The award-winning Lincoln authority Allen C. Guelzo offers here a penetrating look into the mind of one of our greatest presidents. The author takes us on a wide-ranging exploration of seven problems that confronted Lincoln, setting these problems and Lincoln's responses against the larger world of trans-Atlantic liberal democracy in the 19th century, comparing Lincoln not just to Andrew Jackson or John Calhoun, but to British thinkers such as Cobden, Bentham, and Bright, and to French observers de Tocqueville and Guizot.
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The award-winning Lincoln authority Allen C. Guelzo offers here a penetrating look into the mind of one of our greatest presidents. The author takes us on a wide-ranging exploration of seven problems that confronted Lincoln, setting these problems and Lincoln's responses against the larger world of trans-Atlantic liberal democracy in the 19th century, comparing Lincoln not just to Andrew Jackson or John Calhoun, but to British thinkers such as Cobden, Bentham, and Bright, and to French observers de Tocqueville and Guizot.
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The year 2009 marked the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, resulting in the publication of a number of short biographies for busy readers of the 16th president, including books by James McPherson's "Abraham Lincoln" and George McGovern's book for the American President's Series, "Abraham Lincoln: The 16th President, 1861-1865)" Unlike these books, which offer an overview of Lincoln's life and achievement, Allen Guelzo's new book, "Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction", published by Oxford University Press is a work of depth. The book spends little time with Lincoln's conduct of the presidency during the Civil War or with Lincoln's personal life. Instead Guelzo's book focuses on Lincoln and the life of the mind. As Guelzo writes in his Introduction (at 8): "This will be a biography of [Lincoln's] ideas." Guelzo is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Studies at Gettysburg College. He has written several other books on Lincoln with a focus on intellectual history.
Although engaged in the most public of professions, Lincoln was notoriously reserved and difficult to get to know intimately. Guelzo explores the books Lincoln read and the ideas which influenced him. Near the end of his life, Lincoln told a journalist that he "was a lover of many philosophical books" including Butler's "Analogy of Religion", John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty", and the works of the early American theologian, Jonathan Edwards. (p. 5)
Guelzo develops two large themes in Lincoln's thought. First, Guelzo sees Lincoln as a product of the Enlightenment, with its faith in progress, human reason, and secularism. Lincoln was a liberal in the classic sense of that much-abused word. Enlightenment liberalism taught Lincoln the importance of human equality and of individual effort. He wanted an activist government which promoted trade and commerce so that every individual would have a chance in life. He did not want people tied by what he viewed as shibolleths of tradition, hierarchy, or authority. In opposition to Jacksonian democracy, Lincoln early became a Whig, and his model statesman was Henry Clay.
The second and later developing theme in Lincoln is a qualification on the first. As shown in his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, in the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and in the Gettysburg and Second Inaugural Addresses, Lincoln became convinced that progress and free individual action were insufficient bases on which to build a democracy. Instead, there had to be a basic sense of right and wrong in fundamental matters of human conduct. Lincoln found slavery (if not racism) to be such a matter. He rejected Douglas's contention that slavery was somehow ethically neutral and that its acceptance or rejection should be subject solely to the popular will.
With the vicissitudes of the Civil War, Lincoln moved still further. Although he never joined a church or became a believer in any creed, he seemed to find a sense of transcendence that governed human life. He found that the War was playing itself out over the institution of slavery and the complicity that Americans North and South shared in it. His earlier skepticism and his faith in human reason and progress were qualified, Guelzo suggests, by his cautious belief in providence and some vague form of transcendence. Lincoln thus became the founder of the type of American secular religion that still has broad appeal to Americans of many different persuasions today.
Guelzo's book is organized less as a traditional biography than as an exposition of a set of ideas that shaped Lincoln's thought and actions. This is best evidenced by the chapter titles: Equality, Advancement, Law, Liberty, Debate, Emancipation, and Reunion. For a short work, Guelzo offers a detailed bibliography keyed to the major sections of his studies. Unfortunately, there are no endnotes to document his many quotations and references.
In an Epilogue, Guelzo tries to summarize the nature of Lincoln's achievement. Guelzo tries to show, in his view, what Americans today should learn from Lincoln. Among other things, Guelzo concludes,p. 128
"For Lincoln had, by a long and battle-smoke-stained path, discovered that liberal democracy was not an end in itself, as though merely counting noses was the last word in any political question; nor was it a merely a means that permitted the greatest number to acquire the greatest levels of insipid material contentment. There is evil to be confronted in this world, irrational and spiritualistic as it may sound, and without a willingness to name evil as evil. liberal rationality will stand, hesitating, before the seeming-reasonableness that evil manufactures like a squid's cloud of ink."
We see little of Lincoln the pragmatist in Guelzo's book. But we do see Lincoln as thinker. For all its brevity, this book will be of most interest to readers with a good background in Lincoln. Guelzo has developed his views on Lincoln in other books, including "Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, "Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America" and "Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America". I learned a great deal from these books and from this "very short introduction" to Lincoln.
