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Disenchanted with the current state of the nation, historian Allen C. Guelzo set out to inquire into Abraham Lincolns faith in democracy. Not only did President Lincoln lead the nation into and out of civil war, he also worried about polarization, immoral majorities, vengeful politics and voter fraud. Though Lincoln invoked the word democracy fewer than 150 times in his writings and speeches, and nowhere explicitly defined the term, Guelzo has plenty of source material worthy of reflection. The author of Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, among other histories, organizes his book around Lincolns views on intertwined themes: liberty, law, economics, race, slavery, emancipation.

A prolific Lincoln scholar, Guelzo gets his own politics out of the way at the start, describing the late 20th century as a time when the glue of American democracy was dissolving in a welter of gender and racial identity demands; as for the present moment, his twin enemies are progressives (in particular woke progressives) and authoritarian conservatives. Readers who disagree with Guelzos political leanings would nonetheless do well to continue reading Our Ancient Faith.

On the contested question of Lincoln and race, Guelzo captures the complexity quite nicely, contending that Lincolns long indifference to black civil equality weighs heavily against him, even as that indifference is not unmixed with a certain candor about the unfairness of inequality. Guelzo reminds us that opposition to racial slavery in the 19th century, including vehement moral opposition, was not synonymous with anti-racism, and early along he points to words Lincoln jotted down in 1858 that come closest to a definition of democracy: As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master, Lincoln wrote, helpfully adding, This expresses my idea of democracy.

Lincoln believed deeply in a harmony of interests between capital and labor. In this vision, any diligent worker could save his wages to climb the ladder of opportunity (here Guelzo acknowledges a degree of callousness in Lincolns attribution of economic failure to personal failure). Precisely because enslaved labor precluded aspiration and upward mobility, Lincoln despised the slave South. But Lincoln also believed deeply in natural rights for all human beings, and so he despised the slave South on moral grounds as well. Slavery, he said in 1854, was the great wrong of the world.

On the question of Lincolns wartime leadership, Guelzo takes the conventional view that the presidents aims evolved, from circumspect preservation of the union to the imperative for Black freedom. The Civil War, Guelzo writes, raised so many questions in Lincolns mind about the purpose and meaning of the war that he began to contemplate the possibility that God intended the outcome to be emancipation. Asserting a transformation in the presidents convictions about the wars purpose, Guelzo nevertheless rejects this same interpretation when considering Lincolns views of race, bemoaning that Lincolns defenders frequently resort to useless tropes like growth or evolution to argue that, over time, Lincoln changed for the better.

Race, slavery and emancipation are central to Guelzos story, and he writes movingly of Lincolns regard for the loyalty and sacrifice of Black soldiers during the war. Given that centrality, though, Guelzo misses the chance to consider the presence of African Americans in Lincolns world. When he describes Lincoln walking through the streets of the vanquished Confederate capital of Richmond on April 4, 1865, as if tempting some unbalanced Richmonder to ambush him, there is no mention of the well-known enormous crowds of elated Black men and women who might well have made it difficult for an angry Confederate to get near the president. More expansively, when Guelzo writes that all Americans had been invested in the evils of slavery (his emphasis), that phrasing unwittingly erases enslaved and free Black Americans from Civil War history.

In a book devoted to a careful assessment of Lincoln, it is surprising too that Guelzo omits the nuance of Frederick Douglasss words on this very subject. Guelzo quotes Douglasss 1865 oration proclaiming Lincoln emphatically the black mans president, yet omits the sentences context: Abraham Lincoln, while unsurpassed in his devotion to the welfare of the white race, was also in a sense hitherto without example, emphatically, the black mans President. Why elide that eloquent expression of Lincolns complexities?

Toward the end, Guelzo asks the perennial question, What if Lincoln had lived? He believes that Lincoln (unlike his disastrous successor, Andrew Johnson) would have rewarded Black men with the vote and speculates that, given Lincolns earnest faith in hard work, he may even have championed the radical act of redistributing land from former masters to formerly enslaved people. When Guelzo quotes Lincolns optimistic conviction, a few days before the assassination, that the reunited nation would soon celebrate the resurrection of human freedom, he wisely adds, We can only say perhaps.

Guelzos Lincolnian future would embrace an equality in which no privileged groups claim superior sanction for power; it would be a world that both protects American industry and productivity and empowers and organizes workers, a world that demolishes class alienation via a determination to relieve poverty. In Lincolns democracy, all people would live lives free from domination and exploitation.

In 1861, worrying about democracys fragility, Lincoln fretted over the possibility that the people may err in an election by elevating an anti-democratic leader. The true cure, he said, is in the next election. Lovers of democracy can only hope that Lincoln was right.

Martha Hodes is a professor of history at New York University and the author, most recently, of Mourning Lincoln and My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering.

Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment

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Our Ancient Faith by Allen C. Guelzo book review - The Washington Post