Excerpting, editing by Carolyn Bennett
Director of the Civil War Era Studies Program and Professor of the Civil War Era Allen Guelzo
spoke last month with Tom Mackaman of the World Socialist Web Site. This is some of what Dr. Guelzo had to say about the character and thoughts of America’s sixteenth president.
Slavery the retrograde institution poisoning the republic ─
keeping the American republic from realizing its full potential
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verybody in the race of life ought to get a fair start and a
fair chance ─ this was the star by which Lincoln navigated and the best example
was his own life.
Enlightenment
“Lincoln saw in the Southern elite a defection from
Enlightenment bourgeois politics toward aristocratic rule.” The complexion and
structure of the plantation aristocracy of the Old South ─ similar to Prussian
Junkers (19th and 20th centuries’ pejorative designation for a member of the
landed nobility in Prussia and eastern Germany) who were not great aristocrats
but squirearchy ─ Lincoln saw himself arrayed against that.
“Lincoln sees American democracy as a last stand, what he
calls the last, best hope. And if this goes down, we may so discredit the whole
notion of democracy that no one will ever want to go this way again, and so
this is the test.
It’s a test of whether or not we’ll
have this new birth of freedom, if we’ll finally shuck off these last husks of
aristocracy and move forward in the direction of democracy.
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That for him is the vital issue.
The Civil War was “a test [of] whether this nation or any
other nation so conceived can long endure. Is democracy self-destructive? Are
the aristocrats right: That the only way you’ll ever have order in society is
to let them run things; That you cannot put rule into the hands of ordinary
people because they’ll botch it from selfishness, egotism, and stupidity?”
Union-Slavery debate
“People today often want to separate slavery and say that
Lincoln was interested in preserving the union and not in destroying slavery.
“That gets it exactly wrong. The two are as knotted together
as a rope because the only union worth preserving is a union that has abjured
slavery.
“So for Lincoln to get rid of slavery is to purge America of
the aristocratic poison. He once said that slavery was the one retrograde
institution that was poisoning the American republic, keeping the American
republic from realizing its full potential.…”
Incompatible with Enlightenment
“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.
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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
[t]he 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.
From Declaration of Independence
Lincoln was not exaggerating “when he talks at Gettysburg
about the country being founded on a proposition, that’s what he means ─ that
he did not have a political thought that did not flow from the Declaration of
Independence ─ and specifically that all men are created equal.”
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y equal, Lincoln means “equality of aspiration. He spoke
those words about never having had a political thought which did not flow from
the Declaration in February of 1861, outside Independence Hall. He believed
that what the Founders meant, what the Declaration of Independence meant, was
that everybody in the race of life ought to get a fair start and a fair chance.
That was the star by which he navigated, and the best example he could offer to
anybody was his own life.
“[Lincoln] had come up from grinding backwoods poverty and
by dint of his own effort, intelligence, and gifts, had risen to more than a
modicum of success ─ not only success in financial terms, but success socially.
In every respect he was his own confirmation of his theories.…”
Democratic leadership
Lincoln combines “virtues of democratic leadership.” As
opposed to aristocratic leadership, which honors valor, physical prowess, and
dominance, “democratic leadership is more about perseverance, self-limitation,
and humility. What we see in Lincoln is a collection of the virtues we think
are most important in a democratic leadership.
“[Lincoln] presided successfully over this incredibly
critical moment we call the Civil War. He kept the union together. He defeated
the Confederacy.
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?
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…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.
“…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.”
Sources and notes
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| Professor Allen Guelzo |
“Understanding Lincoln: An interview with historian Allen
Guelzo,” World Socialist Web Site,
April 3, 2013 (Copyright © 1998-2013 World Socialist Web
Site - All rights reserved), http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/03/guel-a03.html
Allen Guelzo spoke with Tom Mackaman of the World Socialist
Web Site in his office at Gettysburg College on a Saturday morning in March.
“A large academic conference was being held that weekend at
the college entitled “The Future of Civil War History.” Gettysburg, in
southeastern Pennsylvania, was the location of the bloodiest battle in the
Civil War, and the city’s college is now one of the leading centers in the
study of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln.
During the period addressed in this
interview, the late antebellum and the Civil War, American capitalism and its
political representatives, led by Lincoln, played a revolutionary role,
confronting the reactionary leadership of the American South and its system of
slave labor.
Within a decade of the end of the
Civil War the class struggle between the
triumphant capitalist order and the working class had supplanted the earlier
struggle between ‘free labor’ and slavery as the decisive issue in American
history.
Professor Allen Guelzo
Allen Carl Guelzo is Director of the Civil War Era Studies
Program and Henry R. Luce III Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg
College
Born 1953 in Yokohama, Japan, Dr. Guelzo took his academic
credentials, M.A. and Ph.D. in history at the University of Pennsylvania
Most recent publications (Allen C. Guelzo)
Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and
Reconstruction (2012)
Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas (with Michael Lind, 2009)
Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions,
2009)
Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (2008)
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in
America (2004)
Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Library of Religious
Biography) (2003)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_C._Guelzo
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