In this episode of We the People, Jeffrey Rosen has a special one-on-one conversation with the historian Allen Guelzo on his new book Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment. They discuss Lincoln’s powerful vision of democracy, revisit his approach to tackling slavery and preserving the Union, and explain how Lincoln remains relevant as a political thinker today.
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Today’s episode was produced by Lana Ulrich, Samson Mostashari, and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Samson Mostashari, Cooper Smith, and Yara Daraiseh.
Participants
Allen Guelzo is director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship and Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous books on the Civil War and early 19th century American history and is among America’s foremost scholars on Lincoln. His most recent book is Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment (2024).
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- Allen Guelzo, Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment (2024)
- "Lincoln’s Speeches and the Refounding of America," NCC America's Town Hall program (Nov. 2021)
- William H. Herndon, Herndon on Lincoln: Letters (2016)
- Abraham Lincoln, “Speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield," (1838)
Excerpt from Interview: Allen Guelzo discusses Lincoln's flaws and complexities. Despite missteps, Lincoln's struggle and growth offer lessons and insights for today's challenges, reminding us that even great leaders are human with imperfections.
Allen Guelzo: Jeffrey, I can't disguise the fact that yes, I admire Lincoln and, I would like to invite others to admire Lincoln. And yet I also understand that Lincoln himself is simply a man. He did not walk on the Potomac. He was not perfect. And he brings into this struggle for the preservation of democracy and the Civil War. Many of the prejudices of his own day, I would like to discount them and say, well, you have to look at the context of the 1860s. And yet I'm also aware that if I make an appeal to context, if I yield to that temptation, then what I've done is I've effectively erased an irrelevance of Lincoln to ourselves today. Because if he is only a product of his context, then he has nothing to say to us, and I don't think that's true. I think what we have to understand in looking at Lincoln is he makes mistakes.
He has misperceptions. Sometimes he's yielding to the misperceptions, especially on race of his own day. Sometimes he's yielding to necessity. He is a politician. He's begging for votes and he's begging for votes from people who sometimes entertain in embarrassing degrees, the most vile of prejudices on the subject of race. And he's also someone who is feeling his way through a crisis. We look back on the civil War, we look back on emancipation and we say, oh, well, yes, of course that was inevitable. It was gonna happen that way. He should have known better. Perhaps. On the other hand, the United States had never had a civil war before. The United States had never seriously considered as a nation the question of emancipation. Sometimes it was because the situation had never forced itself on us. Sometimes it was because we didn't wanna think about it until it did force itself on us.
There is no civil war for dummies that he could buy at the bookstore. There's no emancipation for dummies. There's no template. So a lot of the time, what you're seeing in Lincoln as half-heartedness, lack of interest, indifference, sometimes it's because he's not sure where he's at. He's not sure where the country's at. He's not sure where the way forward is, and there's no one to tell him. We have the benefit of hindsight. Now, of course, if we take that very same attitude and apply it to ourselves, I'm sure that 50 years from now someone will be looking back at us and saying, "Well, they should have known to do X, Y, and Z." And it will seem very easy and obvious 50 years from now, we don't experience it that way. We experience anxiety. Well, we experienced uncertainty. Now, Lincoln experienced uncertainty that what was race, what was going to be the future of those who had been enslaved, who were not going to be now going to be free?
What do you do with the population that a large majority of the rest of the population holds in contempt? How do you reconcile these things and how do you do it in the middle of fighting a war? All these get sometimes an answer from Lincoln that we scratch our heads about and say, "What was he thinking? It should have been obvious," except that it wasn't obvious. It was not obvious to people then obvious to some, but not to many.
So he struggles with this. And in our ancient faith, I have to say, frankly, he doesn't always struggle and come up with the right conclusion. He doesn't struggle his way through these questions with perfect adeptness. You mentioned colonization. He's willing to dabble with the idea of colonization, and what colonization meant, just to translate it was, alright, yes, we're going to emancipate the slaves, but we're then going to take all the slaves and we're gonna deport them. Where to? Well, maybe Central America, maybe somewhere in the Caribbean, maybe West Africa. There were a variety of competing theories. But you take one step back from that and you're gonna say to former slaves who have now been emancipated, many of whom, whose ancestors had been in the United States longer than most of the white people who were living in the United States. But you were gonna say, "No, we're gonna ship you somewhere else."
And Lincoln appears for a while at least to play along with this. And there's one particularly damaging moment in August of 1862 when he speaks to a delegation of black leaders in the White House where he urges them, "I want you to consider colonization." Why does he do that? Well, partly, as I say, it's because he's feeling his way through the thicket of these problems, feeling his way, because he doesn't know where the ultimate path or the ultimate answer lies. Okay? That's one thing.
Second thing is, why is he talking about colonization? What good would that do? Well, certainly it wouldn't do any good for the freed slaves. What it might do though, is to persuade reluctant white people to go along with emancipation. You see, if you're gonna get to emancipation, you've got to convince a lot of white people in Lincoln's day that that's not going to pose some kind of economic or political threat to them. How do you make the pill of emancipation go down easier?
You can make it go down a lot easier by telling white people in Lincoln's day, once we emancipate black people, you won't have to worry about it. There's a way out, there's a back door. At which point, reluctant white people say, "Oh, all right, we'll go along with emancipation then."
And there were a number of people, both black and white, who thought that they discerned exactly that strategy in Lincoln's talk about colonization. In the event, does he really carry out colonization? He sanctions one small scale experiment to an island off the coast of Haiti. It lasts for six months. He sends a boat, brings everybody back, and as his secretary, John Hayes said, slews off this humbug of colonization. Why was he doing it? I strongly suspect he was doing it to be seen talking about it, to damp down opposition to the bigger project, which is emancipation.
After that point. Lincoln never looks back to it. After that, that's when he starts talking about voting rights for the freed slaves. And at that point, he's on the high road at last, but he does take his time getting there. That is a fault in Lincoln. So I will not put a halo around his head. I think he's impressive. I think he's admirable in so many ways, but he has his faults, which is to say he's like you and me.
Excerpt from Interview: Allen Guelzo emphasizes Lincoln's view on democracy, highlighting its core principles: consent of the governed, sovereignty residing in the people, accountability through elections, respect for minorities by majorities, and the centrality of law to ensure reasoned governance and prevent anarchy.
Allen Guelzo: Lincoln is a figure that bulks very large in any thinking that we have about democracy, and especially in times that we live in now, times of anxiety, times of concern, fears of crisis. And at moments like this, we turn back to the figure of Abraham Lincoln, because there was a time of crisis in which he lived. And yet our democracy emerged victorious from that, in large measure because of his leadership and his wisdom. So we wonder, can we find answers to our present dilemmas in Lincoln? I think we can find at least some answers, and certainly a large measure of encouragement. And the curious thing is, Jeffrey, that Lincoln never really offers what you would call kind of a dictionary definition of democracy.
In fact, the closest he comes to giving us a definition of the term, is in a note that he writes out in 1858, doubtless in connection with the great campaign of 1858 against Stephen A. Douglas for the Illinois Senate seat. And he says in a very brief compass, As I would not be a slave. So I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy. And that, as I say, is not perhaps the best definition one could find, because it's all cast in the negative of what democracy is not. Nevertheless, I think we can still extract some important things from it. And you've actually mentioned several of them already.
One is this fundamental idea of consent. What you deal with in a democracy is the consent of the governed. You work on the basic assumption that political sovereignty, the power to do things and to get things done, resides in the people. The people make the decisions for themselves. The assumption is people are competent to do that. The people, he said, who inhabit the country are the people who should rule it. And with that in view, we understand that consent, being able to say yes, is one of the absolute vital aspects of a democracy. In a monarchy, for instance, or a dictatorship, nobody asks the people what they want.
Either the monarch or the dictator says, this is the way it's going to be, and you're gonna have to live with that. And the people have no choice but either to submit or, in some cases, to rebel. But for Americans, Lincoln understood that democracy, is about this thing called consent, the consent of the governed. And he called that in the great speech he gives in 1854 in Peoria, Illinois. He calls that the sheet anchor of American republicanism, this idea of consent. That's the same speech, by the way, where I extract the title, Our Ancient Faith. And it's in that very same speech he gives in Peoria in October of 1854.
So sovereignty and consent, yes, that's fundamental. To any notion of democracy. We assume in a democracy that ordinary people are capable of governing their own affairs, that people are not born with bits and bridles in their mouths and saddles on their backs, waiting to be ridden by someone who assumes that they have more wisdom or more authority on their own. So yeah, sovereignty, consent. And then along with that, elections. Elections are just absolutely vital to a democracy. Not because we enjoy all the hoo-ha that goes along with elections. And there was lots of hoo-ha in Lincoln's day too. But it's because elections are about accountability. People make the choice of their laws, but they also make the choice of the officials who are going to enact and execute those laws. Well, if they don't do a good job, then elections are a way of holding those particular officials accountable.
It's simply saying that officials, simply because they're elected, do not automatically become monarchs or dictators of their own. No, they're accountable to the people. And so you have to have elections. They have to be free. They have to be fair. They have to be frequent. Otherwise, he said, you can't really have free government because free government is about accountability. To those people who are the sovereigns. And then there's majorities. Majorities are another important part of this for Lincoln. Because in any democracy, you're never gonna get unanimity. You're never gonna get 100% of the people who decide, yeah, we all want pepperoni on our pizza Friday night. I've never seen that happen even in a dorm room.
So you're always gonna have a majority. You're always gonna have a minority. In a democracy, majorities have the privilege of ruling, of having their say and having their way. Now that doesn't mean that majorities then have the authority to take the minority, stand it up against a barn wall and execute it. Now, majorities have the privilege of ruling, but they also have the obligation to respect minorities because, and here's one of the great shockers of democracy. A majority might be wrong. A majority might make a mistake. It might be carried away into error. And the minority might, in the event, turn out to be correct after all. In fact, the minority might be so correct that they actually persuade enough people so that they can become the majority at another point further down the road. So majorities, yes, they rule, but they also respect minorities.
But you see minorities also have a responsibility. Minorities have the privilege of dissent. They have the right to dissent. Maybe I'm using the word privilege and right a little too interchangeably. Let's keep it to right, because that's even more fundamental. Minorities have the right to dissent, but they don't have the right to subvert. They don't have the right to frustrate stand in the way of divert the attention and the direction of the majority. So you understand that in a democracy, there are majorities and minorities, they have obligations, they also have rights. Finally, you mentioned law. For Lincoln law is absolutely indispensable to a democracy because law is what keeps reason central to how a government operates. In a monarchy, what matters most is not reason. You didn't get a king because someone decided it was better for that particular person, Charles the first, or James the first to be king.
That was not the product of a reasonable deliberation. No, it was an accident of birth of heredity. So monarchy, dictators, these are not things that happen by reason. They happen by accident. Sometimes they happen by power, sometimes they happen by force, not by reason. A democracy functions by reason. How do you express reason in a political environment? You express it through law. 'Cause Otherwise, without reason, without law, a democracy can become a mob. This is what, this is what James Madison was afraid of, writing in the Federalist Papers. He was afraid that if democracy became unhinged, then it would do terrible things because it would move from being reasonable and governed by reason to being governed by power or maybe by fear. And he makes a comment in the Federalist Papers that if, and he's talking about the Athenian democracy, the democracy of Athens in its golden age…
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