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Allen C. Guelzo
84 quotes
“[T]he very people who write so disparagingly about it either do not understand it, or I suspect even more, understand it all too well and do not like the implications of it.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation" (23 March 2005), C-SPAN
“[V]ery little has changed in the fundamental ideology of the Democratic Party since Jackson's day.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We live in a cynical age.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Reputation of Abraham Lincoln" (12 February 2011), C-SPAN
“[A]bsent Lincoln's proclamation, not a single fugitive slave would ever be other than a fugitive, rather than a legally free man.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[E]ven a great man cannot be wise in everything.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[B]y what inattention these scurrilously racist Republicans installed the first African-American secretary of state and national security advisor, appointed a black Supreme Court justice, elected the first black U.S. senator since Reconstruction, and sent the troops into Little Rock.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Protecting slavery, Lincoln declared, had become the chief irritant that provoked the Southern states to reach for the solution of disunion.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It thus became vital to the peace of the planters' minds that the frustrations of the "crackers," "sandhillers," or "poor white trash" be diminished or placated at all costs. This involved, first and foremost, keeping the bogeyman of race ever before the nonslaveholders' eyes, for whatever hatreds the poor whites nursed against the planters, they nursed still greater ones against blacks.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[S]lavery was neither a backward nor a dying system in the 1850s. It was aggressive, dynamic, and mobile, and by pandering to the racial prejudices of a white republic starved for labor, it was perfectly capable of expansion.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he South looked like anything but a market society, and no matter that slavery was based on the absurd and irrational prejudice of race; slavery's greatest attractions were its cheapness, its capacity for violent exploitation, and its mobility.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Slaves who ran away in Pennsylvania to join Sir William Howe's occupation of Philadelphia or who ran away in Virginia to join Lord Dumore's "Ethiopian Regiment" found themselves dumped by their erstwhile allies in Nova Scotia or sold back into slavery in the Bahamas.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The political idealism of the Revolution also encouraged, and sometimes forced, white slave owners to liberate their slaves.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[R]eligious commitment formed the backbone of much of the North's hostility to slavery.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lincoln habitually would tell people he was totally ignorant of a subject which in fact he was quite well versed in, because then they would underestimate him, and when they underestimated him they would fall into his trap. Leonard Swett once said that anybody who mistook Lincoln for a simple man would soon end up with his back in a ditch.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lincoln was not eloquent in the usual 19th century way, certainly not in the romantic way. He was not a man of frothing at the mouth or shaking his fist in a dramatic way. Lincoln was logic, and when he got the hook in your mouth he would pull you in no matter how much line was involved. One observer of the Lincoln-Douglas debates said that if you listened to Lincoln and Douglas for five minutes, you would go with Douglas. If you listened to them for an hour you always went with Lincoln.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What we see in Lincoln is a collection of the virtues we think are most important in a democratic leadership.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People today often want to separate slavery, and say that Lincoln was interested in preserving the union and not in destroying slavery. No, that gets it exactly wrong. The two are as knotted together as a rope, because the only union worth preserving is a union that has abjured slavery. So for Lincoln to get rid of slavery is to purge America of the aristocratic poison. He once said that slavery was the one retrograde institution that was poisoning the American republic, keeping the American republic from realizing its full potential.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[O]n the whole, given that the environment of the U.S. in the middle of the 19th century is so white supremacist in its assumptions, Lincoln is actually quite remarkable for standing apart from that.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[A]sk the slaves themselves how they were freed, and they will say, “Lincoln’s proclamation.” The testimony of freed people before the joint committee on reconstruction—about how they became free is uniform. They were well aware that the Fugitive Slave Laws and Constitutional provisions for the rendition of slaves were still in force. The position of runaways remained perilous. The Emancipation Proclamation resolved that.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What if George McClellan had won the presidency in 1864, defeating Lincoln? He would have immediately begun negotiations with the Confederacy. And it is difficult for me to imagine that those negotiations would have not involved some sort of provision for rendition.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[E]mancipation cannot be so easily detached from union (which is another way of saying that racial justice and liberal democracy rise or fall with each other).”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Union (and the liberal democracy it represented) and emancipation were not, after all, mutually exclusive goals. Unless the Union was restored, there would be no practical possibility of emancipation, since the overwhelming majority of American slaves would, in that case, end up living in a foreign country, and beyond the possible grasp of Lincoln's best antislavery intensinos.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[N]o democracy worth its name could continue to drag the burden of slavery around after it.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Defending slavery deprived the Confederate soldier to the same claim to nobility, but not to tragedy.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In 1863, the United States is really the only free-standing democracy in the world. That all across the stage of world history the forces of reaction have been on the march, ever since Napoleon Bonaparte.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everywhere that there is aristocracy in the world, there is sympathy for the Confederacy, and rejoicing that this civil war looks like it's finally going to paid for good to these notions of democracy.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Emancipation, not colonization, was the real goal to which the logic of the American Founding was driving the nation.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[E]verything in the reasoning of the founders pointed inexorably toward the incompatibility of liberty and equality with slavery...”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Abraham Lincoln was a repo man.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the end of the Civil War, the "Slave Power" had been destroyed, free-labor Republicanism was triumphant, and the freed slave was poised on the verge of assuming an equal place in American society with every other citizen. Fifteen years later, the one-time slaveholders were back in control of the South, free-labor Republicanism was coping with the first stresses of mass industrialization in its own Northern backyard, and the freedmen were consigned to an economic peonage that offered little practical improvement on enslavement. It began to seem that a great opportunity had been bobbled away.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he Civil War’s victors ended up blaming themselves, or at least allowing the defeated South to foist the blame on them. Postwar Southerners never accepted the results of military defeat in the war, and they resisted Reconstruction (and much more effectively than they had resisted the Union armies)...”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]n a liberal democracy, sovereignty lies in the people at large; and our governing structures exist to implement that will.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he attention span for political affairs in a democracy is a limited one. The fundamental genius of a liberal democracy lies in how it restrains government and permits its citizens to pursue their own interests without unnecessary molestation. So when we must address political or national issues—whether it’s “On to Richmond” or “54-40 or Fight”—we want problems addressed swiftly, so that we can turn back to our private concerns. When that doesn’t happen, we turn back to the private concerns anyway, and the problems and their solutions are left to fester or find their own solutions.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Southerners carried out an asymmetrical kind of political warfare that the rest of the country eventually ran out of patience in confronting. We had the West to win, the Pacific Rim to open, a new economy to create, a catastrophic financial panic to overcome, and in the end, dealing with the political insurgencies of disaffected ex-Confederates simply couldn’t compete.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In 1968, we won a substantial military victory, as we did in 2003; we then fumbled them away because of our inability to keep a long-term focus on the political aftermath, and we live with the results to this day. This is, so to speak, the advantage tyrants and dictators have over democracies: they can force their people to pay attention to the problems they choose to address, and for as long as they wish (or until their people overthrow them, which is not all that common).”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Reconstruction was overthrown, not that it ground to an exhausted halt. Indifference and inattention helped to divert resources from Reconstruction, but the real dagger was planted in Reconstruction’s back by political insurgency.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[F]or all the economic destruction levied on the South by the war, the people who ran the economic show before the war were still running it afterwards. Former slaveholders were thus free to use cotton profits to maintain a version of the plantation system and force the freedpeople into peonage; peonage, in turn, gave white Democrats the power to control black voting...”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even though Lincoln won a resounding victory at the polls in his re-election campaign in November 1864, the Democratic opposition did not, by any means, disappear, and much of it remained militantly hostile to black enfranchisement and black equality, North as well as South.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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...”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[N]either the Civil War nor Reconstruction fit neatly into traditional Marxist frameworks. Both the Civil War and Reconstruction belong to a chapter in American history in which the United States was still an overwhelmingly agricultural economy, and the contest that was waged between 1861 and 1865 was largely an argument (in economic terms) between the free-labor family farm and the slave-labor cotton plantation.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]e need to shove aside the notions of the Progressives and Lost-Causers, that Reconstruction was some sort of Vichy occupation of a poor, pitiable South, as well as of the Marxists, that Reconstruction could have been the beginning of a socialist America had not the monied interests suppressed it. Neither of these approaches has much sense of the texture of Reconstruction’s reality.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Reconstruction should be considered as a "bourgeois revolution.”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he real issue of the Civil War was a terrible ideological derangement that had lifted an entire portion of the American Republic away from the ideological moorings of the founders...”
Allen C. Guelzo (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source