[N]o democracy worth its name could continue to drag the burden of slavery around after it. - Allen C. Guelzo

[W]hat Reconstruction succeeded in doing: it helped us avoid a renewed outbreak of civil war (which, considering the history of civil conflicts, is no small achievement); it laid the legal and constitutional foundations for a more egalitarian America, foundations that it took only sixty-five years to revitalize into the Civil Rights Movement; it restored the original balance of constitutional federalism, putting aside the states’ rights absolutism of the pre-war Southern aristocracy. But I do not say this to encourage any historical Pollyannaism about Reconstruction. That restored federal balance permitted the emergence of the first women’s voting rights legislation, the curtailing of municipal corruption, and the introduction of widespread public schooling; it also permitted the emergence of Jim Crow. But as Lincoln said, “this is a world of compensation.” The historical good and the evil, even in Reconstruction, do not come unmixed.

[M]any quite frankly fought to protect slavery, which laid on the survivors of the rebel armies an incubus to which few were willing to admit in alter years. More than just one out of three Confederates whose campfires dotted South Mountain in the June dusk owned slaves... [T]hey brought slaves with them on campaign to tend to the menial jobs... The slave system had invested them with an instinctive impulse for domestic dictatorship; they could brawl, stab, and shoot, in and out of race tracks and saloons, and still assume that they were God's natural aristocrats.

Lincoln is, both culturally and in terms of his economic thinking, firmly and immovably located in the center of what we can call liberal democratic thought in the 19th century. He is very much market oriented, with tremendous confidence in the power of a capitalist society to transform for the better, and he believes in opening the possibilities of that society to as many as possible. To him, that’s what’s coterminous with liberty.