"Our Ancient Faith" with Dr. Allen Guelzo | Lincoln, Democracy, & the American Experiment

hello everybody I'm Megan Tori I am the CEO of the world affairs Council of Connecticut joining you here tonight from Harford Connecticut for this very special edition of our series with Jim Faulk and world now with Jim Faulk tonight is a very special presentation with Dr Alan gzo on our ancient Faith Lincoln democracy and the American experiment I want to welcome everybody joining us and before I throw the program over to Jim I just want to remind you that we want this to be a very interactive session so please put your questions in the Q&A box on your screen and please use the chat to interact with everybody joining us from around the country this program is in partnership with the world affairs Council of Santa Fe in all of the partners that you see on your screen I have the pleasure of handing the program over to one of my favorite people Jim Faulk Jim take it away thank you Megan um it's always a pleasure to be with you and I really appreciate this opportunity especially on the evening when it is Lincoln's Birthday because as we know he was born on February 12th in 1809 and to have one of America's most distinguished Lincoln Scholars with us is indeed a privilege Dr Alan gelo comes to us from Princeton University where is the Thomas Smith distinguished research scholar in the James Madison program and American ideals and institutions he's the author of 15 books on Lincoln in the Civil War period And I almost hesitate to mention the title of some of his prior books but I'm going to highlight two uh Abraham Lincoln Redeemer president and Lincoln's Eman Emancipation Proclamation the end of slavery in America America I note these two books because both won the Lincoln prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute prize and Dr gzo has been the recipient three times of the Lincoln prize now with some 15,000 books imagine that 15,000 books written to date about President Lincoln I had to go to the internet and to Google and say what are the top books what are the top 10 and on practically every list I looked at Dr gelo's books were either at least one or probably in most cases two on the top 10 another interesting fact is that in 2010 he along with his colle uh his uh associate at the time Richard Rus were nominated for a Grammy award for their BBC production on the Lincoln Douglas debates he is a do uh Dr gzo is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania where he received his Masters and his Doctorate and I guess it won't surprise any of us that he and his wife have a home in Gettysburg Dr gzo thank you so much for being with us and I apologize for being briefly on mute you think I would know better by now I make the mistake all the time myself so I noticed that unlike your other books on Lincoln this was really written more as an essay less than perhaps a scholarly work that you've done in some of your other books almost everything else that I've written about Lincoln and and about the Civil War has been narrative history because in a in a way narrative is the meat and drink of of historians in terms of style this book is different because it's really a series of thematic essays and the themes are all themes that grow out of the issue of democracy it's a way of saying can we understand what Lincoln thought democracy was and then break that down into its component parts and ask what did Lincoln think on this particular aspect of democracy on that particular aspect of democracy and so on through each chapter of the book and hope then to arrive somewhere near the end at a way of saying this is what Lincoln suggests to us that democracy is and perhaps at the same moment also offer us a measure of consolation of encouragement of hope that this thing called democracy has a lot of resilience it has a lot of bounes to it it can absorb a great deal of punishment and even though we live in a time where there's a tremendous amount of anxiety in the air about democracy and its future I think resorting to the example of Lincoln is one way first of all to understand that we have been through some really critical challenges to democracy in our past but have come through them have triumphed through them Lincoln reminds us of that particularly of our Civil War era and I think also points us to a number of important aspects of democracy that we need to really focus on as we move and anticipate a future for Democracy in America so that's in large measure why the book has taken the shape that it has taken not a narrative but an exploration a consideration an opening up of definitions so that we can learn a thing or two about democracy from this man Lincoln who I think has so much teach us on the subject when did you decide to write the book well that's difficult to pinpoint I think that these are questions that I have been turning over in my mind probably for a good 15 years or more but the actual decision to do the book really only occurred some three years ago when I made a proposition about bringing A Book Like This Together uh to Alfred kof my publisher and the response was good and I set to work on it along with a number of other projects there's always something else in the works uh but with this project I wanted to bring this to fruition and I think that there's almost a coincidence but a happy coincidence that the book is brought out in February of an election year when as I say there's a lot of anxiety in the atmosphere about our directions and our future indeed you know I noted and I think it's amazing that you can get access to information this now thanks of course to computers and artificial intelligence Etc but that Lincoln mentioned democracy 137 times and I looked up and saw that in President Biden's inaugural speech he mentioned democracy 11 times more than any other time that it had been mentioned in inaugural speech were you surprised that Lincoln did not mention democracy see even more than he did well yes and no it you would think that for someone who we hold up as an icon of democracy he would be talking about it all the time well in many respects he was but did that mean he felt it necessary to use the term no because he understood that he was on the same wavelength with a great many of the people he was speaking to he didn't need to stop and define democracy there were certain common assumptions about its Primacy that Lincoln could take advantage of so he didn't need to stop and say well here's a problem with this let me Define this after all he's not he's not a professor in a classroom who's going to give a quiz on it at the end uh he is assuming that his audience knows and not only knows what democracy is but in fact wants it wants it to flourish wants it to be the way forward for America so he doesn't feel a need to stop and offer definitions sometimes he doesn't even feel the need to use the word itself because he understands that this is the common ground on which he is standing with all other Americans of his day whether they agreed with him or not what did you mean when you said he just looked like democracy we we are so used to the figure of Abraham Lincoln and you you've got some pictures of him behind you on on your shelves I think that's your book by yeah exactly he's he's he's on the $5 bill he's in the Lincoln Memorial we've gotten so used to him that it doesn't strike us the way it struck people then and if there is a word that sums him up it's bely I'm afraid there's not an easier way of describ and he knew it himself and his voice too right I mean yeah those those big cadaverous cheeks um the the rough rly hair even even the one eye slightly out of focus with the other eye not not crossy but just very slightly out of focus with the other eye the mark above his brow where he had been kicked by a horse or a mule when he was a boy yeah there you looked and and if you took the man as a hole 6 feet four inches tall 6'4 in was was pretty extraordinary in Lincoln's day when average male height was approximately 5'8 so he clearly towered over people and it wasn't just that he was tall it was the way he was tall because his height was almost all in his legs if he was if he was sitting down Jim he would look to be about the same proportions as as both of us it was it was when he stood up he stood up he just seemed to keep on going and going and going and those enormous long legs of his made made him look like when he stood up like like he was a jack knife unfolding so when you when you met this man you your first impression was he looks very strange he looks so homely he looks as one person said when uh they talked about Lincoln's looks this is someone who knew Lincoln in Illinois he said when you first met Lincoln the impression you had was of a rough intelligent farmer because to tell the truth he looked he looked like a scarecrow who who was a refugee from a cornfield uh he was just not very impressive to look at we're used to it but the impression he made on people then really was where did they get this guy from and it and it wasn't just the looks per se his voice our impression of Lincoln you know from from movies and whatnot is that he he must have spoken in a oracular theatrical baritone he didn't he he spoke in a fairly high-pitched tener voice very re very narrow very penetrating that's why he could be heard at Great distances in the open air during those Lincoln Douglas debates but it it wasn't a particularly musical sounding voice and he had this he had that very thick border state accent you know he's born in Kentucky he's raised in southern Indiana and when he talked it sounded really like something from the backwoods and people people remarked on this um one New York visitor to Lincoln George Templeton strong a actually did this sort of phonetic rendering of Lincoln in in Templeton Strong's diary and he had gone to strong had gone to the White House he was representing the United States Christian commission and hearing Lincoln he was so struck by listening to the man that he actually creates this phonetic rendering and it comes out something a little like this here this is supposed to be Lincoln well I never cross a river until I come to it yeah and you're thinking what what no wonder One Illinois editor after his election threw his hands up in the air and said who will write this ignorant man's State papers for for him that's amazing I mean we look we we we'd love to know what did that what was that man saying by 1865 but in 1860 when people first met Lincoln then the impression was where this man seems like just some some County uh Courthouse lawyer he is like some redneck and Lincoln knew Lincoln knew that people had that impression of him he he made jokes about it and and guess he could use it to his Advantage well exactly because that meant and he knew what it meant that they would underestimate him and when they underestimated him that was their downfall because as one of Lincoln's longtime legal Associates out in Illinois said of Lincoln any anyone who took Abraham Lincoln for a simple-minded man would soon wake up with his back in a ditch and there were a lot of people in that ditch well I want to get to that in a second let me remind everybody please put your questions in the Q&A box I'm seeing some come into the chat and they're very long and it'll be very difficult for us to to one for me to read them and two to get to them one of the things when you talk about images that we have of Lincoln is of him studying books with the candle light and you I I wanted you to talk more about how he came to the study of Law and then we'll go from there to how important law was when we talk about democracy Lincoln has less than a year of formal schooling and that is part of what people generally know about Abraham Lincoln he did not have serious educational advantages he does not go to college uh doesn't go to a law school uh he learns to practice law the way a great many people learned the practice of law on the western side of the Appalachians before the Civil War and that was almost literally by serving as an apprentice to an already credentialed lawyer so you'd read law this is the phrase you read law in somebody's office and you you do the equivalent of what we'd call clerking for that lawyer today and in the process you would read textbooks from that lawyer's Library principally you'd read Sir William blon's uh commentaries on the laws of England and some others and you you'd learn the law by observation you learn the law by directed reading from a lawyer you wouldn't go to school to get it and when you reached a certain level of Competency learning to do basic legal documents out of a legal form book for instance Lincoln had one of those U then you'd appear before the Bar Association of whe you're a town or state or County and you'd be asked what would strike us as being a few random questions and then you'd be licensed to practice law and to us that's seems like a a very loose ended way of going at things but it was actually no different than any other professional practice uh in the West in the years before the Civil War uh it begins to change over Lincoln's lifetime but as Lincoln is growing into a 20-some uh this is the way way that most people learn how to practice law and that suited him because he he had a very remarkably profound intellectual curiosity he loved to read he understood from very early on that books were the keys that unlocked the world and he once made the comment that anybody who would loan him a book was his friend he and so he he reads and not only he read he has he has a remarkably retentive memory so what he reads he picks up and it stays with him uh some people sometimes have asked me well he did he have a photographic memory well maybe not quite photographic but really a very good memory he could read something once or twice and he would have it so he he he reads widely he vacuums things up from so many different quarters and it stays with him now I I think a lot of the times we're tempted and sometimes we're paying a compliment to Lincoln we're saying well Abe Lincoln was a simple man he he was not one of these well- read book lawyers well actually that's not true uh the Lincoln hearnden law office and and I'm referring here to his longtime law partner William hearnen had probably more than about 200 books as a law library that's pretty substantial and and tell us how many cases he handled because he could have been he didn't have to go into politics he could have been a very successful corporate attorney oh yeah I mean his law practice is enormous over over a law career of approximately 24 25 years he handles something like 5,200 cases and that that is a lot he's a trial lawyer too then when I'm talking about cases I'm not just talking about doing wills and Estates and and other kinds of paperwor jobs uh he is in the courtroom he is uh pleading in front of juries in one particular year in the 1850s which is really the big year for his law practice the big decade rather uh in I think it's 1853 1854 he is attorney of record on something like 360 cases and you you do the division and that's that's one significant jury trial every day and more of the calendar year so he has a a very big law practice he's very busy all the time and and he's a very hard worker at it he he's the sort of person who who gives a a law lecture for instance and this is this is a document that's survives to us from the 1850s it's it's a document of advice to lawyers about how to conduct their practice and he says diligence is the most important thing you sit down if someone comes into your office they have a case they want to talk about sit down write the Declaration that day don't let anything go by and he's got recommendations about how to do this how to do that don't he said don't just rely on your eloquence in front of the jury you're going to have to do the homework you're going to have to do the discovery you've got to know the ins and outs of the details of the case work work work is the main thing he said in a letter to an aspiring lawyer so he's very diligent that way and it shows up in the practice that he has and in the kind of income he derives from it well let's talk about sort of the theoretical premise of the law because as as you write he was not someone who he never became a member of a church although he was brought up in a very religious household and I think he wrote that to him he really revered law in a sense that was his faith thus the title lot of ways Jim in a lot of ways you you put your finger right on it uh for him for him law had to be treated with a reverence that Rose to the level of religion and this shows up quite dramatically in one of his early political speeches in 18 183 which was sometimes called the Lum speech because it was delivered to the Springfield Illinois young men's Lum and he starts off by saying what everyone could see around them and that is the year 1838 was a bad year for Mayhem for Anarchy for mobs for lynchings and Lincoln lays out first of all what the real threat of all this this this lawlessness is and what a threat in particular it is to democratic government and then he shifts and says how should we regard law we should regard it with reverence we should regard it as a kind of political religion and it should it should be taught law reverence for the law should be taught in our schools it should be taught in colleges it should be taught by mothers to their infants in their laps and even if that means that sometimes you're encountering laws that you believe are wrong or unjust nevertheless it's important to show that reverence and respect for the laws yes you can change them at some other point but what you don't want to do is simply throw them to the winds and ignore them because if you do that then you remove one of the principal props of a democracy because what what else is democracy but government according to reason not according to impulse not according to passion passion for him was a bad word we sometimes use the word passion as though we we were talking about someone's commitment to something for Lincoln and in Lincoln's day the word passion did not mean the word passion meant someone who was out of control well he really saw law as a way to curb passion exactly and if you curb passion that is how you put the stiffening into democracy because democracy cannot survive by Passion democracy needs to survive by reason and the element of Reason in a democracy is what is captured by law law is what makes democracy possible law is the scaffolding behind Which democracy is constructed and his summation in the Lum speech is that abiding by the laws submission to the laws reverence for the law that that is what we need because if we don't and Mayhem and chaos and Anarchy Prevail then what you will get will be disgusted people who see no alternative except to call in some kind of authoritarian some kind of General on a white horse a Napoleon bonapart a Caesar an Alexander and power then gets concentrated and what you get is a despotism because people have been driven to desperation by the lawlessness we have a number of questions in fact when I look at some of these I think that um we could take a whole hour on a few of them but let me take one now from TK in Dallas that he hopes that we he ask that we talk about why do we not have a democracy but a republic well this is an interesting question because strictly speaking the the questioner is right we are a republic we are not a democracy in the pure strict sense of the term democracy democracy of course is a form of government that originates in In classical Athens in the Golden Age of Athens and it refers to the fact that in Athens the Athenian assembly governed the city of Athens it was a face-to-face sort of thing somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000 citizens of the city and they conducted the business of the city themselves everybody who was a citizen of Athens could participate in the assembly everybody who was a citizen could be an officer elected by the assembly the assembly could take certain officers and take them out of office and replace them that kind of everyday everybody into the pool democracy worked for Athens but that was just one city how do you take the fundamental principle of a democracy that sovereignty political sovereignty resides in the people and how do you transfer that is it possible to transfer that to a larger environment that's where we get a republic and this is what what classical Rome was before it became an Empire before Caesar and that is yes sovereignty resides in the people but you're dealing with so many people that everyone just can't show up for everything so what you do is you elect representatives and hopefully the representatives whom you elect are people who have some wisdom they have some knowledge uh they know how things operate they have Insight empathy even so you're going to elect the wisest and those Representatives then conduct the government always always accountable to the people ultimately but still it's the representatives who are going to do the governing that's a Republic now what the founders of the United States in terms of its Federal Constitution Invision was a republic because we were we were we were too large even even at our very beginning to have a sort of General democracy like like Athens so the the composers of the Constitution are they really understand that what they're doing is they're creating a Republic and the Constitution is structured to create that system of representation so we are a republic but republics tend to exist on a spectrum they exist on a spectrum from those which are more democratic to those which are less Democratic in the way they operate you had ancient republics let's say Renaissance Florence that's a republic but it's but it's a very oligarchic Republic it's not very Democratic but then you move along that spectrum and there are a number of republics which are very very Democratic in the way they operated and the American Republic was one of those very Democratic forms of a republic something which gets recognized almost it once I mean even in the 1770s the young Alexander Hamilton is talking about how the the United States is a very Democratic kind of Republic and that means by the time we get to Lincoln people are using the term democracy and Republic in America almost interchangeably and when Alexis doeville comes to visit America and write His Marvelous observations on American political life he entitles it Democracy in America because we were a republic yes but we were a republic that was very Democratic in the way that we operated interesting one of the areas that I've really been eager to talk with you about is majority minority rule because we have certainly seen that in our country over the last several months if not years and in in Lincoln's view what was the appropriate balance and how have we gotten off track and there was this I'll I'll just mention this where our audience hears it he wrote in a letter um uh to his secretary John Haye we must settle this question now whether in a free government the minority has the right to break up the Govern government whenever they choose I turn it over to you yeah to to him to Lincoln the most important thing that a democracy can do is elections what happens at elections do election has have any of us ever known an election where the vote was unanimous uh usually the places where votes are unanimous really aren't democracies they're really democracy that we see now I I know I know so uh what what happens in an election well you get a large number of people who vote one way and a smaller number of people who vote the other it's a majority it's a minority what should happen then well first off he says do not expect unanimity it's never going to occur what you're going to get you're always going to get a majority and a minority in a democracy what you do is this the majority simply by virtue of being the majority has the right to have its way to have its policies implemented however the majority does not have the right to take the minority stand it up against a barn wall and shoot it the majority does not have the right simply because it has the the direction of policy to destroy a minority why why shouldn't why shouldn't a majority have that right humility because democracy is in a lot of ways an exercise in humility democracy is saying all right the majority has made a decision but the minority you know they might have a point as as we see policies implemented it might turn out the majority is wrong and the minority might turn out to have been right and at that point the minority persuades people to come around to its point of view and at the next election the minority becomes the majority at that point that newly created majority of course does not despise the oldtime minority at the same time though while the majority has to have that respect for the minority the minority has to have respect to the majority it has to say all right we lost the other side has won this particular issue or this particular point in policy it is not our job to sub vert that to destroy that to undermine that we can disagree with it we can continue to think and promote our viewpoint but we cannot be destructive is that where perhaps where we are now in some respects we have been at this point many times more times I think than we suspect in our history where minorities sometimes are so disgruntled that they say we're not we're not going to toh to play along this was certainly the case in 18 1860 you come to a presidential election in November of 1860 Abraham Lincoln wins the election well he wins the election doesn't he he wins it with only 39% of the popular vote he wins a Whopper of a victory in the Electoral College but only 39% of the popular vote and what happens then you have the southern states where slavery was legalized simply saying we lost the election we're not going to live with that we're g we're not going to cooperate with that we are going to take our bat and ball and go play in some other league or some other ballpark we're going to secede from the union we're not going to recognize the legitimacy of the majority and for Lincoln that is exactly what undermines democracy that doesn't that's that's not respect for someone going off on their own and doing something contrary that that kind of disrespect is exactly what destroys democracies and that's why he says to hey what is going on here is really a test of whether people are capable of governing themselves and I mean understand the context in which he's saying that in 1860 what was the United States in the environment of the world itself back in 1776 we declare independence all men are created equal we're a republic and it looks like that's going to be the coming way of the future and then in 1789 we seem to get a confirmation of that when the French Revolution takes place and it looks like American Revolution 2.0 except that the French Revolution circles down down down into the reign of terror then it circles down to F still further into Anarchy and what do you get you get Napoleon bonapart who's who's who's kind of the model for the modern dictator the modern desperate and every every voice in Europe looked at that and said oh okay I see what democracy gets us it gets us robes Pierre it gets us the reign of terror in 1860 the United States is the only large scale workable democracy in the world and if the United States can't make it work if the Americans can't make this democracy thing work if the first time there's a great disagreement and a minority decides to walk out and pull the plug on things then what does that say it says that the Kings and the princes and the Dukes and the counts the monarchs were right all along and democracy is an illusion that will always self-destruct Lincoln says that is what is at stake in this controversy over secession which is very shortly going to blow up into Civil War well and that's what we're hearing now um as other countries look at what's happening in in in in our the threats to our own democracy let's take this uh question from haraldo um and it's a shift to talk about the economy um political economy because you go into a great deal of detail about that and this question says Lincoln and the new Republican party pushed an aggressive domestic agenda including a national platform of tariffs and the creation of a federal currency and I I I just didn't you know I think about Eisenhower Building the the interstates well L really had this Vision about inter Coastal waterways oh he did he did I mean very early in his career even before he becomes a lawyer uh he offers to Pilot a steamboat up the Sangamon River to where he was then working in New Salem and why does he want to do that because he wants to show that the Sangamon river is commercially viable for transporting goods uh to the Illinois River and from there to the Mississippi River and then down the Mississippi to the great commercial entrepre of the North American continent which was New Orleans so Lincoln's involved in questions about the economy from from very early on and he believes as Alexander Hamilton believed as his model Statesman Henry Clay believed that the best way for the American democracy to be able to defend itself against hostile monarchies and Empires was to bulk up economically well how do you bulk up economically well you're going to do it basically by three ways one is you're you're going to develop infrastructure and they called it in those days internal improvements but it's infrastructure and sometimes it actually literally will be highways maybe not you know mechan mized highways that we think of today with automobiles on them that was Eisenhower and the interstate system but certainly something that looks like a remote Forerunner of that but even more than that canals Harbors waterways of various sorts he was a tremendous proponent of canal building because this would build the internal economy it would help bring consumers and producers together because you have to understand in Lincoln's day what what's the what's the fastest that people can move I mean when he's growing up in in Illinois um coming to maturity there the fastest you can move is about 25 miles a day you're you're either walking or you're riding a horse or you're driving a wagon and about 25 miles a day so what what is a superior way of moving goods and that is by water so you want to connect Rivers the way to connect Rivers you dig canals how do you dig canals else how do you fund them well this is where Lincoln steps forward and says we need to have public private Partnerships to make this happen so infrastructure second thing tariffs you want to encourage American manufacturing how can you how can you do that when the British are dumping cheaply made Goods on on the American economy well you you Pro you protect and encourage American manufacturing through tariffs and protective tariffs will boost the cost of cheap British Imports to the point where Americans will conclude all right we won't buy those British goods we'll buy native made American goods and what does that do that again that helps to bulk up the American economy and then then finally what Lincoln backed was the idea of a National Bank just as Hamilton had in the 1790s and when you say a National Bank we're not just thinking of a Savings Bank we're thinking of an investment Bank a public private partnership that would involve public money but also involve private entrepreneurship and private development where people who want to create large scale businesses are able to go and find funding and we had two versions of that we had a First National Bank that was devised by Hamilton we had the Second Bank bank of the United States that had been presided over by Nicholas bidd and Lincoln advocated strongly not only on behalf of a bank of the United States but also of a state bank for Illinois again with a view of providing this kind of economic capitalization for the development uh of not only the Illinois economy but the American economy as a whole and the thing to keep the thing to keep your eye on here Jim is that all right Lincoln Advocates all these things when he is sitting as a member of the Illinois State Legislature in the 1830s and 1840s when he becomes president we tend to think of his presidency as being completely consumed for the Civil War yeah but he has a domestic agenda and that was one of the questions we got was if there was not the Civil War what type of president what would have been his agenda and you're saying he had an agenda he did and the what and what does the agenda look like no surprise infrastructure projects he signs the bill for the single biggest government assisted infrastructure project in the 19th century and that is the Transcontinental real yeah U and that's important not only because of what it's able to do economically it's also important politically because it helps to bind the Pacific coast to the to the East and to the Midwest and lest you think that that's an inconsiderable um Factor uh there was there was a lot of talk in the 1840s and the 1850s about the Pacific coast going independent setting itself up as its own Republic and and there was a real danger to that so A Transcontinental Railroad is going to reduce anybody's temptation to resort to that all right so infrastructure he also is going to encourage tariffs and during Lincoln's presidency tariff protection in the American economy ascends to the highest levels it's ever had in American history the overall average on tariff protection is something like 49% and then of course he doesn't get what he probably would have wanted to get and that is a Third Bank of the United States but comes relatively close to it with the national Banking Act and the national Banking Act establishes a uniform United States currency a paper currency for the entire American economic system we have about another 10 minutes but we're going to go a bit longer tonight for those of you who would like to stay on because we have a treat I think the technology will work we'll be able to hear Aaron copel 's uh the Lincoln portrait narrated by of course Alan gelo and I think you'll enjoy that so we'll start that at the top of at the top of the hour another question we have which you could respond probably in two hours is how did Lincoln struggle with the balance of the rule of law in Prosecuting the Civil War that that extremely important question yeah because on the one hand you have Lincoln especially in that Lum speech talking about the importance of the rule of law this is a man who spends his whole career as a lawyer when he becomes president people point at him and say wait a minute if he was serious about law why are people being locked up why are there civil liberties violations why are the editors of newspapers being thrown in jail which they were and above all why has President Lincoln suspended the rid of habius Corpus which is probably the most important aspect of anglo-american law in terms of the protection of the rights of those who have been accused and arrested and detained and you look at that and you say well that must mean that Lincoln was utterly insincere about what he said about law no what it means is that Lincoln is dealing with a totally novel situation which is a a Civil War and and there's there's there's no textbook for how to conduct a Civil War the Constitution doesn't have any provision doesn't have any there's no article in the Constitution says when the Civil War breaks out you do a b c and d nothing like that it it calls for an improvisation and improvisation often makes mistakes and in the midst of Civil War without without guidance this way about how to do how to conduct when everything seems to be as catch as catch can how is l going to conduct things well people complain they say there there were massive civil liberties violations and you and you can point to some very celebrated ones when you sit down and actually calculate the number of Civilian arrests during the Civil War they probably amount to somewhere between 13 and 14,000 in in a nation of 22 million this is what the north northern population was during the Civil War that is not exactly the gulg and then you parse that 13 to 14,000 and then you find out that a very large number of those arrests were of Smugglers of the crews of blockade Runners many of them foreign Nationals you find that the bulk of these arrests occur in places like Kentucky and Missouri where Guerilla Warfare is R when you boil it down maybe you can identify some some 800 arrests and detentions uh for for strictly political matters and even then with these arrest generally speaking most people could be released almost at once if they would take an oath of loyalty to the United States so Lincoln yes he does put some dents in the rule of law I I'm not going to try to tell you that he is a saint and that he walked on the pic uh he does put some dents in the rule of law what is remarkable is that in the unprecedented environment of the Civil War it's only dense that at the end of the day the United States When The War is Over goes right back into its original Groove if if Lincoln really had been this great monster that some people want to Define him as being if he had really committed horrible terrible permanent crimes against American Liberty then then what what magic powder was able to restore Us in 1865 when the war ends to to our normal way of doing things well it's because we didn't need a magic powder that in fact the civil liberties violations were not of catastrophic nature and that Lincoln never intended them to be of a permanent catastrophic nature they were impro improvisations they were bad improvisations and I and I don't hesitate to say they were bad improvisations and probably in many cases he could have done better he does not always offer the best rationalizations for some of the decisions that he makes but we can learn from that and we can learn from it and we can do even better than Abraham Lincoln did well that that's a good segue to a question we have here about how do the ideas from Lincoln about democracy and our conver affect our conversations and processes today are there things that we can learn from the Lincoln Legacy uh thank you uh devis steuart for that question i' I'd say that there's a number of things that have permanent communication with us today for Lincoln and this is the first thing for Lincoln the most important aspect of democracy even more important than than elections and majorities is consent I mean fundamentally what a democracy is about is the consent of the Govern this is what Jefferson says in the Declaration of Independence Lincoln always said that he never had any ideas politically that weren't ultimately connected to the Declaration of Independence and in 1854 in a great speech he gives at Peoria Illinois he speaks of consent as the sheet anchor of American republicanism in the one occasion in which he actually offers what you could call the definition of democracy he says as I would not be a slave so I would not be a master this expresses my idea of democracy well what's he talking about he's talking about consent so the first thing that Lincoln would want us to learn and to understand about democracy is how vital the consent of the Govern is how seriously we need to take that notion of consent that govern that government in a democracy is is the self-government of the people it is their consent to being governed because as he wants said no man is so good that he has the the right or the power to override some other man's consent to govern him for him that was in fact what made slavery utterly irreconcilable with democracy all right that's one thing consent second thing citizenship for for Lincoln the the highest title was was the title of Citizen and for us today I mean there's so many different ways in which we can describe ourselves but fundamentally what makes us what we are as Americans is the fact that we are citizens and we are all citizens I you know I think one of the least well appreciated Provisions in the Constitution it it's a very brief one but it simply says there shall be no titles of nobility no titles of nobility that sounds kind of Toothless but when you reflect on it for a moment it's powerful it's very strong says there are no the only title that an American has is Citizen and all Americans have it together I don't want to close without people having a chance to hear how beautifully you write could you read perhaps a paragraph or two and then I'm afraid we're gonna have and then I do want to set the stage for the Lincoln portrait ask you to do that all read what constitutes a final paragraph from the book because that actually brings me to that third thing about Lincoln and his message of democracy for us today a Lin colian democracy is a democracy which embodies Lincoln's own virtues resilience humility persistence work and dignity through the example of Lincoln democracy can claim to offer people not only order but decency even a kind of quiet unostentatious Grandeur even in its faults then and now democracy is still the best method for people to live lives free from domination and exploitation at peace with themselves and with others embodying and these are Lincoln's words a progressive Improvement in the condition of all men and augmenting the happiness and value of life to All Peoples of all colors everywhere Lincoln then was not wrong to trust that our principle however baffled or delayed will finally Triumph men will pass away die die politically and naturally principle will live and live forever and there would be neither slaves nor Masters wonderfully said wonderfully written can you take a minute and tell us about what it was like narrating the Lincoln portrait with the US military band I I love Lincoln portrait because as we were chatting beforehand my first year in college I was a music Major I wanted to be a composer only one problem didn't really have all that much talent something some some truths about your fa yourself you have to face up to but I've always had very deep musical interests you can see over my shoulder in the back one of those interests that's my old double Bas so I've always had deep musical interest and I love reading score and and and taking music seriously the Copeland Lincoln portrait which Copeland Aaron Copeland wrote in 1942 on special commission uh is is so to speak my solo piece because it's written for orchestra but also written for narrator reading Lincoln's own words and I did this for the very first time when I was a senior in high school and our high school orchestra performed it and our Orchestra director Luca Del Negro beloved man uh invited me to to be the narrator and I've narrated this with a number of orchestras uh all over the country over the years uh continue to love to do it if you're in charge of an orchestra any of you out there please let me know about it I'd love to com and L with you but on this on this one occasion in 2009 for the Lincoln B Centennial Mike curn uh who was then the director of the United States Marine band uh invited me to come and narate Lincoln portrait with the US Marine band and that's what this performance is well I want to thank uh you of course Dr gzo for being with us and our sponsors the world affairs Council of Connecticut Global Santa Fe the world affairs Council of Dallas fortt worth and uh I hope that our audience will stay on and listen to the Lincoln portrait and if you do not yet have a copy of U Allen's new book rush out there and get it right now from your independent bookstore have a great evening enjoy the concert fellow citizens we cannot Escape history [Music] that is what he said that is what Abraham Lincoln said fellow citizens we cannot Escape history we of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered In Spite of Ourselves no personal significance or insignificance can spare one or for another of us the fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation we even we here hold the power and bear the [Music] responsibility [Music] he was born in Kentucky raised in Indiana and lived in Illinois and this is what he said this is what AB Lincoln [Music] said the dogmas of The Quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present the occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion as our Cas is new so we must think a new and act a new we must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our [Music] [Applause] country when standing erect he was 6 feet 4 Ines tall and this is what he said he said it is the eternal struggle between two principles right and wrong throughout the world it is the same spirit that says you toil and work and earn bread and I'll eat it no matter in what shape it comes whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor or from One race of men as an apology for enslaving another race it is the same tyrannical [Music] principle [Music] [Music] Lincoln was a quiet man Abe Lincoln was a quiet and a Melancholy Man but when he spoke of democracy this is what he said said he said as I would not be a slave so I would not be a master this expresses my idea of democracy whatever differs from this to the extent of the difference is no democracy [Music] Abraham Lincoln 16th president of these United States is Everlasting in the memory of his [Music] countrymen for on the Battleground at Gettysburg this is what he said he said that from these honored dead we take increased Devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain and that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the People by the people for the people shall not perish from the [Music] Earth [Music] [Applause]

Channel: World Affairs Council of Connecticut

Views: 1,913

Keywords: world affairs, world affairs council, ctwac, foreign policy, foreign affairs, global education, global affairs, current events, lincoln, democracy, history, american history

Id: fhfB_14UdQ0

Length: 59min 40sec (3580 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 27 2024