Our Ancient Faith
Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
An intimate study of Abraham Lincoln’s powerful vision of democracy, which guided him through the Civil War and is still relevant today—by a best-selling historian and three-time winner of the Lincoln Prize
*Winner of the 2024 Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Prize*
"It is altogether fitting and proper that, with this meditation on democracy and its most subtle defender, Allen Guelzo again demonstrates that he is today’s most profound interpreter of this nation’s history and significance." —George F. Will
Abraham Lincoln grappled with the greatest crisis of democracy that has ever confronted the United States. While many books have been written about his temperament, judgment, and steady hand in guiding the country through the Civil War, we know less about Lincoln’s penetrating ideas and beliefs about democracy, which were every bit as important as his character in sustaining him through the crisis.
Allen C. Guelzo, one of America’s foremost experts on Lincoln, captures the president’s firmly held belief that democracy was the greatest political achievement in human history. He shows how Lincoln’s deep commitment to the balance between majority and minority rule enabled him to stand firm against secession while also committing the Union to reconciliation rather than recrimination in the aftermath of war. In bringing his subject to life as a rigorous and visionary thinker, Guelzo assesses Lincoln’s actions on civil liberties and his views on race, and explains why his vision for the role of government would have made him a pivotal president even if there had been no Civil War. Our Ancient Faith gives us a deeper understanding of this endlessly fascinating man and shows how his ideas are still sharp and relevant more than 150 years later.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Guelzo (Robert E. Lee) plumbs the depths of Abraham Lincoln's passion for American democracy in this combative study that seeks to silence the institution's "cultured despisers" by illuminating the president's eloquent defense of it (he called democracy his "ancient faith"). Bolstering Lincoln's philosophy of democracy, according to Guelzo, was his belief in the American system (where there were "no slaves and no masters except the self-driven and the self-mastered") and its entwined "mores" of property ownership, religious morality, toleration, and electioneering. Taking to task "Lincoln-haters," Guelzo justifies Lincoln's cancelling of habeas corpus during the Civil War, cheekily asserting that the arrests "did not exactly represent a Night of the Long Knives." Elsewhere, he sharply attacks contemporary critics who would deny Lincoln his status as "the Great Emancipator" as another example "of the rise of an Afro-pessimism which questions whether the entire premise of democratic government has failed on the doorstep of race." Throughout, Guelzo shines prodigious light on Lincoln's unshakable belief in democracy, while skirting the more problematic aspects of the president's political interactions with race as a mere persistent "zig zag" in his thoughts and actions. It's an erudite if contentious consideration of Lincoln's feelings about the American experiment.
