Allen C. Guelzo Quotes

From the moment they took a republic rather than a monarchy as the shape of their government, Americans prided themselves on being a nation of peace, dedicated to the arts of commerce rather than the rapacity of empire and "the spirit of war."

The answer, then, to the question of who freed the slaves is not the slaves, and not even (as Blight tries to temporize) both the slaves and Lincoln. It was Lincoln's task—and Lincoln did it. This may not work to promote anyone else's self-esteem, but it did wonders for providing freedom.

It was not Abraham Lincoln who invented the nanny-state; it was that son of the Confederacy, Woodrow Wilson. That American conservatives, even more than American leftists, should today manage to find themselves enamored of the secessionist republic may be the crowning irony of them all.

There has never been a freedom, of course, that someone has not proved ingenious enough to abuse.

Trying to plant such an oligarchy in the midst of what was otherwise the world's most successful republican regime was no small task, and it required the invention of ideological monstrosities to justify it. In the Southern case, the monstrosities included race-based rationales for the enslavement of Africans.

[R]eligious commitment formed the backbone of much of the North's hostility to slavery.

I know it seems strange to say that Progressivism wore a white supremacist face. But the most thorough going Progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, was an unabashed white supremacist. So, it should not be surprising...

Just think: there are no Reconstruction reenactors, no reconstructed Reconstruction villages on the order of Colonial Williamsburg or Old Sturbridge, no Reconstruction observances and ceremonies.

Abraham Lincoln was a repo man.

[T]he defeat of the Confederacy did not necessarily mean the end of oligarchy. Despite the destructiveness of the war, Southern land tenures remained largely undisturbed, and in the Reconstruction years, the sadder-but-wiser oligarchs learned how, once again, to play on the racial hatreds they had spent decades so sedulously cultivating among the white yeomanry.

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

The cotton nabobs had made the South a no-go area for the Constitution...

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

Lincoln sees American democracy as a last stand, what he calls the last, best hope. And if this goes down, we may so discredit the whole notion of democracy that no one will ever want to go this way again, and so this is the test. It’s a test of whether or not we’ll have this new birth of freedom, if we’ll finally shuck off these last husks of aristocracy and move forward in the direction of democracy. That for him is the vital issue.

[A]bsent Lincoln's proclamation, not a single fugitive slave would ever be other than a fugitive, rather than a legally free man.