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“To draw a bright line from the founders to the Civil War has become one of the most difficult interpretative tasks confronting American historians, if only because we confront, on the one hand, truculent bands of neo-Confederates who struggle to disguise the fatal corruption of the Confederate rebellion in modern libertarian garb, and, on the other, the brigades of neo-Progressives who have been only too happy to sunder the founders from emancipation in order to subvert any notion that an 18th-century Constitution still has viability after being crisped up in the flames of the Civil War. What both neo- camps ignore is how hugely the accomplishment of the founders—whether in the secular language of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton or the sacred language of the Awakeners—represented a decisive break with all previous notions of human political organization. The achievement of Lincoln was to carry that break relentlessly forward against its oldest foe. The achievement of our times—if there will be one to write about—will depend largely on how we resist the newer, more subtle, forms of dehumanization which now, like the tireless tide, creep all around us again.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, The Logic of Liberty (2014)

“[W]hat Reconstruction succeeded in doing: it helped us avoid a renewed outbreak of civil war (which, considering the history of civil conflicts, is no small achievement); it laid the legal and constitutional foundations for a more egalitarian America, foundations that it took only sixty-five years to revitalize into the Civil Rights Movement; it restored the original balance of constitutional federalism, putting aside the states’ rights absolutism of the pre-war Southern aristocracy. But I do not say this to encourage any historical Pollyannaism about Reconstruction. That restored federal balance permitted the emergence of the first women’s voting rights legislation, the curtailing of municipal corruption, and the introduction of widespread public schooling; it also permitted the emergence of Jim Crow. But as Lincoln said, “this is a world of compensation.””

Allen C. Guelzo

The historical good and the evil, even in Reconstruction, do not come unmixed.
2010s, Interview with Sara Gabbard (2018)

“[I]n a liberal democracy, sovereignty lies in the people at large; and our governing structures exist to implement that will.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Interview with Sara Gabbard (2018)

“Anyone who sits down for a moment to think about what the alternative would have looked like—a successful breakaway Confederacy—and how that would have flowed downstream has to be with impressed with what Lincoln was able to save us from. There is in the end no intrinsic reason why the Southern Confederacy should not have achieved its independence. And if they had, that would have had serious implications for the later role the North American continent plays in world affairs. Imagine a North American continent as divided politically and economically as South America. This would take the United States off the table as a major world player, and then what would you do with the history of the 20th century?”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

“Americans prided themselves on being a nation of peace, dedicated to the arts of commerce rather than the rapacity of empire and "the spirit of war."”

Allen C. Guelzo

Source: 2010s, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (2013), p. 9

“To Lincoln, slavery undercut the free labor outlook on the world because it denied advancement and self-improvement. For Lincoln, the great attraction of any economic regime was the degree to which it permitted accumulation and self-promotion. He once described the ideal system as being one where the penniless beginner starts out working for somebody else, accumulates capital on his own by dint of savings, goes into business for himself, and then eventually becomes so successful that he hires others, who in turn continue the cycle. And he spoke of that as being the order of things in a society of equals. For him, the very notion of equality is a matter of equality of openness, aspiration, and opportunity.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

“[Abraham Lincoln believed that] [t]he only reason people do not succeed in a capitalist environment is because they are improvident, they are lazy, they are good for nothing, or they experience some incredible turn of bad luck—that’s why "better luck next time." That may seem like vanishingly small consolation to people who’ve just come through a depression, but for Lincoln, that kind of hardship paled beside slavery. Slavery says that there is a category of people that can never be allowed to rise, that cannot improve themselves no matter how hard they try because they will always be slaves. It’s very much the classic disjuncture between the Enlightenment and feudalism. Feudalism talks about people being born with status, and everyone comes into this world equipped with a status. This status is either free or slave, serf or nobility, elect or damned, whatever. For the Enlightenment people come into this world armed with rights, and the ideal political system is the system that allows them to realize those rights, to use those rights in the freest and most natural fashion possible.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

“[M]any quite frankly fought to protect slavery, which laid on the survivors of the rebel armies an incubus to which few were willing to admit in alter years. More than just one out of three Confederates whose campfires dotted South Mountain in the June dusk owned slaves… [T]hey brought slaves with them on campaign to tend to the menial jobs… The slave system had invested them with an instinctive impulse for domestic dictatorship; they could brawl, stab, and shoot, in and out of race tracks and saloons, and still assume that they were God's natural aristocrats.”

Allen C. Guelzo

Source: 2010s, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (2013), p. 15

“[E]mancipation cannot be so easily detached from union (which is another way of saying that racial justice and liberal democracy rise or fall with each other).”

Allen C. Guelzo

Source: 2010s, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (2013), p. xviii

“The anti-free-speech fanatics on campuses and throughout the country have raised their hand against the idea that guarantees us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Allen C. Guelzo

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

“What the Democratic Party has most liked to say about itself—that it is the party of the working man, the voice of the oppressed, the tribune of the people—loses some of its strut in the light of a rather long list of inconvenient facts, chiefly having to do with slavery and race. Such facts as these: that the Democrats were the party that championed chattel bondage, backed an expansionist war to expand slavery's realm, and corrupted the Supreme Court in order to open the western territories to the cancer. The party's Southern wing then led the nation into civil war in defense of slavery while its Northern wing did its best to stymie the administration of Abraham Lincoln, widely regarded by the Democrats as an accidental, even illegitimate, president. Thereafter, the party embraced Jim Crow as slavery's next-best substitute, elected a president who imposed segregation on the federal workforce, and remained the chief opponent of racial equality…”

Allen C. Guelzo

2000s, Good Democrats and Bad Democrats (2006)

“The attempt by eleven southern—and slaveholding—states to secede from the Union in the winter and spring of 1860-61 presented the United States with the greatest internal political challenge it had ever faced. Because the Constitution had created a federal Union, secession (which broke the ties of Union) was a dagger at the heart of the American polity. The fact that this secession was motivated by Southerners' determination to protect their investment in human slavery added a cruel twist of the blade. Not only did secession fracture the Union, it did so on behalf of a practice which obliterated the fundamental natural right to liberty, which the federal Constitution was supposed to protect.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2000s, States' Rights and Wrongs (2008)

“[O]n the whole, given that the environment of the U. S. in the middle of the 19th century is so white supremacist in its assumptions, Lincoln is actually quite remarkable for standing apart from that.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

“[T]he very people who write so disparagingly about it either do not understand it, or I suspect even more, understand it all too well and do not like the implications of it.”

Allen C. Guelzo

&quot;Lincoln&#x27;s Emancipation Proclamation&quot; https://www.c-span.org/video/?186036-1/lincolns-emancipation-proclamation (23 March 2005), C-SPAN <br class="br">2000s

“Culture made the use of the F-bomb on television unthinkable in 1965; 40 years later, HBO would be lost without it.”

Allen C. Guelzo

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

“Abraham Lincoln was a repo man.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Lecture (2017)

“[N]o democracy worth its name could continue to drag the burden of slavery around after it.”

Allen C. Guelzo

p. xviii https://books.google.com/books?id=i5u1P0Fq4GYC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=0307594084&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwj17N6CovLcAhUPUt8KHTa1CrgQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false <br class="br">2010s, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (2013)

“But secession struck to an even deeper level, to the very roots of popular government. The seceding states made their bolt for the door not in response to invasion or military occupation or internal taxation, but because their favored candidates did not win a presidential election. The genius of popular government was wound around the twin propositions that majorities have the privilege of winning, and that minorities have the obligation to be cooperative losers. Secession was a declaration of non-cooperation with a national vote, and since the United States in 1860 was virtually the only large-scale example of a successful popular democracy, the threat that the American republic would fracture over a lost election seemed to call into question the entire workability of popular government.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2000s, States' Rights and Wrongs (2008)

“I remember a rusher; not on a sports team. A rusher who carried an American flag, the regimental flag of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers. It is an attack on the Confederate fort known as Battery Wagner outside of Charleston, south Carolina, in July of 1863. 54th Massachusetts was an all black regiment, one of the first to be recruited after the Emancipation Proclamation. The attack was almost a suicide mission. the regiment swept up to the walls of the fort. penetrated briefly, only to be driven out with heavy losses. the rusher I am thinking of was the color sergeant of the regiment. his name was William H. Carney. He had been born a slave. He was now a free man and a soldier. He brought the stars and stripes off the ramparts of Fort Wagner, despite being wounded in the chest and leg, staggering back under fire to a field hospital, and there, just before he collapsed, he surrendered the flag into the hands of several others there saying, "The old flag never touched the ground, boys!" Before the first of January 1863 when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation into law, he didn't have a flag, he doesn't have a country. He was a slave; he was an unperson. But in July of 1863, he was a free man. As a free man, there was no symbol to him of greater value than that flag. So you understand that it is difficult for me to understand why people would insult it.”

Allen C. Guelzo

&quot;Free Speech and the First Amendment&quot; https://www.c-span.org/video/?437511-1/free-speech-amendment&amp;start=150 (20 November 2017), C-SPAN <br class="br">2010s

“[B]y what inattention these scurrilously racist Republicans installed the first African-American secretary of state and national security advisor, appointed a black Supreme Court justice, elected the first black U. S. senator since Reconstruction, and sent the troops into Little Rock.”

Allen C. Guelzo

2010s, Letter (2010)