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

Effective historians strive to ensure their scholarship is relevant to public audiences. Allen C. Guelzo, in his new book Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment, succeeds in doing just that. While our nation has survived economic depressions, wars, and contested elections, between 1861 and 1865, Abraham Lincoln struggled to lead the nation through the gravest calamity it has ever faced. What carried him through was his faith in democracy. In a departure from his traditional medium, narrative history, Guelzo offers readers a series of essays, meditating on Lincoln’s relationship with democracy. The book is organized thematically, with each chapter addressing a specific tenet of democracy and how the sixteenth president grappled with and often drew upon these principles during the Civil War.The author opens with a concise primer on the characteristics of democratic governments, which is effective to ensure that the lay reader grasps the concept and can follow the author’s arguments. While focusing primarily on Lincoln, throughout the book Guelzo displays a wide understanding of democracy by drawing on foundations of American government, including Athenian democracy, Roman republicanism, and the Enlightenment. He also contextualizes Lincoln’s worldview by showing how democracy was practiced in America between the founding and the Civil War, which largely encompassed Lincoln’s formative years. Throughout his essays, Guelzo also weaves in a historiographic assessment of Lincoln, addressing some of the main criticisms of the sixteenth president that run counter to democracy, particularly his expansion of the federal government, his suspension of habeas corpus, and his views on race.Chapters 1, 2, and 3 broadly address Lincoln’s rise to the national stage, and how democratic ideals are present in his writings, speeches, and law work before the presidency. Guelzo opens by considering Lincoln’s views on human liberty, connecting Lincoln’s views on the subject to the future president’s rise from poverty to the highest office in the land. In the second chapter, the author covers Lincoln’s views on law, and the negative excesses of passion (typified by Jacksonianism), which was the opposite of Lincoln’s, and democracy’s, valued reason. He “was not a man who liked to talk about hearts,” Guelzo affirms. “His guiding stars all belonged in the constellation of reason” (84). Chapter 3 examines Lincoln’s perspectives on democracy as it related to economic development. A disciple of Henry Clay, Lincoln, according to Guelzo, believed that the government had a responsibility to encourage internal improvements and commercial development.Chapters 4 through 8 cover democracy as it was reflected during Lincoln’s presidency. Guelzo’s fourth chapter addresses Lincoln’s views on political economy, focusing on the achievements of Lincoln’s domestic agenda (an outgrowth of his support for internal improvements) amidst the Civil War. Next, the author focuses on Lincoln’s attitude toward mores of the democratic culture, which floats below the surface of the President’s valued reason. In the following chapter, Guelzo tackles Lincoln’s record on civil liberties, spending considerable time addressing the common criticism of Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Guelzo argues that democratic governments “are drawn for times of peace,” and that Lincoln had to wade into uncharted waters between 1861 and 1865 (94). The author concludes that the suspension of habeas corpus was a military necessity that Lincoln did not relish, and ultimately did not have lasting effects on the nation after 1865.Chapters 7 and 8 address Lincoln’s complicated views on race and emancipation. While Guelzo maintains that the concept of race is outside the reason so prized by democracy, he admits that it has intruded into the concept and is appropriate for assessment. The author argues that, while Lincoln detested slavery, he was less enlightened on issues of equality and displayed an “uncomfortable zigzag” on race (116). Emancipation was not abolitionism, and slavery was only ended as a war measure issued by the Commander-in-Chief, who also flirted seriously with the colonization movement, even during the war. But, Guelzo concludes, it was Lincoln’s “underlying commitment to democracy, which made him oppose slavery from the start, as well as natural rights, which positioned him at a point strategically closer to Black equality than even he was willing to admit” (137). The last chapter charts democracy in Lincoln’s plans for the restoration of the nation, followed by an epilogue in which Guelzo muses on what might have happened had Lincoln lived through his second term. He concludes, ultimately, that the task of reconstruction was difficult, and that Lincoln would not have fared much better than his successor.In his first pages, the author confesses that Lincoln only uses the word “democracy” 137 times in his collected works. The sixteenth president only attempted to define democracy once–a seemingly off-hand definition that he jotted down in 1858, contrasting democracy with slavery. In that, Guelzo concludes, he only “illustrates what democracy was not” (26). Therefore, the bulk of the work is devoted to deciphering how Lincoln felt about democracy through his extant writings and actions. As the author of seven books about Lincoln, and editor of a collection of his speeches, Guelzo is uniquely qualified to take on this task. He concludes that “it is not difficult to piece together the larger ‘idea’ from the vast outpouring of letters, speeches, briefs, notes, and state papers which he composed over the course of a public life that lasted thirty-three years” (30). To that end, the author provides fifty-four pages of endnotes (but no separate bibliography), most of which are published primary sources.What Allen Guelzo has left his audience with is a short, readable volume that is a valuable work of intellectual and political history. More than that, though, by displaying how Abraham Lincoln drew upon his faith in democracy to see himself and the nation through its most trying years, Guelzo gives us hope that this nation might live.