Abraham Lincoln's Vision of Democracy | Allen Guelzo

when you met Abraham Lincoln first off the impression you would take away was captured by by someone who in fact had just exactly that kind of meeting and this man said that the impression Lincoln gave you was of a rough intelligent farmer and he had this very thick border state accent and oh Larry he looked funny I'm sorry he looked homely I mean just know two ways about it people would underestimate him on that basis and he let them he had thought his way around all of them despite the fact that his education was as limited as it was here was someone who had read voraciously who scooped things up contemporary literature contemporary philosophy especially political economy that was his strong Center [Music] hello Alan how are you I doing well Larry on yourself I'm very well very nice to be talking with you well I wish you were I wish you were talking to a more handsome or more interesting person but I'll do my best to keep up appearances yeah you know people our age Allan we we uh come to understand handsomeness is overrated but but we know some stuff I'm so glad to hear you say that uh Allan I will tell our audience is a amazing man he uh I think I I'm going to ask him about this in a minute but he he studied first he studied lit uh religion philosophy then he turned to history uh he wrote about Abraham Lincoln beautiful book in 2003 called Redeemer president uh he has a new book out called ancient Faith Lincoln uh democracy in the American experiment and I've read the book and I read it as a development on an application of that great book Redeemer president uh Alan I'd like you to tell us a little please about your education how you went through the stages of it and what got you to where you are today I wish I could say it was because I was following a very carefully worked out plan in advance but it wasn't when I went to college my first year in college was um that of a music Major believe it or not and I had great Ambitions to be a serious music person and a composer I wanted to compose there was only one problem I just didn't have very much talent oh darn oh you make these wonderful discoveries about yourself in college and that's one thing I suppose the college is for you help to find it helps you to find out what you can't do as much as what you can can do from there I switched over to studying religious studies and was making plans to go into the ministry went to Seminary in my last year in seminary I was asked would you be interested in doing some adjunct teaching in church history which I was agreeable to I was planning to do a master's program at the University of Pennsylvania in history anyway so I combined the two I ended up teaching church history for several years an opportunity then once I had the PHD in hand materialized with Eastern University and I taught there for some 15 years and then another opportunity showed up at Gettysburg College and I was there for another 15 years and then yet another opportunity made itself apparent and that was at Princeton and I've been there since 2019 and and there's said no point Larry that I could have ever predicted the twists and the turns that things have taken what' you write your doctoral dissertation about on 18th century moral philosophy and uh and especially Jonathan Edwards and the problem of determinism and Free Will in American philosophy we've got a really great couple of Jonathan Edward guys around here now at Hillel College well I didn't know that uh yes yes because my my long suit has always been American intellectual history I've written a lot about Lincoln I've written a lot about the Civil War but fundamentally what I am at uh at the base is I'm a historian of American ideas and in a lot of ways I got into doing Lincoln because of doing the history of American ideas I had done that dissertation at pen it was published in 1989 and I was in the process of working on a follow-up volume to that that would take this the history of this idea of determinism into the 20th century and as I worked on it I thought it would be a Nifty idea to bring Abraham Lincoln into the book sort of a walk- on part U sort of a cameo appearance because I knew that Lincoln had had some things to say on the subject of determinism and Free Will so I wrote a paper about Lincoln and his doctrine of necessity it was it was very well received and I I had an offer an inquiry from a publisher and lo and behold what turned out was Abraham Lincoln Redeemer president and I've been writing about Lincoln more or less ever since um a little bit on the logic of the child that gets the hand on the cookie jar and can't get it out uh uh you know my uh I had a great teacher I learned of you through him Harry Jaffa and uh he's a Lincoln scholar and an Aristotle scholar and a great scholar dead now and I remember in class and I was this is 2003 and I was long since graduated but I happened to be in a class listening to him one day still lived in uh I'd been back to Claremont and he said uh this book is really good a book about Lincoln not written by him and I'd only heard him ever say that about Don fabacher before and I went wow isn't that something and he talked about the book for an hour oh uh and that said did you know that story no oh yeah no you you conquered him and uh goodness it's part of the reason we know each other uh because I always thought go ahead I have to tell you this story about about Harry Jaffa because after writing Redeemer president I went on to write a book about Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation and in the introduction to that book I was responding to some questions that have been asked me about Redeemer president a number of people assumed oh you must be a political science person no I'm sorry I'm not I'm a history person then the question was well then you must be a straussian must be a follower of Leo Strauss and I said well well no no I'm a history person not a political science person and I wrote that in the introduction to the Emancipation Proclamation book I am not a stoian I got a I got a I got a phone call in the middle of the night of course this is coming from Harry who's out in the west coast but I get a phone call in the middle of the night hello this is Harry Jaffer and I okay I am in trouble probably and he said what do you mean to say that you're not a straussian I said well well Harry i' I've never read Leo struss and he replied well you've read me and that and that was supposed to settle the question I had it was yeah I I don't use I I had a wonderful time with Harry I I would get calls from Harry totally unheralded and we would talk Lincoln and I think almost every time I ever sat down and talked with Larry and this was many times uh with with Harry um he would he would bring the conversation back to Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence whatever I wanted to say about Lincoln it had to be in connection with the Declaration of Independence he uh you know in both your cases Professor Jaffa had not had any particular interest in anything American really and uh he he he was Charmed by the arguments of Lincoln as were you as was I he uh discovered a copy of the Lincoln Douglas debates in a bookstore he didn't have enough money to buy it he recalls and he stood and read it and he would go back and he read it for hours and he saved up and bought the book it's the text of the leak and Douglas debates and that led him to write his first book on Lincoln uh crisis the house divided I had something of a parallel experience with with Harry and crisis of the house divided because I first encountered crisis of the house divided in a secondhand copy of the book that I found at Baldwin's Book Barn in Westchester Pennsylvania and I took the book home with me and sat and read it and quite frankly sat up all night reading it it was the first time I'd read a book which said to me that it was possible to take Abraham Lincoln seriously as a thinker seriously as a man of ideas I was enchanted by the book so you might say that at that point even years and years before I ever talked to Harry Jaffa I had become if not a straussian then at least a Jaffa you know that makes you oddly enough a straussian because I I say all right I never I never met Leo Strauss either I've read a lot of him and of course I knew Harry Jaffa but um the thing about him uh I think the turning point in his life uh had to he was a very brilliant young man he's a gradu student in Germany he studied with the very great n Martin heiger who was very great accepting for the fact that he was a Nazi yeah and he never recanted that indeed his diary has been published after his death and we find out he was really a Nazi and here's Leo Strauss a Jew and Strauss got the idea we should start over we should go back to the beginnings of philosophy and retrace our steps and maybe we'll see where we went wrong yeah so the heart in my little opinion of Strauss and of every great scholar and of Alan gzo is that you should take seriously what people say and write and if they're serious people you won't miss it this is true this is very true I mean one of the Curiosities here is that Harry being an American Boy cast around for something that might in the American Experience be the equivalent of the kind of classical writers whom Leo Strauss was encouraging his students to take seriously and when Harry found that copy that secondhand copy of the Lincoln Douglas debates for him as he said afterwards it was like finding the American equivalent of Plato's Symposium yeah and in a sense as Strauss encouraged his students to go back to The Fountains of classical philosophy uh Harry encouraged people who admired him and what he had had done to go back to The Fountains of American political thought and those fountains are the Declaration of Independence and the way the Declaration is put firmly back into place by Abraham Lincoln in the experience of the Civil War and in the uh that's very good and you know Professor jeffa was he fell in love with Aristotle when he was studying with Leo Strauss and by extension also with Thomas coinus and uh Jaffa saw in Lincoln something that is in Redeemer president and also in this your new book ancient faith and that is America is a coherent thing it has causes the in Aristotle there are four causes of things and uh he he thought Lincoln sees this and explains it to me and I hadn't fully thought of it before he said Professor Jaffa became a student of Abraham Lincoln as you have been um it uh and you know that's so I think you and he have something in common uh you're a frustrated musician I'm a frustrated major league baseball player I do figured out I I loved it I was pretty good darn it's not fair these other people have talent uh but then you and Professor Jaffa and I we heard something great and we heard it not everybody does and uh that's uh I wish you know people always say it's lucky that you were not a great baseball player and I always reply great lucky really uh wouldn't that be fun um I want you to tell us a little bit about just uh describe it for us please Redeemer predator president uh sorry Redeemer president and then because I want people to have that in their mind when we talk about your new book Redeemer president grew out of that paper I was describing written about Lincoln and the doctrine of necessity and it grew out of that because there was a fundamental Insight that I had from doing work on that subject and that was that Lincoln was a very serious thinker in his own right the popular image of Lincoln is that he is a homegrown politician he's someone from the backwoods kind of a political Jeff Foxworthy maybe even a little bit naive and that's supposed to make him accessible to people he's a person who tells jokes and funny stories and who was able to turn a phrase in a really memorable and and eloquent way but really not terribly much more than that that in some respects is one of the greatest mistakes you could make about Abraham Lincoln one of the lawyers who practiced law with him out on the Old Eighth judicial circuit in Illinois in the years before the Civil War man named Leonard sweat said that anybody who took Abraham Lincoln for a simple-minded man would soon wake up with his back in a ditch Larry there were a lot of people in that ditch when you when you met Abraham Lincoln first off the impression you would take away was captured by by someone who in fact had just exactly that kind of meeting and this man said that the impression Lincoln gave you was of a rough intelligent farmer and he had this very thick border state accent and oh Larry he looked funny I'm sorry he looked homely I mean just know two ways about it people would underestimate him on that basis and he let them he had thought his way around all of them despite the fact that his education was as limited as it was here was someone who had read voraciously who scooped things up contemporary literature contemporary philosophy especially political economy that was his strong Center Define that term for us what is political economy there's a chapter in your book about it it's how you understand the integration of politics and economics today we tend to regard these as two separate disciplinary spheres that wasn't how people thought about it in the 19th century you understood that economic decisions were made for political reasons and had political ramifications but you also understood that politics had certain economic results that you had to reckon with so when you did politics you were also doing economics when you had economics to do you were also going to be thinking about the political possibilities and the political measures that would make them possible so the two work together in Lincoln's mind and he has read some of the most important pieces that are written in in English in the 19th century on the subject of political economy he's read John Stewart Mill he has read Francis wayand he has read Henry carry these are these are works with which Lincoln is familiar enough that he can pick up chunks of them and quote them in speeches he gives so anyone who thought that because this was a man who had never done anything in the way of Education Beyond grade school if you thought that this was just as sweat said a simple-minded man you were going to get a really big surprise when he started talking he was very well read and he took seriously what he read so because there's the chapter in your book about political economy and because we're going to go toward the place where people accused Lincoln of expanding the federal government beyond all recognition maybe a good a good intro to that would be describe his political economy what did he mean by that well let's put it down with a political tag he was a wig a wig of the old wig party which is to say that he was a follower of the famous Henry Clay and of Henry Clay as American System you might actually say in the longest sense of the word that Beyond clay Lincoln was a kind of hamiltonian we'll take it back to Alexander Hamilton at the very beginning of the Republic and what the hamiltonian Henry Clay wig way of thinking about political economy was about was really centered around three things one is the importance of tariffs protection of American industry understand that in the America of Lincoln's day we're not talking about a mighty industrial nation we're talking about a nation which is still very much an agricultural Nation some 72 out of the 119 districts represented in the northern states in in the United States Congress are rural districts this is still very much an agricultural Nation how does a nation like that get itself to an economic point where it can compete with other more vastly industrialized nations well you do that through protection of American industry and you and the protection comes through tariffs so that's one point second point is about a national banking system how are you going to promote interchange and commerce well you have to have a common circulating medium you have to have some kind of exchange some form of exchange that everybody across the country understands recognizes and can use with confidence because if what you're dealing with in Louisiana is a customer who comes and wants to buy goods or services with bank Notes From A Bank in Maine are you going to trust that bank that you've probably never heard of are those banknotes still good no what you need is a common National circulating medium that is only going to come through some kind of national banking system this is what Hamilton had in view with his bank of the United States it's what what Henry Clay has in view advocating this and in fact we'll get something reasonably close to that with the national Banking Act that Lincoln signs during the Civil War so tariffs then Banking and thirdly infrastructure because how do you get goods from one place to a market in another place you've got to have roads canals and ultimately railroads that'll help to bring people who have Goods they want to bring to Market to get to those markets you need those three things what's the common denominator of the three common denominator of the three is transformation it's enablement and when Lincoln thought about the politics of an economy which is to say where what's the interface between the government in this case the federal government and the economy for him that was all about how you enabled me people how you enabled Commerce how you enabled marketplaces because when you did that that had another political Consequence the political consequence was self- transformation you could take an ordinary person as ordinary as Abraham Lincoln was when he was growing up and you can open up before that individual all kinds of possibilities all across the country in which everyone can compete equally if what we're talking about in the American Republic is a very Democratic way of being a republic almost to the point where you use the terms democracy and Republic interchangeably as Lincoln did then what you're saying is we should be responsible as a nation for fostering an economy in which a poor boy born in Kentucky and raised in Indiana and who comes to maturity in Illinois can actually aspire to become a very well-known and successful prosecuting attorney attorney and Commercial attorney and who knows maybe even president of the United States that kind of Mobility that kind of transformation requires that kind of economy that kind of economy requires that kind of politics for Lincoln it all works together that was his notion of political economy so Lincoln had some uh human type that he thought America could and should produce would you describe that do you agree with that would you describe it he said it over and over again he said in the United States the most remarkable thing about American life is that someone can start out poor then they can go to work for someone else they can work they can save up and when they've saved up then they can go work for themselves set up their own business and then if they're successful in that business then they can turn around and employ some other poor beginner and thus he said the process can keep on going and going and going and May It Go on he said forever because that is how in a system of political equals people are able to prosper and we see the result of human flourishing H and so he he uh one of the arguments you make here one of the things you explain is that uh Lincoln thought property was important to people uh oh yes oh yes because what what do you want to do you you want to acquire property property is a good thing he said we don't we don't Envision any war between labor and capital the acquisition of property is a good thing because then owning that property you can turn that property to productive uses those productive uses benefit the people who will buy the goods or the services that your property enables you to produce and it will also enable you to hire other beginners and give them a start in life as well so Lincoln was for equality but he was not a socialist no no he had no interest whatsoever in moving in the kind of directions that you see in the European socialism of the day in prudon or Simon or even for that matter marks and angles that's right they're contemporaries aren't they uh and so he imagines an open that's a big phrase now right George Soros is a student of Carl poer the open society and uh what Lincoln meant by that was open to the energy and effort of everyone and yet they make their own way uh for him the key word is always going to be self- transformation how can you take the work that you do and use it to make yourself into something which is more useful more productive more satisfying a society which will Foster that kind of development which won't put somebody into a cubicle and leave them there which won't put them into a slot and condemn them to always be in that slot that kind of stasis for him was what described slavery this is why he was such an enemy of slavery because at its very bottom a slave cannot transform himself a slave is condemned always to be a slave always to be a product of the Master's whim there's never any real hope for the slave slavery for him then was overwhelmingly a question of economics and the kind of slavery that he saw in the American South was particular offensive precisely because it stood in the way of that kind of self- transformation that he saw promised in the Declaration of independence's Declaration that all men are created equal if we are all created equal then we should have the freedom and the opportunity we should have the Level Playing Field as it were to move ahead and make of ourselves what we can and what we will but a slave slave cannot have that a slave you might say and this is what the apologist for slavery would say slavery well this is a good thing because you provide the slave with all the things the slave really needs a roof over the head Three Square meals a day all of that is taken care of proslavery apologist like George fitzu said well this is what makes slavery Superior to capitalism because in a capitalist system well anything can happen and nobody's responsible for anybody else oh rather said fitzu slavery slavery is in fact I'm I'm citing Fitz you directly here slavery is the best form of Socialism because it car it captures exactly that sense of stasis that lack of movement which they translated into security and Lincoln thought that was abhorent he said I have always hated slavery I cannot remember a time when I did not so think and feel and what he's saying here is slavery demeans human beings because slavery puts them in a pigeon hole and says there you are you're not going anywhere else learn to enjoy your pigeon hole for him that was at heart so uh Lincoln imagined a energetic society in which which people would transform have a chance to transform themselves and of course that means change the form of oneself and form is a big word uh human beings have a form bipeds uh upright eyes dominant sense because it's not right next to the ground nose deterior sense sense of smell depreciated because it is far from the ground uh an irrational Soul uh and so in this uh don't we all we all want to take care of our eles and we all want to have Independence and enough property so we don't have to worry about being hungry tomorrow and to take care of our loved ones is there in Lincoln's mind some end for human being some ultimate status that uh uh is the final goal of Life what did he say what did he say about that no he doesn't actually have in view a moment in which people say we have arrived we have have achieved everything the human beings can achieve and we don't need to think about doing anything more than that or going any further at the end of a great speech that he gave in 1859 he talked about he talked about an Eastern Monarch as he put it an Eastern Monarch who said to his wise men I want you to develop for me a statement which will always be true everywhere and at all times and Lincoln said the wise men of this Monarch went off and talked among themselves and they came back with a proposition and the proposition was this here is the statement which is going to always be true all times and in all places and that statement ran like this and this too shall pass and L and Lincoln said now that's that in in in seasons of adversity that can be a very consoling thing to say but let us hope that it is not entirely true let us hope that making the best use we can of the resources of human nature and of physical nature we can go on and on into the future a future of constant Improvement and with Lincoln you have that sense of an almost Cosmic optimism of where people can go and he is willing to see that happen there may be mistakes along the road there may be bumps on the highway but he would prefer to let people discover for themselves what it is they are able to do without let without hindrance with Mo without molestation or control by others this is a man who is really passionately interested in in Freedom wouldn't you think say that Lincoln had a profound interest in the Eternal yes he did but he was very Cherry about talking too much about it he had grown up in a very religious household like many adolescents that you and I have known over the years they get into adolescence and of course they want to do the exact opposite of whatever their parents are doing and so does Lincoln so he comes into his young adulthood in the 20s as what people sometimes called an Infidel an unbeliever person who didn't have any connection to formal religion he knows a lot about Christianity knows a lot about the Bible he can recite chunks of It Off by heart but he doesn't join a church in fact never joins a church we have no record that he ever participated in any kind of official Church ceremony you know baptism communion things like that and yet this is also a person who is always thinking about these questions sometimes very early on he's thinking about religious questions in a way so as not to generate public criticism and hostile reactions because that's going to have a political downside for him so he wants to try to assure people all right it's true that I don't have any particular church membership nevertheless here are the things I believe and you could find that these are not necessarily hostile to religion he goes further on into his 40s and early 50s and then he has to think more seriously because he has a child who dies his father dies he has to take more seriously these questions of Eternity and yet he still is not going to join a church he's not going to make any kind of official religious profession then we come to the Civil War years then he has to really think through why is this Civil War happening what what what purpose is it serving if you believe as Lincoln believed in this confidence in this constant future up movement of human aspiration how can this Civil War waged on behalf of a retrograde system slavery how can this be happening and he wrestles with this he tries to figure out in the most logical fashion why has God brought this war into the life of the nation and you see him develop over the years of his presidency thinking more and more and increasingly more and more about religious questions until in the second inaugural address he delivers in March of 1865 you have a man who stands yes as president as a politician speaking to the American public but who will speak to them in terms that sounds nothing so much as like a sermon when he talks about the will of God the Judgment of God and being under that judgment and therefore needing to exercise necessarily malice toward none charity towards all watching Lincoln develop this way is an interesting spectacle in its own right and Lincoln was conscious of his own movement one political operative thurlo weed wrote to him after the second inaugural accom him Lincoln wrote back and said thank you everyone likes a compliment he said people will not be flattered that I have said that both North and South bear a responsibility for this war but that they have to accept that responsibility because God is the judge of both and J God has brought this war as a judgment on both north and south and we have to accept it and acknowledge it for that he said people will not enjoy my having said this but he said that is the only conclusion that Believers in a living God can come to and it was important for me to say that so I was thinking when you were talking about Lincoln who believed in human transformation I was thinking of that my favorite phrase in the second inaugural if every drop of blood drawn by the L must now be repaid by another drawn from The Sword still it will be said that the ways of God are righteous all together yes uh that is a profound judgment uh but the Declaration of Independence which Lincoln knew extremely well a long time before that begins with this reference to the laws of nature and of Nature's God mhm and in uh those who signed that document and Thomas Jefferson who wrote it they imagine a universe in which God is sitting in judgment equally upon them and upon the king uh in other words there's something Beyond us we can grow we can settle a continent we can become more prosperous we can enjoy a wider equality of activity we have an equality of equality of Rights in that document but in the end the final judgment will be something Eternal in light of which we have to live uh are you saying that Lincoln learned that because of the Civil War and didn't know it before he had glimmerings he had to have had glimmerings because the very calvinistic faith in which his parents reared him would have told him that whatever happens in this world happens as a result of of God's Providence and God's Direction so he has through even the earliest stages of his life a very very clear and palpable sense of the directing power of God in human Affairs the question is how directing how powerful how intrusive how do you understand God in a very real sense his ancestral Calvinism H hobbled him somewhat because if you understand that God decrees all events whatever comes to pass then your decision to embrace God also is part of God's decree and you can't get ahead of that you've got to wait for God to move you to move you toward God and in a sense that slowed down Lincoln's reactions it slowed down Lincoln's way of thinking but the war accelerates that the war does not give him a chance to Simply look at the war and say well this is this is simply a matter of force this is simply a matter of power this is simply a matter of the application of politics no for him the Civil War has this enormous moral Dimension it's moving towards a moral goal what could that goal possibly be he writes a very interesting memorandum in possibly we think 1862 because there's no date on it but it sounds like 1862 and in it he tries to work out what is the purpose of God in this war it almost reads it almost reads like a problem in Geometry as he walks through it and what he is trying to do is to establish what is the purpose of God here all right if if the purpose of God was for the north to win the war he could have done that in the first few months of the war if the purpose of God was for the Confederacy to win the war well he could have done that very easily too in the first few months why is the war going on the way it is and the conclusion he eventually comes to is God has a purpose in this war different from what either North or South began the war with we have to see what that purpose is now I think very plainly what he's working towards is emancipation the end of slavery yet at the same time watch how he's doing this he's not talking about God as he had talked about God 10 years before as a very remote God a deity somewhere in the universe no he's now now he's talking about a God who is actually involved in the process of human Affairs and that particular sense that particular notion that concept of God is what the war helps to trigger in him because he has no other explanation for the costs of the war than to say God has a personal involvement in what is happening in human Affairs H was it in 1863 that I think it was that Lincoln had some free negro leaders in the White House and talked to him about colonization August of 1862 and they they didn't like it uh what did Lincoln conclude from that this is one of those unusual moments when you're not sure if you're listening to Lincoln the 19th century white supremacist or whether you are listening to the Lincoln who is one unusually shrewd politician colonization was supposed to be one of those solutions to the problem of slavery that white supremacists in America were supposed to love because what it would say would be all right we will move towards emancipation but once we move towards emancipating the slaves we will take all the slaves and we will Deport them somewhere because we want it to un be we want it to be understood that the United States is is for white people so we'll solve the slave problem yes by emancipating but then we will take those whom we've emancipated and basically we will punish them we will punish them for having been born in America because we're going to deny that they're being born in America means anything we're going to ship them somewhere where else people looked at colonization and they could draw one of two conclusions to it if you were someone who was really committed to the abolition of slavery and especially if you were a black American you would look at colonization and say thanks for nothing some of us have family that have gone back Generations long before the white people who are constructing schemes of colonization before they were ever here why should we leave why don't you go back to Ireland or Germany or Scandinavia or wherever cuz we've been here for longer than you have and the reaction would be this is this is ridiculous this could only come from just someone who's pedaling more white supremacist ideas all right that's one way one way now here's the other way how do you get a culture which is topheavy with Notions about white supremacy to agree to emancipation in the first place ah here is where the politician as Lincoln comes to play how is he going to get Northern whites to sign on to the idea of emancipation remember we go into this Civil War and people are swearing up and down we are fighting the Confederacy for the purpose of restoring the union not really involving ourselves in this question of slavery and race because we don't want to think about black people we don't want black people coming away from the south up into the North and competing for Northern jobs all right how do you persuade Northerners who have that view to endorse emancipation you do it by saying all right let let's sugarcoat emancipation um we'll talk about colonization if we talk about colonization will you agree to emancipation and the testimony of a lot of Northerners was well all right okay so what does Lincoln do he invites a delegation of black leaders to the White House he also invites the Press what are they doing there they're there to write this up in the newspapers Lincoln is sending a message we will yes we will talk about emancipation but um we sugarcoat it and that's the message I think at least that Lincoln is trying to communicate I remember I think the notes from that or the new newspaper accounts of that and he puts it in uh he says everywhere you go in the L Union the ban is still upon you yeah yeah uh and and wonder if you want to go M there's a place you'd have to want to go he says oh yes there's he's not right he's not doing compulsory it's not this is not going to be deportation it's going to have to be it's going to be a volunteer basis yeah and I don't know why you would want to live around us he says and then he says uh think about it right and they come back and say no don't want to go right that and that statement of Lincoln's may be the most revealing one of all when he says you you you don't have a whole lot of motivation to live around us he said our race has not given you many reasons to love us and as soon as he said that I mean you can hear a lot of people clutching their chests and falling over but he's doing why is he why is he pursuing this colonization thing I think in large measure large measure it's because he wants to put a billboard up we want to go to emancipation and if this will still the opposition all right then we'll talk about colonization now un understand something this is August of 1862 he has the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation sitting in his desk he's already read it to his cabinet he knows where he wants to go with this what he is doing he's he's doing some public relations here at least this is the interpretation as I'm reading it but it's also the interpretation that a number of other people saw in it one foreign Observer Frederick Mill's edge and a black Pastor in a very famous black Pastor Henry mcneel Turner in Washington DC saying look understand what Lincoln is getting at Lincoln is trying to damp down the opposition to emancipation and if uh Lincoln has uh as I read it two problems to face uh one is uh it's a lesson that we are learning to our cost in attempting to found democracies around the world world uh democracy is not something you can do for somebody else he says uh you'll know exactly the quote I'll bet you Alice Allan he says uh a near Universal opinion cannot be safely ignored so white people look down on black people in substantial numbers and yet they are a majority of the voters and if we make them are they Sovereign anymore uh that's the first problem and the second problem is the Constitution doesn't give did not give the federal government until amendment power to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed and he regarded the Constitution as precious right apples of gold and pictures of silver exactly how did he address that explain that there were several ways of going at the problem of slavery and he took his election as a sign that the country had decided to take the first public step in opposition to slavery all right what is that first step the first step is you make it clear that slavery is not going to be legalized anywhere apart from the states where it is currently legal you're not going to allow slavery to spread into the western territories you're not going to let slavery turn those territories and the states that are formed out of those territories into some kind of Leverage for slavery to nationalize it across the country all right step one no expansion of slavery into the territories second thing buy it out and one of the things that people do not I think pay sufficient attention to is how within six months of his inauguration he begins devising schemes for buying out slavery and he does this you might say the laboratory for it there are four states where slavery is legalized in in the United States in 1861 that's Delaware Maryland Kentucky and Missouri the so-called border states they slaver is legal but they haven't joined the Confederacy they're still part of the Union Lincoln wants to make an overture to the state of Delaware Delaware is a slave state only has 1700 slaves but it's a slave state he wants to make an overture to their state legislature to say we will provide you with $700,000 in United States bonds you may then turn around sell those bonds use the proceeds to buy the freedom of every slave in Delaware that's what the state legislature will do if that works we move to Maryland do the same thing if that works we move to Kentucky do likewise and then to Missouri what he wants to do is to start buying slavery out now that's an expensive proposition not as he pointed out nearly as expensive as civil war so use use the authority use the means use the resources of the federal government to make overtures to these states and offer to buy them out and he believes at least in 1861 that that really is going to be the strategy that works there was only one problem the Delaware State Legislature threw it right back in his face they loved white supremacy more than they loved Freedom so they refused to go along well that leads him to begin to explore other possibilities and the second possibility and actually the one he will act upon is going to be to read the Constitution carefully and to see that in the Constitution as president he has the authority to be the commander-in chief of the Army and Navy in time of war or Rebellion all right if he is going to be the commander-in-chief there should be some powers that go along that with that the the War Powers what what's the point of being a commander in Chief if there are not any War Powers among those War Powers deal with the Enemy who is making War how do you incapacitate an enemy who is making War you emancipate that enemy's slaves so the Emancipation Proclamation January 1st 1863 but the ultimate solution you amend the Constitution and he goes through a long process of persuasion to get Congress and he finally does get Congress to pass a 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery in January of 1865 but in the process and this is this is the most interesting thing about the entire movement of Lincoln in this direction it's how carefully constitutional he was in all of this in September of 1863 September 2nd 1863 his Secretary of the Treasury Salman Chase an abolitionist from Ohio writes to Lincoln and says well you know the Emancipation Proclamation has been doing very well it's had great effect why don't we just move ahead take those four border states and declare emancipation there as well instead of just in the Confederacy Lincoln writes back to him and says I can't do that I can't just issue unilateral declarations even if they respect my particular personal opinion I can't act just on that if I acted outside the Constitution wouldn't I be doing the same thing that these Rebels against the Constitution are doing would I not be there a great phrase he uses would I not be in the boundless field of absolutism he won't go there he other words he he will emancipate but it's going to be constitutional yeah on that point doesn't Lincoln uh the restraint he shows in the face of the Constitution I take some pride in the fact that the founders of the college where I work had to do with that device of forbidding slavery in the federal territories and forgoing getting rid of it in the States but if you do break the Constitution then you are acting rather like the slaveholders themselves exactly I mean he said to chase this would this would make us guilty of exactly the thing we're accusing the rebels in the Confederacy of doing and that in fact that's not the only issue in which he will raise that point in 1864 he's up for reelection or Civil War is going on in fact in the summer of 1864 it's not doing particularly well I don't think at that point that if Lincoln had said look you know it's kind of a silly idea to be holding a national election in the middle of a civil war could anyone really have raised an OB well they could have raised an objection but wouldn't it at least have been understandable to say in the middle of a National Emergency we're going to have to cancel or delay these elections he doesn't do that he is convinced in the by the end of August 1864 he's going to lose and yet the thought never seems even to have crossed his mind now he does go on to get reelected in November the situation militarily and politically turns around and after the election a group of jubilant washingtonians comes to serenade at the White House and he gives a little speech to them and he says we had to have we had to have these elections we couldn't cancel these elections you have to have free elections in a democracy because if we didn't it would be the same thing as giving away everything that we had been fighting for to the rebels in the Confederacy so he is constantly keeping in view what is it we are fighting for yes it's for the abolition of slavery yes it's for the restoration of the Union but in the most ultimate sense what he wants to see Triumph the thing which above all he sees is at stake in the Civil War is this whole question of whether democracies can survive or whether under pressure under stress they simply fly off into pieces and thereby and thereby justify all the skepticism of monarchs and dictators about democracies that's beautiful Alan uh could reconstruction have gone better I don't see how it could have gone worse when you when you consider Andrew Johnson as a successor to to Abraham Lincoln uh the Palm flies to the forehead and you think oh my goodness how could this happen it's I I'm always leery of of what if speculations history people have enough trouble trying to establish what actually happened without often wandering off to guess about what might have happened but I I have to say that I'm I'm asked this question more often than any other question in places that I go and and talk about Lincoln and that is what what if Lincoln had lived so in the book in our ancient Faith at the very end I I give myself permission I probably don't deserve it but I gave myself permission to ask the question well what if Lincoln had lived and I think there are some indicators I think he would certainly have been strongly supportive of black civil rights he was already talking about that before his assassination I think he would probably also have wanted to talk about black economic empowerment because if his whole political career had been dedicated to the idea of self- transformation then certainly self- transformation is what would be important to these newly freed slaves and would certainly go hand inand with the Civil freedoms they were now about to enjoy I think also that you would probably have looked for a longer reconstruction than the one we actually got I think we might have looked for something much more similar to what we did after the second world war long term with Germany and with Japan we stayed the course there and the results are are very clear and very manifest but I also have to say this reconstruction might have been a problem that even the political talents of Abraham Lincoln might not have been quite equal to that's not because I know something about Lincoln that others don't it's that I know a few things about the problems of reconstruction and they were formidable so formidable that they might have styed even even an Abraham Lincoln so I always keep that reservation in view even Lincoln might have found reconstruction to be a very very difficult nut to crack Lincoln had a wonderful power to explain and uh my own view is that that might have helped a lot uh there's a debate with Douglas where Douglas in the Lincoln Douglas SP where Douglas comments on the fact that Lincoln's friend Frederick Douglas the speaker at the Hillsdale College twice uh rode through this town in a carriage written by driven by a white man you want to see things like that vote for Lincoln M Lincoln's response is in her right her right he says to eat the bread that she earns with the sweat of her own face the black woman is the equal of everyone here and that's uh that's a powerful argument well certainly is I mean especially when you see it in the way that Lincoln defines the way he's talking about rights he will be dealing with stepen a Douglas who is an who who is a Shameless player of the race card in front of white illinoisans and L Lincoln accommodates himself to a certain extent to that when he gets up and says as he does in the fourth of the of the debates in 1858 at Charleston Illinois when he says I I have no no interest in trying to promote the social or political equality of the races and people have sometimes latched on to that statement of Lincoln and said see he really isn't interested in equality this is all just a lot of flimflam talk well read on a little bit social and political equality he says no natural equality equality of natural rights the right of that person to eat the fruit of their labor that they've earned by the sweat of their brow in that respect yes the equal of myself judge Douglas and every other living man what is what does that stimulate in Douglas it stimulates a response that says if you take Lincoln's logic You know despite what he has said previously about social and political equality if you take Lincoln's logic about natural equality the equality of natural rights if you take that seriously you're going to get political and social equality so if you want black citizenship vote for Lincoln for once in his life stepen A Douglas had it absolutely right he had seen exactly where the logic of Lincoln's position was going to go that was the really determining factor and in fact the great line that exists between Abraham Lincoln and Steven Douglas amen and that's beautiful Allan and I think that's the time we have and I mentioned the name of the book again ancient faith and our listener could do much worse anytime than read Allan gzo I encourage it

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 8,222

Keywords: hillsdale, politics, constitution, equality, liberty, freedom, free speech, lecture, learn, america, education, learning

Id: G5A0qmUf3oI

Length: 60min 41sec (3641 seconds)

Published: Wed May 29 2024