0:04

On this episode of Newts World, Abraham

0:07

Lincoln grappled with the greatest crisis

0:09

of democracy that has ever confronted

0:12

the United States. While many books

0:14

have been written about his temperament, judgment,

0:16

and steady hand in guiding the country

0:18

through the Civil War, we know less about

0:21

Lincoln's penetrating ideas and beliefs

0:23

about democracy, which were every

0:25

bit as important as his character in

0:27

sustaining him to the crisis. In

0:30

his new book, Our Ancient Faith,

0:33

Lincoln, Democracy and the American

0:35

Experiment, Award winning historian

0:37

and best selling author Alan Gelzo

0:40

captures the president's firmly held belief

0:42

that democracy was the greatest political

0:45

achievement in human history. He

0:47

shows how Lincoln's deep commitment to

0:49

the balance between majority and minority rule

0:52

enabled him to stand firm against secession,

0:55

while also committing the Union to reconciliation

0:59

rather than recruitminals in the aftermath

1:01

of war. Here to discuss

1:03

his new book, I am really pleased

1:05

to welcome my guest, Alan Galzo.

1:08

He is perhaps best known as one of

1:10

the most respected Lincoln scholars in the world.

1:13

He is a Senior Research Scholar at

1:15

the Council of Humanities at Princeton University

1:18

and the author of several books about the Civil War,

1:20

including Gettysburg and

1:22

Robert E. Lee. He has been the recipient

1:25

of the Lincoln Prize three times and

1:27

the Guggenheim Lehmann Prize for Military

1:29

History. He's also someone

1:31

I regard as a close friend and who I turned

1:33

to for advice regularly. Alan,

1:52

welcome and thank you for joining me

1:54

again on Nuts World.

1:56

Well, thank you very much, dude. It's good to talk again,

1:58

especially to have an opportunity to talk talk about

2:00

Abraham Lincoln.

2:01

Well, point you make, which is the United States is

2:04

the longest still functioning

2:06

large scale democracy in the world. What

2:08

makes it different from the ones that have failed.

2:12

Well, one thing which certainly has helped

2:14

the United States that way are two

2:16

oceans that has

2:19

kept us from as

2:21

a democracy being constantly under

2:23

assault. And

2:26

there's a sense in which those

2:28

two oceans protected us from the very beginning.

2:31

We had, at the beginning of

2:33

the American Republic already

2:36

an empire on our western border, and

2:38

that was Spain. We had another

2:40

empire on our northern border that was Great Britain,

2:43

and we had the French very eager to re establish

2:46

a beachhead in North America, which

2:48

they'd lost in the middle of the eighteenth century.

2:51

All of those powers, if

2:53

they had had greater proximity to

2:56

the United States, could have very

2:58

easily destabilized the

3:00

United States in its early years. Instead,

3:03

our geography is a big help for us. A

3:06

second big help for us is our Constitution. The

3:09

Constitution struck this remarkable

3:11

balance between power

3:14

and liberty, and it

3:16

made liberty something that people prized,

3:19

that people loved, that people enjoyed,

3:21

and that they were willing to make tremendous sacrifices

3:23

for. So when you put those

3:26

two forces together, the

3:28

fateful friendliness of geography,

3:31

along with the principles captured by

3:33

the Constitution, then you have something

3:36

which weighs in in a very formidable way

3:39

for the protection, the defense, and the fostering

3:41

of democracy in America. The great

3:43

tragedy, of course, was that in eighteen sixty

3:45

one we nearly threw all of that away.

3:48

There's a very interesting

3:51

and important distinction between

3:53

liberty, which we treasure, and

3:56

the concept of democracy, which

3:59

the founding fathers were very worried

4:01

by. Can you describe

4:03

their sense of why pure

4:05

democracy was a dangerous

4:08

concept?

4:09

Well, the one major example that they had

4:11

in front of them of a pure democracy

4:14

was Athens. And

4:16

they didn't really think that Athens was going

4:18

to give the United States very much in the way of direction.

4:21

And for two reasons. One is, the

4:23

Athenian democracy really amounts

4:25

to nothing more than the citizenry of Athens.

4:28

We might say, oh, three to six

4:30

thousand people in the Athenian

4:32

Assembly, and yes, it was a direct democracy,

4:35

but it was also very small

4:37

scale. In fact, it was deliberately small

4:39

scale, because one of the problems

4:41

of the Athenian democracy was that

4:43

it resisted expansion of

4:46

its citizen days. For the

4:48

United States just at the very beginning,

4:50

we were already too big in seventeen

4:52

eighty seven to think about some kind

4:55

of direct style Athenian democracy.

4:57

So the first objection that the founders raised

5:00

was simply one of scale. We just can't do

5:02

it the way a city state like Athens

5:04

did. The second objection that

5:07

they would raise was that the Athenian

5:09

democracy didn't always do things

5:11

right. James Madison

5:14

made the point in the Federalist Papers

5:16

that if every Athenian

5:18

had been a Socrates, the

5:21

Assembly would still have been a mob

5:23

because remember, Socrates, of course, was

5:26

put to death by action

5:28

of the Athenian Assembly. So

5:30

when they looked at the

5:33

major example of a democracy, strictly

5:35

speaking, they were very dicey about it.

5:38

What they preferred, and Madison particularly

5:40

preferred, was to talk about a republic. A

5:43

republican a democracy share one

5:45

basic thing in common, and that is they believe

5:48

that sovereignty belongs to

5:50

the people, not to kings, not to the

5:52

nobility, to the people. The

5:54

way, however, the people manifest that sovereignty

5:57

is different. In a democracy, you do

5:59

it directly. In a republic, you

6:01

do it indirectly through representatives.

6:05

And Madison presumes that the representatives

6:08

who would make these kinds of decisions would

6:10

be the wiser, the more

6:12

balanced, the more property the people

6:14

who are willing to take responsibility. So

6:17

the founders start out with the assumption that

6:20

the United States is a republic rather

6:22

than a democracy, and that's

6:24

what's captured in the Constitution. But

6:27

it didn't really stay that

6:30

way. That line between

6:32

democracy and republic was,

6:35

as it turned out, surprisingly poorous and

6:38

poorous, because, for one thing, they never really developed

6:40

in America that class of elites

6:45

that Madison thought should

6:47

have the ruling authority. Instead,

6:49

what you get is something of the reverse, instead

6:51

of the representatives limiting the

6:54

follies of the people. In general,

6:57

you get a situation, and this is what took Veil

7:00

crimes in democracy in America.

7:02

You get a situation where it is the people

7:04

who limit what the representatives

7:06

can do. So very

7:08

early on you

7:10

get a situation where people are starting to use

7:13

the terms democracy and republic interchangeably

7:16

as though they were synonyms. And as I

7:18

say, that happens very early

7:21

so that by the time we get to Lincoln, Lincoln himself

7:23

is using the term democracy and republic

7:26

as though it really meant the same thing.

7:28

The founding fathers literally

7:31

identified the Senate with Rome

7:34

and the Roman Republic and

7:36

had the judges approved

7:38

by the Senate. In that

7:41

sense, even today, the very act of having

7:43

a Senate is a step

7:45

back towards the Roman

7:47

Republic rather than the Athenian

7:49

democracy. And I think that's some

7:52

of the people tend to forget.

7:53

Yeah, I think that's very true. Even the very name

7:55

senate. This is what has drawn from

7:58

the example of the Roman Republic, where the

8:00

Senate was in fact the most important

8:03

deliberative body for the republic.

8:05

So given that background,

8:08

and I gather the enormous sense of pride

8:11

in the American system that existed

8:14

as Lincoln was growing up. How

8:16

did Lincoln approach the

8:18

preservation of liberty and

8:21

the preservation of the American Republic

8:24

as we began to drift into a crisis

8:27

between North and South.

8:29

He started from a baseline

8:32

that understood that there were really

8:34

two really important

8:37

things that you

8:39

needed to understand in order to have liberty. One

8:42

was going to be consent, the consent

8:45

of the government. He says this very early

8:47

in the run towards residential

8:50

office. This is in eighteen fifty four,

8:53

in October, and great speech he gives in Peoria,

8:55

Illinois. He talks about consent,

8:58

says that's the sheet anchor of

9:01

American republicanism. He actually

9:04

uses the word republicanism there. It's

9:06

also the speech where he uses that phrase our

9:08

ancient faith, because

9:11

there he talks about the Declaration of Independence

9:13

and he insists, the Declaration of Independence

9:16

is our ancient faith. It articulates

9:19

in its basis exactly what

9:22

it is America is. And he

9:24

would later say that he'd never had a

9:26

thought politically that was not contained

9:28

in the Declaration of Independence.

9:31

So for him, you start out with these two baselines.

9:33

You start out with the declaration of independence, and especially

9:36

you start out with the idea of consent.

9:38

For him, that is the

9:41

basic definition of what a democracy

9:43

is, and in fact that's actually how he captures

9:46

it at one point in eighteen fifty eight, because

9:48

he makes this statement as

9:51

I would not be a slave, so

9:53

I would not be a master. This

9:57

expresses my idea of

9:59

democraocracy. Whatever differs

10:01

from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

10:04

So for him, consent the declaration,

10:07

that's where we start when we're talking about

10:09

a democracy.

10:10

When you think about that, I've

10:12

used constantly Lincoln's line

10:14

that with popular sentiment, anything

10:17

is possible. Without popular

10:20

sentiment, nothing is possible, and

10:22

trying to get across that, effective

10:25

legislation and effective policies

10:28

have to grow from the people, not

10:31

be imposed on them.

10:32

This is very much the case because for Lincoln,

10:34

sovereignty, the idea that sovereignty belongs

10:36

to the people is absolutely key.

10:39

The country, he once said, belongs

10:42

to the people who inhabit it. So

10:44

when you are talking about what a democracy

10:46

is, you have to start by understanding that

10:49

sovereignty. There's no hierarchy,

10:51

there's no pyramid. There's no nobles,

10:53

there's no king. It is the people

10:55

themselves who are the

10:57

sovereigns. And curiously, I think

11:00

that the one provision in the Constitution

11:03

which underscores that so dramatically,

11:05

and it's a provision that we often miss. It's

11:08

at the end of Article one, section

11:10

nine, where it says there will be no

11:12

titles of nobility

11:15

in America. Well, as soon as

11:17

you've said that, you've wiped out centuries

11:19

of aristocratic, monarchic

11:22

dictatorial rule. So you

11:24

start with sovereignties. I was sovereignty

11:27

manifested. It's manifested with

11:29

three things. One is elections,

11:32

free and fair and frequent. Elections

11:35

are the key to the people's exercise

11:37

of sovereignty and consent, because

11:40

otherwise you said you can't have free government without

11:43

elections. Because elections are about accountability.

11:46

Elections say to officeholders two

11:49

years from now, four years from now, you're going to have

11:51

to give an account to the people of what

11:53

you've done, so every elected

11:55

official knows they're not permanently installed.

11:58

Majorities are another part of this

12:01

sovereignty, and the people is manifested by

12:03

majority rule. Majorities

12:06

rule. Now here's the key thing. Majorities rule,

12:08

but they don't suppress minorities.

12:12

Minorities dissent, but

12:14

they don't subvert the majorities.

12:18

And the thing which keeps all of these functioning

12:20

together sovereignty elections majorities

12:24

is law, because law

12:26

is what keeps reason central

12:29

to a democratic system. Otherwise,

12:31

if you don't have reason, then the

12:34

people wind up being governed by what

12:36

he called passion, And for him,

12:38

passion is a bad word. Passion

12:40

is what happens when mobs take

12:42

over. Mobs lead to anarchy. Anarchy

12:45

leads to despotism, and that's the end

12:48

of democracy. So those, for

12:50

Lincoln really become the key features

12:53

of what he's talking about when he speaks about

12:55

democracy.

13:18

It seems to me that Lincoln is the

13:20

person who resurrects

13:22

the Declation Independence and makes it central.

13:25

The Constitution had been more

13:28

focused on in the previous sixty

13:30

or seventy years, but Lincoln

13:33

literally weaves the

13:35

decreation Independence into his entire

13:37

political philosophy and dates

13:40

the whole process at Gettysburg from

13:43

this magnificent document. Is

13:45

it accurate to think that Lincoln is the one who

13:48

reasserts the Declaration as

13:50

the heart of the American system.

13:52

Well, he doesn't do it single handedly. There

13:55

are many people who will rise up along with

13:57

him and who will say we cannot abandon

13:59

the declaration. He's articulating the point

14:01

of view that many people held in eighteen sixty

14:03

one. The difficulty is that there

14:05

were also many people who had taken

14:07

a different road. The

14:10

most obvious of the people who

14:12

had taken that different road was John Calhoun of

14:14

South Carolina. And John

14:17

Calhoun is taking a

14:19

road which says the Declaration of Independence

14:21

was wrong. All men are not created equal,

14:24

and since all men are not created equal, therefore

14:27

it's legitimate for some of us

14:29

to enslave some of them.

14:32

We can reduce them to slavery. Well, they're not really

14:34

equal to us. The declaration is

14:36

wrong to us. That sounds simply astonishing

14:39

coming from a man as John

14:41

Calhoun had been, who had been vice President

14:44

of the United States under two different

14:46

presidents, by the way, and

14:49

a Secretary of War, a United States

14:51

senator. But he's very frank about saying

14:53

it. We got it all wrong in seventeen seventy

14:55

six. And the people who rally

14:58

around him to say that the Declaration of

15:00

Independence is wrong are in large measure

15:02

going to be the slaveholders

15:04

of the South, because that is

15:07

what helps them to justify the

15:09

very human slavery that Lincoln

15:12

condemns as a contradiction of democracy,

15:15

because he.

15:15

So clearly condemned it and did so much earlier

15:18

than people normally think. Was

15:20

he really surprised that the South

15:22

wouldn't tolerate his victory.

15:25

I think he was to a

15:28

larger degree than we imagined, because

15:30

remember Lincoln was born in Kentucky,

15:33

and that he's raised in southern Indiana, which

15:35

is still part of that great border

15:38

section of the country which owes a great

15:40

deal to the South. And Lincoln

15:43

really believed that he understood

15:45

how Southerners thought, and

15:49

that led him to conclude that

15:51

all of this talk about secession,

15:53

about rebellion, all of this

15:55

was really the activity

15:58

of a very tiny cadre

16:01

of revolutionary figures in the South.

16:04

And he'll persist in thinking that even

16:07

into the war years. He will insist that

16:09

what makes the Confederacy work,

16:12

so to speak, is that it's a military

16:14

coup d'etas. The Confederacy is

16:16

really just its army. Its officials

16:19

are just the military, and by

16:21

and large, the generality of the

16:23

people of the South retain their

16:25

loyalty and commitment to the principles of

16:27

the Declaration. I think he might

16:30

have been more than a little optimistic

16:33

in that judgment, because,

16:35

in weighing as I do, the

16:38

way the Confederacy resisted

16:41

and the number of lives lost in the

16:43

process of that resistance, my

16:46

fear is that there were more people

16:49

willing to embrace the

16:51

song of John C. Calhoun in the South

16:54

than Lincoln wanted to believe. And

16:57

that is what makes the Civil War as protracted

17:00

and as bloody as it turns out to be.

17:03

Pulvanly Southern

17:05

nationalism if you will guarantee

17:08

that there would be a people's war and

17:11

that you would have to literally destroy their capacity

17:14

to fight.

17:15

And that eventually is what he begins

17:17

to see as a necessity, so

17:20

that he will turn to someone like Ulysses

17:22

Grant, who understands that

17:24

the real kind of war you need to make is

17:27

on the Southern capacity to resist.

17:29

You're not going to put an end of the war simply

17:31

by marching onto a battlefield and

17:33

having a data day with a Confederate

17:36

army. I mean, for one thing, by the nineteenth

17:38

century, armies are so big you just don't win

17:41

catastrophic victories like Napoleon

17:43

might have woned Austerlitz. The technology

17:46

of weapons, the technology of war has changed

17:48

so much in the fifty years since Napoleon

17:50

Bonaparte. So you're just not going to win a

17:53

battle like you'd win a football game or

17:55

a football title. You're going to have to

17:57

destroy the very power to resist. Grantees.

18:00

Sherman sees that, and in

18:02

the long run, that is what brings

18:04

victory to the nation in eighteen

18:07

sixty five.

18:08

I'm impressed with the fact that confronted

18:10

with that, Lincoln had

18:12

the sheer moral courage

18:15

to accept that if that was the price of

18:17

preserving the Union, he was a

18:19

price that had to be paid, no matter

18:22

how distasteful.

18:24

Yes, but he never wants to pay that in

18:27

any kind of vengeful spirit. He

18:30

wants the war to end so

18:32

badly that he's willing

18:34

to meet with Confederate

18:37

emissaries, and

18:39

he's willing to do this either directly

18:42

or indirectly, as early as the summer of eighteen sixty

18:44

four. But he actually

18:46

goes and meets with three Confederate emissaries

18:49

at Hampton Roads in February of eighteen

18:51

sixty five, and

18:53

he makes it very clear to them that there's

18:55

a non negotiable. The nogotiable is

18:57

they lay down their weapons and slavery is on.

19:01

But then he says, the way

19:03

that we end slavery, I'm still

19:05

willing to talk about that as a process.

19:08

We want to get the war over,

19:10

we want the killing to stop.

19:14

He comes back to his cabinet and tries

19:16

to explain this to them. The cabinet tells him,

19:18

no, that you can't do that.

19:20

That's not going to work. But what it

19:22

says is that Lincoln felt so

19:24

very keenly what the war was

19:27

costing that he would entertain,

19:29

however fleetingly, he

19:32

would entertain whatever

19:34

might bring peace to the country. My

19:37

old colleague God or bore It, whom

19:39

you have known Newt, once

19:41

wrote an essay, and in that essay he

19:43

said something it really struck me that stayed

19:46

with me all the many years since, And

19:48

that is in July of eighteen sixty four,

19:51

a Confederate division is threatening

19:53

Washington, the northern defenses of Washington.

19:56

Lincoln goes out to Fort Stevens to see

19:58

this. Lincoln stands up up

20:00

on the parapet of Fort Stevens,

20:02

or every Confederate skirmisher could

20:04

take a shot at him, and God

20:06

Bor wondered was

20:08

Lincoln thinking, God,

20:11

if I am wrong, let it end

20:13

here. And

20:15

then in the most eloquent way he comes to

20:18

the second inaugural aw

20:21

he could very easily in

20:23

that second inaugural address, because the war is obviously

20:26

coming to an end on March fourth, eighteen

20:28

sixty five. Everybody can see that. He

20:31

could have done a victory lap. He could

20:33

have said, see, we were right, they were wrong.

20:36

Time for us to have a big party, and

20:38

he doesn't. He doesn't. Instead,

20:41

he says, look, this

20:43

horrible war that we have endured

20:46

for four years is a visitation

20:48

of God's judgment on all of us, North

20:51

and south. We have all

20:54

had our hands imbrood in

20:56

slavery. None of us is innocent,

20:58

and the judgment of God on all of us

21:01

is manifest in this war. And

21:03

anyone who wants to dispute

21:05

that and protest their own righteousness

21:08

and their own clean hands just doesn't

21:10

know how God functions. And

21:13

it's because of that he says, we

21:17

have to proceed with malice toward none

21:19

and with charity for all. Lincoln

21:22

understands that vengeance

21:25

is as toxic to the life of a democracy

21:29

as any external threat, and

21:31

that is what he is pleading for. Even

21:34

there at the end of the war.

21:36

I've gone, as I know, you have to

21:39

the Lincoln Memorial, and it's

21:42

so stirring and

21:44

so moving to first

21:46

read aloud the Jettisburg Address,

21:48

and then to turn and

21:51

read the second Inaugural, which has multiple

21:53

references to God and which

21:56

really is a sermon. It's probably

21:59

the most amazing of all American

22:01

inaugural addresses. And you think

22:03

about what's going on in this guy's

22:06

mind. Having presided

22:08

over and in a sense insisted on

22:11

a nationwide bloodbath for

22:13

four long years, which could have ended

22:15

any time. He was willing to quit, but

22:19

because he believed in the Union that

22:21

the very cause of freedom was

22:23

at stake, he wouldn't

22:25

quit, no matter the costs. And it must

22:27

have been literally a constant agony

22:30

for him and totally different

22:33

from what he expected when he ran initially.

22:36

Oh, he understood what

22:39

was going on in the war was

22:41

the biggest question that democracy

22:44

could be asked, and that is,

22:47

are democracies really stable? Are they really

22:50

permanent? Are they for real? I

22:52

mean, there's so many other issues that are bound up

22:54

with the war, there's the issue of you know,

22:56

are we a nation or are we just a league

22:58

of independent states like the old

23:00

Holy Roman Empire. All right, that's one question

23:03

that has to get settled in the war. The other

23:05

question, big question, is slavery.

23:08

I get email all the time from people who

23:10

want to say, well, you know, it was really about states rights, it

23:12

was not about slavery. That's balder dash. Everybody.

23:15

Everybody knew in eighteen sixty one that

23:18

slavery was big ticket

23:21

issue. The seceding states say this over

23:23

and over again in their secession

23:25

documents. But even bigger

23:28

than slavery, even bigger than slavery,

23:31

is an issue we don't often reflect upon

23:33

because we don't need to, and that is

23:35

the survival of the American

23:38

democracy. New think about

23:40

it this way. In seventeen seventy six, we

23:42

declare our independence, we

23:44

create this democratic republic,

23:47

and it looks like we are the coming thing,

23:49

because seventeen eighty nine the French

23:52

overthrow monarchical rule, and

23:55

it looks like this is going to be the wave of the future.

23:59

But then you know what happens. The French

24:01

Revolution descends into the reign

24:03

of terror, the reign of terror

24:05

descends into the dictatorship of Bonaparte,

24:08

you get the Napoleonic Wars, you get the

24:10

Congress of Vienna, and the restoration

24:12

of monarchy. In eighteen sixty

24:14

one, the United States is

24:16

the last large scale

24:19

democratic experiment still functioning

24:22

in the world. If the United States

24:24

blows it, if we can't

24:26

hold together, then

24:29

that just simply shows every monarch

24:31

around the world that democracy

24:33

is a joke, that people

24:36

cannot govern themselves. And

24:38

Lincoln says this to his secretary John

24:40

Hay in May of eighteen sixty one. He

24:43

says, the fundamental issue that we are facing

24:45

in this war is whether

24:47

self government is possible, or

24:50

whether every time you hit a big problem

24:52

a democracy is simply going to blow up.

24:55

So he understood the enormous

24:58

significance of what was happening

25:00

in the United States, and as a matter of

25:02

fact, you know, so did people

25:05

in other places. All the monarchs

25:07

were cheering on the Confederacy. The

25:10

King of Belgium said that the Confederacy

25:12

is the sign of the return of what he called

25:15

the aristocratic monarchical principle

25:17

in the New World. On the other hand,

25:20

the friends of liberty in Europe were cheering

25:22

for the Union because

25:24

they saw in it the

25:26

future of liberty being put to a

25:28

test. Even slaves

25:31

working in the sugar fields of Cuba

25:35

were singing along with whatever

25:38

songs they sang. They were interpolating

25:40

these words, Avanza,

25:43

Lincoln, Avanza to

25:47

esperanza. You are our

25:50

hope. People understood

25:53

the biggest issue of all was this

25:55

issue of democracy, and we

25:58

enjoy today the

26:00

fruit of that, sometimes

26:02

without realizing just how

26:05

much in danger it was in the American

26:07

Civil War years.

26:08

Your point, I mean, Lincoln captures it himself

26:12

in the Gettysburg Address when

26:14

he says, now we are engaged in a great civil

26:16

war, testing whether that

26:18

nation, or any nation so

26:21

conceived and so dedicated,

26:24

can long endure. I

26:27

mean, I think he has sort of captured right there

26:29

that this was the ultimate test to whether

26:31

humans could govern themselves.

26:33

You might say that the Civil War was

26:35

looked upon by Lincoln as the final

26:38

exam for American

26:41

democracy. He said there were three things

26:43

that democracy had to do. First

26:45

of all, it had to set itself up.

26:48

Second of all, it had to find a way

26:51

of establishing its own governing rules.

26:53

We do that in the Constitution. And

26:55

then it has to show that it's not going to fly

26:58

to pieces from within. And

27:01

he said, that is the question that

27:03

is now before us in this civil

27:06

war, and in a lot of ways

27:08

new I wrote this book because

27:11

I think that question is

27:13

before us in every American

27:16

generation. I mean, Lincoln

27:18

settles it in his day, but

27:21

it gets unsettled from time to time.

27:24

I think we're living in an era of

27:26

unsettlement. And

27:29

one of the reasons, if not the prime reason

27:31

that I wrote the book was to say, can

27:33

we look back to

27:35

Lincoln and see what

27:38

Lincoln had to say about democracy,

27:41

to say what he had to say in praise

27:44

of it, but also the

27:46

moments when he points out its weak

27:49

links and it does have them, And

27:52

can we learn for today

27:54

some of the lessons that Lincoln wanted

27:57

to teach for people in his

27:59

day. That to me was

28:02

the most important thing I could say in this book. Because

28:04

you notice Nout, I'm a history person. This is

28:06

not a narrative history, all right, This is

28:08

not a biography of Lincoln. This

28:11

is really a series of meditations on

28:13

these themes of democracy

28:15

that Lincoln himself was concerned about.

28:18

And I write this a way to speak

28:21

to our anxieties today.

28:40

Scott Rasmussen has been doing polling for

28:42

thirty five years, and he recently

28:44

developed what he calls the elite one percent.

28:47

And these are basically people

28:50

who went to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, et

28:52

cetera, got a graduate degree. Didn't

28:54

just go to grad school. We've got a degree, earn

28:56

at least one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a

28:58

year, and live in a large city. This

29:01

one percent, he said,

29:03

the most frightening single number in thirty

29:06

five years of polling. He asked

29:08

the question, would you cheat

29:10

if you're in danger of losing an election? Seven

29:14

percent of the country says yes. Sixty

29:17

five percent of these people said yes.

29:20

So you have an elite which is basically

29:23

valuing the imposition

29:25

of its values over

29:28

the preservation of a system of

29:31

all of us mutually choosing

29:33

who leads us. I think it fits

29:35

what Lincoln was worried about. Every generation

29:37

has to come back and renew

29:40

its dedication to

29:42

this extraordinarily complex

29:44

system that the founding fathers gave

29:46

us, which happens to work.

29:48

This is why he's at Gettysburg.

29:50

I mean Lincoln didn't leave Washington

29:53

very often during a Civil war. I mean understand

29:55

the sense in which I mean this. It's a compliment.

29:58

The man was a workaholic. He was at desk,

30:00

he was at work all the time. He did not stray

30:03

very much out of Washington to go on fundraising

30:05

tours or things like that. But he does

30:08

make an exception to come to Gettysburg in November

30:10

of eighteen sixty three for the dedication

30:12

of the Soldier's National Cemetery there. Why

30:15

does he do that because

30:17

he has seen something in that battle. He

30:20

has seen something in the thirty five hundred

30:22

Union dead who are buried in that cemetery.

30:25

These are ordinary folks,

30:27

Newt. I mean, you've walked around that cemetery,

30:30

as I have many times, and

30:33

you see the names there. They're not the names

30:35

of the rich and famous. They're

30:37

the names of people who a couple of months

30:39

before had gotten off the boat from

30:41

Europe. They're the names of clerks

30:44

and farmers. And yet

30:46

those ordinary people saw something

30:49

in democracy that

30:51

they were willing to surrender their lives for.

30:54

And that pushes him

30:56

to say in the Gettysburg address,

30:59

it's not us who are going to dedicate a cemetery

31:02

here, they've already done that. Rather,

31:05

it's for us to dedicate ourselves

31:08

to that great task for which

31:10

they gave the last full measure of devotion.

31:13

And that is a

31:15

dedication that has to be renewed over

31:18

and over again, and he is confident

31:20

that it can be renewed.

31:23

The statistic you were quoting from Rasmussen

31:26

is a really disheartening one.

31:28

But I don't think that Lincoln would have been disheartened,

31:32

because he understood the democracies have

31:34

these great capacities.

31:38

Democracies have

31:40

this tremendous resilience. Democracies

31:45

have humor. They can laugh

31:47

at themselves like Lincoln did. Democracies

31:51

have humility. Elites

31:54

and elite governments and aristocracies

31:56

and one percent are all built

31:58

on honor and self righteousness,

32:02

but not a democracy. Democracy

32:05

is built on so many other

32:07

things that it thrives on. And

32:10

if the people of that democracy will

32:14

see in it the rainbow of promise,

32:18

then that democracy will survive,

32:21

It will prosper, it will

32:23

have a new birth of freedom,

32:26

not, as my friend Rick Kaiser says,

32:28

and rightly, not a birth of new

32:30

freedom. We're not going to rewrite all the rules

32:32

all over again and have something entirely

32:34

different as a governing way of doing things. No,

32:37

we are going to have a renewal, a rebirth

32:40

of the original purpose of

32:42

this democracy. That dedication,

32:45

I believe, springs from the people

32:47

themselves. We've had faithless

32:50

elites before. We have the

32:52

tories of the Revolution. Even

32:55

the slave owning oligarchs of

32:57

the Confederacy talk about

32:59

in elite. Do you realize

33:01

that in the eighteen sixty census

33:04

the richest county

33:08

in America was Adams

33:10

County, Mississippi, highest

33:13

in terms of net worth. Why slavery

33:16

plantations. That's where the elite

33:18

were. And they were

33:20

wrong, and they gambled

33:22

wrong on rebellion, and

33:25

they lost. And

33:27

frankly, I'll say for myself, and

33:29

probably get some hate mail for it, I'm

33:32

glad they lost. I'm glad

33:34

that Lincoln was right. I'm glad

33:36

that we triumphed as a nation without

33:39

slavery, and I

33:41

want us to continue that way.

33:43

But to balance a little bit, because it gets complex.

33:46

Lincoln may, if necessary, was

33:49

willing to bend the rules to

33:51

suppress dissent, which

33:53

he thought could cost us the nation. And

33:57

then, while he was himself a great lawyer, he

33:59

was prepared to say, you can't use

34:01

the rules to justify suicide

34:04

and therefore they did a number of things,

34:06

from locking up half the

34:09

Maryland legislature to closing

34:11

down some newspapers, et cetera. How

34:13

do you balance the necessity

34:16

of survival against

34:18

the very system that you're trying to have survive.

34:22

I don't know that there is a balance

34:25

you can prescribe. I don't know if there's an algorithm

34:28

for it. I can explain

34:30

what Lincoln did. For

34:32

one thing, Lincoln is working without a template.

34:35

We never had a Civil War before, so

34:38

he couldn't look up what the precedents were.

34:41

There was no bookstore he could go to and buy

34:43

a copy of Civil War for Dummies. That

34:46

just wasn't anything. He's having to improvise,

34:49

and improvise in a volatile situation

34:51

whose result he can't really easily

34:54

predict. And Newton, I'll

34:56

say this just in case anyone thinks

34:58

that I'm a Lincoln worshiper. He

35:00

makes mistakes, and

35:04

I think he made mistakes in some points.

35:07

In other points, I think he makes mistakes

35:09

on some of the civil liberties issues as well.

35:12

When he arrests, for instance, the prominent

35:15

draft dissenter Clement Vlandigham

35:18

in eighteen sixty three, or former representative

35:20

because they jerrymandered his district out from

35:22

under him. Voralandigm gives a speech

35:24

in Mount Vernon, Ohio, and it's

35:27

a pretty incendiary piece of work, and

35:30

he's arrested by military authorities,

35:33

tried by a military tribunal. They're going to send

35:35

him to Fort Warren in Boston

35:37

Harbor to spend the rest of the war behind bars.

35:40

No rid of abeas corpus. And Lincoln

35:42

has to justify what happens to Valandigum,

35:46

and he does it, I'm sorry to say,

35:48

on the basis of what he calls necessity.

35:50

He says the Constitution is different in

35:53

a time of stress, in a time of necessity,

35:55

a time of civil war, than it is in times

35:57

of peace. Note he was wrong. He

36:00

was wrong, and the

36:02

wrongness of it becomes apparent a year

36:05

after the war in expart

36:07

Milligan, where the Supreme

36:09

Court, in a decision written by a man

36:11

appointed by Lincoln to the Supreme

36:14

Court, it says, no, no, no, the Constitution

36:16

is the same document in peace as

36:19

it is in war, and

36:21

it's still the law of the land under

36:23

any of those circumstances. So he

36:25

makes mistakes. The curious

36:28

thing is and This is also part of the explanation.

36:30

This is what I think sometimes people miss when

36:32

they rush to say, oh, Lincoln try to

36:35

be a dictator. No.

36:37

No, If you look at

36:39

the number of these kinds of arrests

36:42

that happen, military, tribunal trials

36:44

and so on like that, the actual

36:46

number of them is vanishingly small. Out

36:49

of a northern population of twenty two

36:51

million, maybe there

36:53

were three hundred arrests you could point

36:55

to as political. And

36:58

in many cases they're not even under taken at

37:00

Lincoln's behest undertaken by

37:03

military department commanders. And

37:06

in almost every case that I'm aware of, people

37:09

in order to be released, all they had to do is to take

37:11

an oath of allegiance to the United States. So

37:15

even when you examine these cases

37:18

carefully, even then, even

37:20

when Lincoln is making a mistake, it's

37:22

not a fatal mistake. Of course,

37:25

it's not a fatal mistake. Because if it had been a fatal

37:27

mistake, why are we not living in a dictatorship

37:29

today. No, the war is over.

37:31

We go right back to being what we were. Lincoln hadn't

37:33

revolutionized anything that way. So

37:37

yes, I'm going to tell you,

37:39

I hope it doesn't come as a surprise. Lincoln

37:41

did not walk on the Potomac. All

37:43

right, We've got him in the Lincoln Memorial there,

37:46

but he did not walk on the Potomac. He made

37:48

mistakes, and I

37:50

think he would have said the same thing.

37:52

I've always thought the Jettis

37:55

sort of address, in addition to being poetry

37:57

and remarkably spiritual, in some

37:59

way, was the kickoff

38:01

speech of his reelection campaign and

38:04

sort of created an amazing moral dilemma

38:06

that in the end of vote against Lincoln

38:10

was to vote that these young men should have died in vain.

38:13

Do you think he had any sense of framing sixty

38:16

four when he gave the speech in November of sixty

38:18

three?

38:19

People had suggested then one of

38:21

the reasons he does come to Gettysburg is because

38:24

there's a certain concern that the governor of

38:26

Pennsylvania, Republican Governor Andrew Curtin,

38:29

might have been a possible rival

38:33

for the Republican nomination. I

38:35

think as pushing things to extremes,

38:38

Lincoln doesn't betray any sign while

38:41

he is at Gettysburg, while he's going to Gettysburg,

38:43

while he's coming back from Gettysburg, that

38:47

he felt that he needed

38:49

to start taking out an insurance policy for

38:51

his reelection or his renomination. Actually,

38:54

at that point, in the fall of

38:56

eighteen sixty three, things

38:58

were really looking very good for him. He

39:01

had written a public letter in September

39:03

of eighteen sixty three in which he talked about

39:06

how the Mississippi River, the father of

39:08

waters, now flows unvexed

39:10

to the sea, how the prospects

39:13

for peace do not look so far

39:15

off as they seemed. So I don't think he's

39:17

coming to Gettysburg because he's got reelection anxieties

39:20

at that point. He will have

39:22

reelection anxieties months later

39:24

when it appears that the war has stalemated,

39:28

and that's what will lead him in August of

39:31

eighteen sixty four to

39:34

write a document that he has his cabinet endures,

39:37

saying it does not look like this

39:39

administration is going to be reelected. But

39:42

I think in the fall of eighteen sixty

39:44

three, he's got other things on his mind. He

39:46

really wants to point us in the direction

39:49

of where he thinks peace lies,

39:52

and the path to peace is

39:54

really going to have to lie through

39:57

that action of dedication

39:59

that he describes in the address.

40:02

Do you think if Lincoln had survived,

40:05

the reconstruction would have been dramatically

40:07

different.

40:08

Well, it wouldn't have been worse, that's for sure.

40:11

It's hard to imagine how we could have botched reconstruction

40:13

more and a large measure of that is

40:16

due to Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson.

40:20

There are dangers in

40:22

imposing what if questions. You know, as

40:25

a history person, and

40:27

wherever I go people ask me

40:29

exactly this question, what do you think would have happened

40:32

if Lincoln had served out that second

40:34

term to which he was elected in November

40:37

sixty four. Well, part of me wants

40:39

to say, who can answer that question? You just can't

40:41

know. But I get asked at so

40:43

many times that I'll yield

40:46

the point. In fact, I yield that point

40:48

in the epilogue of the book, and I say, all right,

40:50

I'll break my own rule, and I'll

40:52

speculate. I think certainly

40:55

he would have put his shoulder to the wheel

40:57

for black voting. He's already

40:59

giving the signs of that in the

41:01

year before his death. I

41:04

think he probably would have looked for

41:06

a longer reconstruction

41:08

period, probably with more involvement

41:11

of the military, not so much because

41:13

he wanted to suppress the South

41:16

as because he wanted to give a chance for an entirely

41:18

new political generation to grow up in the

41:20

South. And as it is, reconstruction

41:23

strictly defined, really only last

41:26

twelve years. That's not a whole lot of time to do

41:28

things. And I think there's

41:30

probably some value to

41:32

wondering if Lincoln would

41:35

have paid attention to the economic future

41:38

of the freed slaves. Here

41:40

are people who have worked this land, and

41:43

it was a tenet of

41:45

liberal democracy all the way back to John Locke

41:49

that you establish ownership

41:51

of property by mixing your labor

41:53

with the land. And I think he

41:55

would have looked at lands that are

41:57

abandoned by Confederate officials

42:00

flee into exile as fair

42:02

game for assigning

42:04

to the slaves. He starts to do that on

42:07

the Sea Islands on the coastal strip

42:10

of Georgia and South Carolina before

42:12

the end of the war, and I think he probably would have

42:14

looked to that as giving the freed

42:16

slaves not just the vote, but the economic

42:19

heft to go along with it

42:21

to support this advance into full

42:23

and equal citizenship. But so

42:26

I'm going to put a butt in here, he

42:29

would only have been president for three more years

42:32

if he observes the usual two term

42:34

rule, which at that point was not specified

42:37

yet in the Constitution, that's not

42:39

going to be a whole lot of time to supervise

42:41

it. So even if he had had

42:44

all these intentions that I'm talking about,

42:46

he might not have had the time. And

42:49

even then, the challenge of reconstruction

42:52

was so enormous it's

42:54

entirely possible it might have been beyond the grasp

42:56

even of Abraham Lincoln

42:59

to pull off with success. We

43:02

just don't know. All

43:04

that we can say is we probably

43:06

could not have done worse than we did.

43:09

You've always been remarkably

43:11

insightful. Every time I turn to you for advice.

43:14

You bring a perspective that's

43:17

extraordinarily educated and

43:19

at the same time as an amazing amount

43:22

of wisdom. So I really want to thank

43:24

you for joining me your new book,

43:26

Our Ancient Faith Lincoln Democracy

43:29

in the American Experiment. It's so

43:31

helpful in replacing

43:33

our understanding of how a divided

43:36

nation can in fact find a way

43:38

forward, and it's very relevant

43:40

today in terms of the principles we should

43:42

apply. And Our Ancient Faith is available

43:44

in Amazon and the Bookstore US everywhere

43:47

will be on our show page. So I

43:49

just want to thank you personally for taking

43:51

this kind of time to help educate

43:53

the rest of us.

43:54

Always a pleasure, my friend, Always a pleasure.

44:00

Thank you to my guests, Alan ce Gelzo. You

44:02

can get a link to buy his new book Our

44:05

Ancient Faith, Lincoln, Democracy,

44:07

and the American Experiment on our show

44:09

page at newtsworld dot com.

44:11

Newtsworld is produced by Ginglish three sixty

44:14

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44:16

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44:18

researcher is Rachel Peterson. The

44:20

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44:23

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