Lincoln and the Truth of Democracy
National Portrait Gallery
By Edith H. Jones
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.
Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment
by Allen Guelzo (Knopf, 2024)
Calvin Coolidge revered Abraham Lincoln. In a 1922 speech, Vice President Coolidge said that Lincoln’s example became a “means by which the people raise themselves to a new and higher order of nobility.” Echoing Coolidge, prize-winning historian Allen Guelzo depicts Lincoln’s moral steadfastness and insights into democracy and self-government in his new book, Our Ancient Faith.
With this “brief essay” written “in a time of shadows,” Guelzo examines Lincoln’s principles to uplift our troubled generation. The author or editor of nine other books about Lincoln, Guelzo is eminently suited to this task.
NEITHER SLAVE NOR MASTER
Our Ancient Faith is divided into two parts. The first chapters are devoted to Lincoln’s conception of democracy and self-government. Guelzo examines Lincoln’s writings, speeches, and anecdotes as the Union moved toward the Civil War.
Although Lincoln used the term democracy only 137 times in his writings, he said nothing could be “as clearly true as the truth of democracy.” His confidence in democracy, Guelzo explains, sprang from personal experience, from the instinct that love of liberty is part of the natural law, and from the past and future promise shown by the American experiment. Democratic ideals of liberty and equality enabled citizens to enjoy the fruits of their labor and initiative, confining no one to enforced servility or poverty.
No one, that is, but slaves. Lincoln abhorred slavery as the very opposite of the ideals of democratic self-government. Rather than define democracy in a positive sense, he jotted a stark and revealing note: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”
The dichotomy between masters and slaves permeates Guelzo’s discussion of Lincoln’s political thinking from before the Lincoln-Douglas debates to the Emancipation Proclamation. That dichotomy proved the imperative of government by consent. But there was also a moral necessity for limits on majority rule. Lincoln held that the role of law in democratic government is to place such limits, and citizens had to abide by those limits. As Guelzo puts it, “In Lincoln’s concept of democracy, reason stood on one side, passion and ‘outrages committed by mobs’ stood on the other.”
Coolidge Review readers will especially appreciate chapters highlighting Lincoln’s enthusiasm for free-market-based liberal theories of political economy and economic development. From John Stuart Mill, for instance, he gleaned the aphorism that “the hired laborer of yesterday, labors on his own account to-day; and will hire others to labor for him tomorrow.” Consequently, as president, Lincoln advanced the Homestead Act, the transcontinental railroad, and the creation of a national currency. Ralph Waldo Emerson aptly characterized his policies in eulogizing Lincoln as “a middle-class president” for a “middle-class country,” a man who looked to the welfare of all by fostering the means of self-advancement. Economic self-improvement went hand in hand with democratic self-government.
STILL THE LAST BEST HOPE
The second half of the book chronicles Lincoln’s responses to the challenges to democratic self-rule posed by slavery and the Civil War. Guelzo evenhandedly assesses criticisms that Lincoln was insufficiently sensitive to African Americans’ rights, that he violated civil liberties while prosecuting the war, and that he unduly delayed emancipation. Often the president faced no good alternatives. Overall, he exercised prudence, adhered to the rule of law with few exceptions, and forswore vengeance. In the end, because he would not be a slave, he was not a master.
Because Guelzo ranges widely over intellectual and American history and political theory in portraying Lincoln’s concept of democracy, the foregoing description states broad themes without doing justice to the eloquence of the author’s full achievement.
The final chapter, however, finishes Guelzo’s picture by asking, “What if Lincoln had lived?” Guelzo speculates how post–Civil War Reconstruction might have turned out. But then he applies Lincoln’s principles of democracy to today’s rancorous political divisions.
Summoning Lincoln’s concept of democracy, and adding his special virtues—resilience, humility, persistence, work, and dignity—Guelzo concludes: “Even in its faults, then and now, democracy is still the best method for people to live lives free from domination and exploitation. Lincoln, then, was not wrong to trust that ‘our principle, however baffled, or delayed, will finally triumph.’”
Edith H. Jones is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.