or was he being a populist demagogue by even raising such a possibility? The author of that piece of legislation, Senator Stephen Douglas, certainly thought so.
Guelzo is surely correct to contend that the Kansas-Nebraska Act revived Lincoln’s political career. Lincoln saw a wrong and acted to right it. He also saw a political opportunity and moved quickly to take full advantage of it.
To be sure, there is nothing wrong with that, especially given the consistency of Lincoln’s opposition to slavery and to its expansion. “Fee soil” was his call and that of his new Republican party. A politician and not an abolitionist, he sought to put slavery on the practical road to “ultimate extinction” by containing it, rather than issue fine-sounding, but impossible-to-achieve, demands for its immediate elimination.
All of that is well and good, and thoroughly defensible. And Guelzo is measured and eloquent in that defense. Just as Lincoln was measured and eloquent—in both his actions and his words—on his way to the presidency and once he was in office.
Guelzo has no time for the “Lincoln-haters,” whether they be of the left or right variety. He properly and effectively absolves Lincoln of racist charges coming from the left and of any charge from the right that his presidency offered a preview of modern big government progressivism in action.
Once in that office, Lincoln was immediately consumed with seeking to achieve what turned out to be the two major goals of his presidency: preserving the Union and ending slavery. If the former required a war, there would be a war; and if that war spelled an immediate end to slavery, so be it.
Everything else was by far secondary, but also far from unimportant, including legislation to advance the opportunities of the common man, whether via the Homestead Act or the Morrill Act to support land-grant universities. Ultimately, “Lincolnian democracy” was—and is—democracy for citizens who exhibit the very traits that Lincoln himself manifested.
Almost as an afterthought, Guelzo adds “one more thing” on the very last page. And here it is: “A Lincolnian democracy is a democracy which embodies Lincoln’s own virtues—resilience, humility, persistence, work, and dignity.” Curiously, something seems to be missing from this list. That something is ambition. After all, according to William Herndon, his law partner’s sense of ambition was akin to an “engine that knew no rest.” Or is it really missing? Anyone with Lincoln’s virtues will already have a sense of ambition or soon acquire it.
Lincoln’s ambitions for his fellow countrymen may have been much more modest, but they were no less important. Once again, Guelzo resorts to that same term, namely “Lincolnian democracy.” We might quibble over the use of “democracy” rather than “republic.” Perhaps Guelzo is out to reclaim the word “democracy” from those who claim that they are out to “save our democracy” today. Or perhaps he simply seeks to emphasize the importance of the direct participation of citizens in the political life of a free country.
Early on, Guelzo tells us that the word “democracy” is mentioned a bare 137 times in the entirety of the collected works of Lincoln. But numbers aren’t everything, especially since one of those mentions from Lincoln is this: Nothing is as “clearly true as the truth of democracy.”
Lincoln’s own “confidence” in democracy was based on three pieces of “evidence”: (1) his own self-transformation; (2) his belief in natural law and, therefore, in natural rights; and (3) his understanding that democracy had the “sanction of both the American past and the American future.”
Those are Guelzo’s words, not Lincoln’s. The heart of his book dwells on Lincoln’s present. Only in the final chapter does Guelzo turn to Lincoln’s future, which is to say our present. He does so only briefly, somewhat obliquely, but nonetheless tellingly.
If we are to have what Guelzo calls a “Lincolnian future,” it will have to be based on the consent of the governed. But first something else will have to happen. To borrow once again from Guelzo, consent will have to be “recovered.”
In a few other Guelzo words, “If the people are genuinely the sovereigns of a democracy, then it is they who would bestow stability on it, rather than having it imposed by a self-designated oligarchy.”
Strong words indeed are those. They are good and true words as well. Guelzo continues: “The amassing of bureaucratic and hierarchical structure which has…” Well, which has what? Made the recovery of consent difficult? Or nigh unto impossible? Guelzo chooses not to speculate, preferring instead to simply add “… stiffened the joints of American politics” and is therefore “antithetical to a democracy….”
If stiffening joints is our only problem, maybe the right medication administered by the right leaders will make the necessary difference. Or maybe American citizens will have to undertake this recovery on their own. Or maybe there is no solution to a democracy’s old age. We don’t—and can’t—know.
What does seem apparent is that we are a more divided nation today–and in more ways–than we were in 1861. To be sure, none of those “more ways” can match the slave issue, but the extent and depth of our divisions are real. Here’s hoping that we can peacefully recover a genuine sense of consent. If not, here’s hoping we can discover another Lincoln to help serve as our “palladium and buckler” when we surely will need one, even if we no longer have any idea what either word means.
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