Allen C. Guelzo: Trending quotes

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“Lincoln was not eloquent in the usual 19th century way, certainly not in the romantic way. He was not a man of frothing at the mouth or shaking his fist in a dramatic way. Lincoln was logic, and when he got the hook in your mouth he would pull you in no matter how much line was involved. One observer of the Lincoln-Douglas debates said that if you listened to Lincoln and Douglas for five minutes, you would go with Douglas. If you listened to them for an hour you always went with Lincoln.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

“Emancipation, not colonization, was the real goal to which the logic of the American Founding was driving the nation.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, The Logic of Liberty (2014)

“Lincoln is, both culturally and in terms of his economic thinking, firmly and immovably located in the center of what we can call liberal democratic thought in the 19th century. He is very much market oriented, with tremendous confidence in the power of a capitalist society to transform for the better, and he believes in opening the possibilities of that society to as many as possible. To him, that’s what’s coterminous with liberty.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

“Slaves who ran away in Pennsylvania to join Sir William Howe's occupation of Philadelphia or who ran away in Virginia to join Lord Dumore's "Ethiopian Regiment" found themselves dumped by their erstwhile allies in Nova Scotia or sold back into slavery in the Bahamas.”

Allen C. Guelzo

Source: 2010s, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (2012), Chapter One

“[T]he defeat of the Confederacy did not necessarily mean the end of oligarchy. Despite the destructiveness of the war, Southern land tenures remained largely undisturbed, and in the Reconstruction years, the sadder-but-wiser oligarchs learned how, once again, to play on the racial hatreds they had spent decades so sedulously cultivating among the white yeomanry.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Bullwhip Feudalism (2018)

“Reconstruction should be considered as a "bourgeois revolution."”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Interview with Sara Gabbard (2018)

“Southerners carried out an asymmetrical kind of political warfare that the rest of the country eventually ran out of patience in confronting. We had the West to win, the Pacific Rim to open, a new economy to create, a catastrophic financial panic to overcome, and in the end, dealing with the political insurgencies of disaffected ex-Confederates simply couldn’t compete.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Interview with Sara Gabbard (2018)

“[A]sk the slaves themselves how they were freed, and they will say, “Lincoln’s proclamation.” The testimony of freed people before the joint committee on reconstruction—about how they became free is uniform. They were well aware that the Fugitive Slave Laws and Constitutional provisions for the rendition of slaves were still in force. The position of runaways remained perilous. The Emancipation Proclamation resolved that.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

“What we see in Lincoln is a collection of the virtues we think are most important in a democratic leadership.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

“[O]ligarchy, strictly speaking, is a regime "in which a rich minority rules for the advantage of the rich minority and in which the people composing that political society are ranked… because the ruling principle of that regime is the principle of natural inequality." Aristotle called it a deviant form of aristocracy (in the same way that tyranny is a deviant form of monarchy), and in practical terms, it exhibits its form through excessive concentrations of property in the hands of a few, the reservation of education to the elite, and the organization of government to serve the purposes of the oligarchs.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Bullwhip Feudalism (2018)

“It was not Abraham Lincoln who invented the nanny-state; it was that son of the Confederacy, Woodrow Wilson. That American conservatives, even more than American leftists, should today manage to find themselves enamored of the secessionist republic may be the crowning irony of them all.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2000s, States' Rights and Wrongs (2008)

“Reconstruction aspired to restore the foundations of freedom to a wayward South and it expected to triumph as effortlessly as 19th-century liberal notions of progress had promised. Instead, the same Romantic feudalism that had created the old Southern order reasserted its hegemony, and postwar Southern aristocrats appealed to a set of cultural and racial biases which safely defused the importance of property, and sharply restricted access to it. This might have been averted had the victorious Union been willing to pour the resources into Reconstruction it had devoted to winning the war. But Reconstruction became a symbol of how quickly political fatigue afflicts liberal democracies. Moreover, understanding Reconstruction as a bourgeois revolution which was strangled in its cradle by vengeful cotton nabobs offers some larger parallels to the optimistic era that prevailed between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Islamic state terrorism.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Defending Reconstruction (2017)

“[O]ne reason there is no socialism in America is because of Lincoln. In the American context Lincoln imparted to liberal democracy a sense of nobility and purpose that it has not always had in other contexts. He makes democracy something transcendent, and especially at Gettysburg where he talks about the nation having this new birth of freedom. He ratchets the horizons of liberal democracy right up past the spires of Cologne Cathedral and he makes it this glowing attractive ideal that people are willing to make these tremendous sacrifices to protect. Because at the end of the day this is what the Civil War is about—it’s about the preservation of liberal democracy. In the 1860s the United States was the last Enlightenment experiment that was still standing. What you had in the climate of mid-19th century Europe was the renaissance of romantic aristocracy.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

“[V]ery little has changed in the fundamental ideology of the Democratic Party since Jackson's day.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2000s, Good Democrats and Bad Democrats (2006)

“Reverence for free speech is deeply embedded in American life, but speech cannot be protected unless those who acknowledge its value set aside their partisan differences for a moment and trust one another enough to say that the outrages against free speech must end.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Free Speech and Its Present Crisis (2018)

“[T]he real issue of the Civil War was a terrible ideological derangement that had lifted an entire portion of the American Republic away from the ideological moorings of the founders…”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Bullwhip Feudalism (2018)

“[S]lavery was neither a backward nor a dying system in the 1850s. It was aggressive, dynamic, and mobile, and by pandering to the racial prejudices of a white republic starved for labor, it was perfectly capable of expansion.”

Allen C. Guelzo

Source: 2010s, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (2012), Chapter One

“Just think: there are no Reconstruction reenactors, no reconstructed Reconstruction villages on the order of Colonial Williamsburg or Old Sturbridge, no Reconstruction observances and ceremonies.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Interview with Sara Gabbard (2018)

“The cotton nabobs had made the South a no-go area for the Constitution…”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Bullwhip Feudalism (2018)

“Lincoln's purpose in promoting Whig capitalism was not self-interest per se, but capitalism's necessary connection to equality, self-transformation, and social mobility, which were Lincoln's real goals. The essence of a free society, Lincoln said in 1859 (and here he was pirating J. S. Mill's Principles of Political Economy), was the openness it afforded to each of its citizens to make of themselves whatever they could, without the handicap of artificial inequalities based on status, nationality, or race. One could not do this in an economic environment governed by status, racial stratification, or centralized planning. Lincoln loved the Declaration's affirmation of all men's natural equality; but that equality would be meaningless without the unfettered opportunity to use it for something. If a national bank, tariffs, and "international improvements" promoted these opportunities, then they really were serving the interests of the natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Letter (2010)