Allen C. Guelzo quotes

[T]he Calhounite Confederacy, despite its Lost Cause apologists and their determination to apotheosize the Confederacy as "conservative", has nothing that binds it to a genuinely republican conservatism. The Confederacy was what William Russell Howard called "a modern Sparta", not a democratic Athens, much less a republican Rome. (Allen C. Guelzo)
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
Technically, Reconstruction was "over" when the last of the Confederate states had written new state constitutions and elected representatives and senators in conformity with the Reconstruction Acts. This happened fairly quickly, between June 1868 and July 1870, and it put in place state governments that were largely dominated by Republicans and that made heroic efforts to make a reality of voting rights for the freed slaves. But one by one, the wheels came off these reconstructed state governments and the old Southern Democratic power machines regained control. But "regained” is too anodyne; "overthrew” is the real word, since the recapture of these state governments was accomplished by violence and black voter intimidation.
Allen C. Guelzo
The political idealism of the Revolution also encouraged, and sometimes forced, white slave owners to liberate their slaves.
Allen C. Guelzo
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
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
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
Southern slave owners constantly agitated in the 1850s for state centralization of economic activities that would promote slave agriculture: state-sponsored agricultural surveys, state-subsidized agricultural periodicals, and state investment in railroads (at more than twice the rate of Northern state assistance) which would unite the South and the West and encourage more intensive cotton cultivation. They were, as historian John Majewski remarks, the forerunners of the "southern Progressives of the early twentieth century."
Allen C. Guelzo
[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
There has never been a freedom, of course, that someone has not proved ingenious enough to abuse.
Allen C. Guelzo
[T]he wall of separation between public and private higher education has been eroding for the last half-century. Funding from public sources now constitutes the bulk of higher-education resources in the United States, whether in the form of government subventions for research and programs, or in the much vaster influx of government-guaranteed student loans. For all realistic purposes, the distinction between public and private higher education has ceased to exist. Further, the vast numbers of young American adults being drawn in to the college and university system (some 20.4 million, up by 25 percent from 2000 alone)-on the assumption that college degrees are virtually a sine qua non of entrance into profitable commerce or lucrative professions-has evaporated what little is left of the pretense that academe constitutes some monastic realm, beyond the orbit of civil society. (Allen C. Guelzo)
[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
Where a republic demands equality, and equality tends to ensure mobility, oligarchy is about hierarchy and stasis.
Allen C. Guelzo
Protecting slavery, Lincoln declared, had become the chief irritant that provoked the Southern states to reach for the solution of disunion.
Allen C. Guelzo
[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
Defending slavery deprived the Confederate soldier to the same claim to nobility, but not to tragedy.
Allen C. Guelzo
The real crime of white supremacy was not that it put up statues, or even that it made speeches, but that it attacked citizens and passed laws.
Allen C. Guelzo
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
Today's despisers of free speech have their roots in a different ideology from the tribal sort that was used to justify slaveholding and Puritanism. This newer ideology began with Karl Marx-or rather, with the struggle of Marxist intellectuals to explain the failure of the European proletariat to rise in violent revolution at the outbreak of World War I. Rather than joining in solidarity with the working classes of other nations, European workers rallied in dismaying numbers to their national flags, exhausted themselves in a four-year killing spree that beggared all previous descriptions of war, and then succumbed to waves of populist fascism. The only revolution that Marxists could tease out of the charnel house of the Great War was a coup d'état in the most backward and least industrially developed empire of Europe and, even then, only by the substitution of what Vladimir Lenin called a "vanguard” of Marxist elites rather than a spontaneous uprising of the workers.
Allen C. Guelzo
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
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)
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
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
[E]ven a great man cannot be wise in everything.
Allen C. Guelzo
[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