It is difficult to understand the importance of Allen C. Guelzo's Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President without emphasizing its departure from much Lincoln historiography of the past two generations. While more scholarship has been dedicated to Lincoln than any person but Jesus of Nazareth and Napoleon Bonaparte, pervasive banalities persist within the academic literature — more perhaps than within the public at large. To do justice to Guelzo’s break with his predecessors, I must briefly deal with this historiographical puzzle.
Lincoln the Intellectual
Guelzo makes clear that Lincoln was not merely a clever, practical politician — a view encouraged by the influential Sen. Albert Beveridge in his two-volume biography of the 1920s. According to Guelzo, Lincoln was, among other remarkable talents, a gifted intellectual — but manifestly not an academic intellectual, or a systematic philosopher. The Lincoln correspondence in Roy Basler’s Collected Works shows that he was indifferent to academic pretense, perhaps even a bit contemptuous of the academic style. Instead, Lincoln was a reflective public man of ideas—big ideas.
On the way to Washington for his inauguration, he insisted that he never had a significant political idea that did not originate in the principles of the Declaration of Independence — the idea that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator” with the inalienable right to life, to liberty and to the pursuit of happiness. This providential doctrine, Lincoln insisted, was “the sheet anchor” of the American Republic, the bedrock of its “ancient faith.”
While it is true he had fewer than twelve months of formal education, he was, nevertheless, a man of penetrating and profound religious insight. An agnostic (perhaps an atheist) in his 20s, never a dues-paying member of a church, Lincoln nevertheless, from his earliest maturity, was deeply concerned with the truth or falsehood of the existence of God and the doctrines of Christianity. Thus, near the very end of his life, in his sublime second inaugural address, he could write, “as was said three thousand years ago… ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
A Bolt From the Sky
One hardly knows where to continue with Guelzo’s departures from certain scholarship of the recent past. Professor Richard Hofstadter’s demeaning portrait of Lincoln — in The American Political Tradition, which emphasized, among other criticisms, the triviality and emptiness of the Emancipation Proclamation — is confounded throughout Guelzo’s work. Far from an amoral, lawyerly sleight-of-hand, the Emancipation Proclamation was morally and politically effective — “an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity.” According to the great black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who knew Lincoln and studied him, the Proclamation was “a bolt from the sky,” the answer to the “prayers of millions” in bondage, an awe-inspiring event on the road to freedom.
Guelzo joins Professor Gabor Boritt in decisively burying the conceit, hatched in the 1930s and 1940s, that Lincoln was some kind of big-government New Deal Democrat, even a legatee of the Jefferson-Jackson agrarian tradition. The truth is Lincoln was an unselfconscious, unapologetic apostle of the Hamiltonian commercial republic, whose advocates, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, were sworn opponents to the Jeffersonian and Madisonian policies that had led to defenselessness and economic collapse during Jefferson’s embargo and Madison’s War of 1812.
But Lincoln’s capitalism was also profoundly different from the triumphal capitalism and laissez-faire libertarianism of recent decades. While Lincoln was a masterful exponent of a domestic free market internally, he was also explicitly a protectionist, a high-tariff man. And his program was consistent with his view that while capital had its rights, free labor was before capital, and thus the value of the workingman’s wage must be considered in the making of national economic policy.
In a word, Lincoln was an activist Whig in the White House. Indeed, his Whiggery was the full-bodied successor to the economic program of another penniless young man — Alexander Hamilton, the extraordinary first secretary of the treasury of the United States. Thus did Lincoln embrace the anti-Jeffersonian Whig program — the judicious and positive use of government power to enhance the market economy, to increase economic opportunities for all citizens, the “American system.” Modern-day, antigovernment, libertarian Republicans might be just as embarrassed by the first Republican president as those scholars and publicists who have labored to extrude Lincoln from either a Jeffersonian or a social-democratic mold.
A Man of Justice
There is more, much more, to the pathbreaking themes of Guelzo’s important book. The power, scope, and action of Lincoln’s personality, ambition, and intellect, as portrayed by Guelzo, lay to rest the improbable view that Lincoln was a passive observer of the scene — to whom, according to some interpretations, amazing things just seemed to happen. In fact, some writers have confused passivity with the mature Lincoln’s lack of bully bluster, with his indifference to elitist credentials, and with his shrewd and modest insistence that he did not shape events, but was shaped by them.
In Guelzo’s view, President Lincoln was deliberate, decisive, and tenacious — such that when he made important decisions, his chances of weighing in successfully at the margins were enhanced. We can see these disciplined, strong-minded traits in his decision to accept war, and then to persist, and to succeed, despite the counsel of faint hearts.
Redeemer President is a brave book that builds on the legacy of the authentic Lincoln, grounded in the Lincoln manuscripts themselves. It is a coherent portrait, not only of our greatest president, but also of a man of flesh and blood, a decisive man of the free market, a man of justice.
(This article originally appeared in CRISIS, America's fastest growing Catholic magazine.)
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