Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment
By Allen C. Guelzo.
Knopf, 2024.
Hardcover, 272 pages, $30.
Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl.
On the southern border of my college’s campus is a statue of a Union soldier. It’s the oldest such monument on campus, dedicated in 1895. Near that weathered bronze stands a seven-foot statue of Abraham Lincoln that was dedicated in 2009. In the spring, a dogwood blossoms just to the left of Lincoln. The Lincoln statue is starting to weather.
The proximity between the two reminds one of the terrible cost of that Civil War, but from his visage, one can guess that Lincoln is bearing a heavy spiritual weight. It’s not possible to walk past the statue without pausing and looking up at the thoughtful if not mournful “visage” and then passing back in time and wondering about Lincoln and his own age.
I should mention that not all are pleased. Some argued, and others still do, that Lincoln violated the Constitution when he suspended habeas corpus.
The point? Those unreconstructed enjoy arguing that their grandparents and great-grandparents before them were simply fighting to defend home and family from invasion, and since the issue was the right to self-government they did nothing wrong and did not need to be reconstructed. Given the prominence of this view, it is no exaggeration to say that the right to secede is still with us. Battle flags abound in my own South Carolina, and May 10 is celebrated as a Confederate Memorial Day. Lee’s birthday is celebrated as is Davis’ birthday in Florida.
Other issues make Lincoln unique in American history. And there are numerous articles and books arguing that Lincoln’s actions, dramatic as they were, were constitutionally sound. There is the issue of Lincoln as a martyr to a cause illustrated, for example, in John Littlefield’s death bed scene and his 1865 portrait of Lincoln—which was so poignant that it led to Charles Sumner once remarking that our “martyred President lives in these engravings.” This makes it challenging to reappraise Lincoln as an important historical figure.
Turn we then to Allen C. Guelzo’s magisterial Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment. Here is a scrupulously measured assessment of Lincoln, who lived during a challenging time needing a revival of “our ancient faith,” a belief that democracy was the greatest achievement in human history. It is Lincoln’s principles that Professor Guelzo believes should live forever as a golden rule and as the best method for people to live free from domination.
Professor Guelzo’s new foray into the life and times of Abraham Lincoln is forwarded by the author, who refers to his book as a brief essay in a time of shadows, similar to Lincoln’s. He qualifies this somber beginning by noting that his long life has been a hurdle-like “race of public agonies” to our own present time in which no reality seems stable.
Not to quibble, but he’s six years younger than this reviewer; still, we share our sense of “public agonies.” The purpose of the book is to gather Lincoln’s thoughts on democracy, on “our ancient faith,” and to apply those thoughts to our own time in which our democracy seems to be dissolving under the attack of various “woke” polarities.
Professor Guelzo writes that he has taken delight in the life of a scholar, but he wonders whether such is not besieged these days by the day-in, day-out of political soap opera. It’s not wonderment; our scholarly profession is besieged. His concerns are thus on point. The result is a fine book taking its place alongside other books on Lincoln the good professor has authored.
Where, then, to turn these days? To the lanky figure of one American who also lived in a time of shadows but who gave American democracy a new lease on life and a fresh sense of its purpose. Against those who may be despairing and feeling ruined by the failures of the present, Professor Guelzo offers this man’s example with the hope that we may yet have another “new birth of freedom.”
From the author’s note to the book’s “Introduction,” he turns to democracy as an antidote to ideology, and to democracy’s Athenian birthplace as the rarest and most delicate fragile flower in the jungle of human existence. He considers the sad rule of democracy’s early times, living for a mere two hundred years before fading and lying dormant over the centuries of monarchy, oligarchy, and despotisms of curdling variety until our eighteenth century when democracy emerged again and became a still functioning virtue with a life pronounced in our United States’ founding documents.
Professor Guelzo also appeals to history by reminding us that Athenian democracy had not always behaved well or wisely, making martyrs of freethinkers. He quotes Madison on this issue, writing there is “a depravity in mankind, which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust,” and if every citizen had been a Socrates, “every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” To which Professor Guelzo adds that with that caution in mind, “the American Constitution of 1787 laid major restraints on the way in which the American republic could be said to be democratic . . .” but rather “was to be a federal republic, a union, an association of sovereign states; and the chief officer of the republic, the president, would be elected by the states, through an ingenious mechanism that came to be called the Electoral College.”
Following the ratification and the passage of the Bill of Rights, Professor Guelzo writes that aspirations developed but that some attitudes did not change. Abiding weaknesses continued to challenge accountability. With the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, powers not specially granted to the federal government were reserved for the states by which unenumerated powers were “inferred.”
Professor Guelzo then turns to his first chapter titled “The Cause of Human Liberty,” noting at the beginning that the word “democracy” occurs only 137 times in the collected writings of Lincoln and always in reference to democracy as the most enlightened form of human government.
Lincoln’s confidence in democracy was based on three “evidences.” The first was what democracy had done for him because his personal experiences illustrated how the absence of a “perpetual hierarchy in American life” permitted anyone to transform themselves. Thus the second “evidence” and the principle of liberty for all gives hope to all. The third evidence was the transcendent rationale found in natural law, which modern jurisprudence has relegated to the historical attic for the most part. The latter two “evidences” underscore Lincoln’s opposition to slavery and, eventually, his “Emancipation Proclamation,” which Lincoln argued was paramount to a struggle to save the Union.
Furthermore, Lincoln’s “faith” in the Declaration of Independence established a transcendental truth applicable to all men and all times that all men are created equal. That truth enshrines equality in law and fulfills the natural law promise made a century or so earlier. The premise, therefore, rests in America’s founding documents wherein the Constitution is the ultimate defining source for natural law, which is then the source of all laws, including moral laws that govern all people.
In the second chapter, “Law, Reason, and Passion,” Lincoln’s political philosophy is brought to the fore.
The republic fractured within three decades of its founding into rival political parties. “Political life seemed to grow more rowdy with every decade.” Moreover, once Jackson became president, his two terms wrought calculated havoc. With his mandate came what Madison feared most: a democratic autocrat.
According to Professor Guelzo, Lincoln was concerned that “our ancient faith,” our democracy, was becoming “the victim of passions.” Signs of political doom were lurking, and with the slave insurrection of 1835, dead black men were “seen dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side.”
Self-government, Lincoln believed, could not survive by passion. Self-government lives by prudent reason, and the instrument of reason in political life was law, which also became the solution to the problems of uncontrolled factional passion. Instead, treat the laws as absolute and let every American, every lover of liberty, swear never to violate the laws of the country and never tolerate their violation by others.
Civil disobedience to the laws leads to mob law.
Professor Guelzo offers these understated words to the shadows of our own times. He argues that law “is the formal expression of the will of the people; its restraints are what prevents a democracy from careening into self-willed anarchy.” To that argument, he adds that nothing illustrated more vividly how disconnections to formal laws could become a rationale for the cultural reality that led to slavery in the South. He quotes Madison, who feared that slavery would be the cultural snake in the American Republic, where slavery rationalized its own code of vices, which was democratic in name but aristocratic in fact.
What was emerging also was the question of whether development in the western territories—soon to become states—would allow the people in those territories to decide slavery for themselves since popular sovereignty “had a certain enchantment to American ears.”
How, then, can we politically navigate the shoals of these American sentiments?
Chapters Five through Nine undertake to answer this question: “Democratic Culture,” “Democracy and Civil Liberties,” “Democracy and Race,” “Democracy and Emancipation,” and “Democracy’s Deficits.” Throughout these chapters, Guelzo gives an account of Lincoln’s argument that the impulse toward slavery was so strong in the South that it had come to exist not only without law but even against law. As Frederick Douglass wrote, “Custom, manners, morals, religion, are all on [slavery’s] side everywhere in the South.”
Lincoln was obliged to navigate these shoals, but something added during the course of the Civil War beckoned ominously. Professor Guelzo notes that Lincoln never neglected his embrace of natural law. Still, the approaching war raised many questions in Lincoln’s mind about the purpose and meaning of that approaching war. Lincoln began to speculate more deeply on the existence of a God who ordered natural law and directed human affairs. If God really is God, his will prevails. Guelzo’s interesting assumption:
Both sides might claim that God was favoring their side and their demands for secession or union. But there remained the possibility that God intended something in the war that neither side had contemplated at the beginning. For Lincoln that meant emancipation which was connected to the Declaration of Independence as if there was an electric cord linking the two.
Professor Guelzo is prescient here in offering Lincoln’s contemplations on the meaning and purpose of the Civil War, including the possibility that the war was a providential necessity preceding an outcome, emancipation, and largely because race and slavery are central to Lincoln’s history as a great evil, our country’s original sin, and anathema to our democracy.
Lincoln’s first presidential term began on March 4, 1861. Soon thereafter, on July 21, 1861, came the Battle of Manassas, or Bull Run. Senators gathered to watch while eating lunch just 30 miles from Washington, D.C. It began a war defending what Lincoln called again “our ancient faith” in democracy. Albeit he had no hesitation in lumping together republic and democracy as if they were synonyms conditional on proper instantiation through the Constitution and forbidding some to be masters and to have others as slaves.
Reason, not passion, would survive and emerge. But first, Lincoln needed to promise that what was needed was to employ all means to suppress the Confederate rebellion, which was shouldering aside a government of the people and breaking up all organic law.
Professor Guelzo concludes this magisterial book with an “Epilogue: What If Lincoln Had Lived?” Johnson, of course, would not have become president, and, given what we know of Lincoln, he would not have pursued a punishing course for Confederate elites. Defeated southerners, Professor Guelzo writes, soon turned to “arrogant defiance.” It became natural for southerners to yield to their old prejudices, which led to setting aside black suffrage.
The question nags even to this day, but Professor Guelzo offers four possibilities. One of the paths leading to reconstruction would have been voting rights, especially for those blacks who had worn the Union blue. Such was never an imperative for Andrew Johnson. Another path for Lincoln concerned economic independence, which “gives heft to political aspiration,” but none of that would “scour” without universal education, suggesting the extension of the benefit “of public schools equally to black and white.”
The third path suggests that economic opportunity would lead nowhere unless combined with ownership of land. The newly freed slaves had none. To redress that, Lincoln would have proposed a redistribution of abandoned lands that had once been held by plantation owners but forfeited for non-payment of taxes. Divide those lands into forty-acre tracts for ex-slaves to farm as their own.
We know, however, that Johnson offered amnesty to all persons who directly or indirectly participated in the rebellion which included restoration of all rights of property except as to slaves. The consequence in time led to the reconstitution of Southern state legislatures, which quickly began to pass “Black Codes.”
The fourth path is whether Lincoln could have wrenched success out of Reconstruction while restoring “our ancient faith” when the political environment had become polarized among extremes that offered little hope for reconciliation. This brings the reader back to Professor Guelzo’s reflections on our contemporary situation: a “bureaucratic nightmare” at odds with the fundamentals of democracy. Equally so is the willingness of Congress to offload responsibility for governance. Add to these the technical capacity for creating a “surveillance state.”
As to whether Lincoln would have been a successful politician today?
Likely not. There’s always that problem of charisma.
Daniel James Sundahl is Emeritus Professor in English and American Studies at Hillsdale College, where he taught for thirty-three years.
Support the University Bookman
The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated!
