Was Abraham Lincoln a racist?  Were his efforts at emancipation the mere cold calculations of a politician whose sole aim was to win the Civil War, or do they point to some deeper ideals of America’s first principles?  Joining Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is Lincoln historian Dr. Allen C. Guelzo for a wide-ranging conversation on how Lincoln’s efforts at ending slavery and saving the union may provide the clearest example of prudent American statesmanship in practice.

About Dr. Allen C. Guelzo

Excerpts from the James Madison Program

Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is a New York Times best-seller author, American historian and commentator on public issues.  He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, National Affairs, First Things, U.S. News & World Report, The Weekly Standard, Washington Monthly, National Review, the Daily Beast, and the Claremont Review of Books, and has been featured on NPR’s “Weekend Edition Sunday” and “On Point,” The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (2008), Meet the Press: Press Pass with David Gregory, The Civil War: The Untold Story (Great Divide Pictures, 2014), Race to the White House: Lincoln vs. Douglas (CNN, 2016), Legends and Lies: The Civil War (Fox, 2018), Reconstruction (PBS, 2019) and Brian Lamb’s “Booknotes.”  In 2010, he was nominated for a Grammy Award along with David Straithern and Richard Dreyfuss for their production of the entirety of The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (BBC Audio).  In 2018, he was a winner of the Bradley Prize, along with Jason Riley of The Wall Street Journal and Charles Kesler of the Claremont Institute.

He is Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar and Director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship.  Previously, he was Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, and the Director of Civil War Era Studies and the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College.  During 2010-11 and again in 2017-18, he served as the WL. Garwood Visiting Professor in the James Madison Program at Princeton University.  He holds the MA and PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania.

Among his many award-winning publications, he is the author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, which won both the Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize in 2000; Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (Simon & Schuster, 2004) which also won the Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize, for 2005; Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (Simon & Schuster, 2008), on the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858; a volume of essays, Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009) which won a Certificate of Merit from the Illinois State Historical Association in 2010; and Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction (in the Oxford University Press ‘Very Short Introductions’ series.  In 2012, he published Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction with Oxford University Press, and in 2013 Alfred Knopf published his book on the battle of Gettysburg (for the 150thanniversary of the battle), Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, which spent eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Gettysburg: The Last Invasion won the Lincoln Prize for 2014, the inaugural Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, the Fletcher Pratt Award of the New York City Round Table, and the Richard Harwell Award of the Atlanta Civil War Round Table.  His most recent publications are Redeeming the Great Emancipator (Harvard University Press, 2016) which originated as the 2012 Nathan Huggins Lectures at Harvard University, and Reconstruction: A Concise History (Oxford University Press, 2018).

He is one of Power Line’s 100 “Top Professors” in America.  In 2009, he delivered the Commonwealth Fund Lecture at University College, London, on “Lincoln, Cobden and Bright: The Braid of Liberalism in the 19th-Century’s Transatlantic World.”  He has been awarded the Lincoln Medal of the Union League Club of New York City, the Lincoln Award of the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia, and the Lincoln Award of the Union League of Philadelphia, in addition to the James Q. Wilson Award for Distinguished Scholarship on the Nature of a Free Society.  In 2018, he was named a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute.  He has been a Fellow of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, and currently serves as a Trustee of the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History.

Together with Patrick Allitt and Gary W. Gallagher, he team-taught The Teaching Company’s American History series, and as well as courses on Abraham Lincoln (Mr. Lincoln, 2005) on American intellectual history (The American Mind, 2006), the American Revolution (2007), and the Founders (America’s Founding Fathers, 2017).  From 2006 to 2013, he served as a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Dr. Guelzo’s latest book, Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment, which is discussed in this episode is available wherever books are sold.

He lives in Paoli and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Debra.  They have three children and five grandchildren.  His website is allenguelzo.com

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