Book Review: Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment

Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment. By Allen C. Guelzo. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024. Hardcover, 247 pps. $30.00.

Reviewed by Max Longley

Princeton professor Allen Guelzo is widely recognized as a leading Lincoln scholar. Just as Lincoln’s exposure to many different types of people helped supply him with ready fund of folksy anecdotes that he could conjure up from memory, Professor Guelzo’s extensive work in Lincoln studies has provided him with numerous opportunities to think about the relevance of Lincoln to the 21st Century.

In Guelzo’s latest book, Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment, he provides a brief review of several aspects of Lincoln’s career in order to find lessons for modern America. In the book, Guelzo shares views that will probably resonate with many who watch the evening news or read current events and ponder the present the state of our nation. However, can Lincoln serve as a source of ancestral wisdom that would benefit us now? Can we repurpose Lincoln’s words and actions in response to the crises of his day for the crises of today?

Guelzo lists several improvements on American democracy which he believes Lincoln’s words and deeds suggest. These include the idea that we would “recover consent,” with politics stemming from the will of the people rather than being “imposed by a self-designated oligarchy” (168), and that we would “embrace an equality in which no privileged groups claim superior sanction for power.” Economically, there would be “an American system that protects American industry and productivity, [and] empowers and organizes workers and small producers” (169). Following his ideals we would recover true citizenship, and have “a democracy which embodies Lincoln’s own virtues – resilience, humility, persistence, work and dignity” (170-71).

Professor Guelzo provides evidence from Lincoln’s career that the president shared a vision along these lines. For instance, to face off against the morally and economically evil system of slavery, Lincoln put forward a free-labor vision where wage laborers, with enough pluck, hard work, and adaptability, could graduate to the ranks of producers or professionals, much like the way Lincoln rose from flatboatman to successful lawyer to congressman to president.

Guelzo also digs into two controversial aspects of Lincoln’s career which some have used to oppose him as a model for modern Americans: civil liberties and race.

In his own time as well as today, Lincoln faced criticism for his administration’s violation of civil liberties in the name of winning the Civil War. These include the imprisonment of suspected subversives without trial, closing newspapers, and punishing a Copperhead Congressman, among others.

Guelzo’s defense of Lincoln’s infringement on civil liberties seems a bit half-hearted. Guelzo points out that the administration’s repression was not as great as it could have been, and that many undemocratic acts occurred via military and civil officers of the United States without Lincoln’s specific prior authorization, and were sometimes disavowed or ameliorated afterward by the President himself.

It is more bracing to see Lincoln’s powerful justifications for his own actions in his famous Corning letter. Here Lincoln did not minimize the emergency steps he had taken. Instead, he invoked the language of the Constitution itself, under which, peacetime rights could be suspended during rebellions when the public safety required it. The President used a medical metaphor to argue that wartime precedents would not be applicable in peacetime. Like a very sick patient, the nation needed radical treatment because it faced an existential threat—when the threat was gone the radical treatment would stop.

Professor Guelzo faces Lincoln’s racial attitudes boldly and unflinchingly. Guelzo does not concur with the effusions of some Lincoln enthusiasts, who claim that Honest Abe had a long-term plan for racial equality, which he only brought forth piecemeal, to avoid frightening white voters. Instead, Guelzo lays out the damning evidence of Lincoln’s white supremacist racism throughout much of his career, which included his denunciation of abolitionists, his opposition to Black voting rights, his refusal even to support Blacks’ right to testify against whites, the Matson case (in which he legally defended an enslaver not the enslaved), and Lincoln’s long-held desire to colonize African Americans outside the United States.

Famously, of course, Lincoln’s position changed. The anti-abolitionist opponent of civil rights became the Great Emancipator and even suggested enfranchising some Black people. But Guelzo does not want to talk in terms of Lincoln’s “growth” or “evolution;” these are “useless tropes” (122). Guelzo prefers to put things a different way: “. . . . [Lincoln’s] underlying commitment to democracy, which made him oppose slavery from the start, as well as to natural rights . . . finally led him to equality’s borders just as his life was cut short” (137). So in Guelzo’s view, Lincoln did not evolve, he simply worked out rigorously the implications of his longstanding beliefs. Another way to put it is that this was a development of Lincolnian doctrine rather than a change of doctrine. Thus, Guelzo believes that modern Americans need not hesitate in embracing the essence of Lincoln’s views.

But will Lincoln stay popular with modern Americans? Will people continue to write books invoking Lincoln’s example to rally and inspire readers? Or will modern people think it is for them to instruct Lincoln on how he should have behaved?