When I need to stretch my legs, I can walk across the street to the museum and relax among the illustrations of Abraham Lincoln's life, too. In a way, it reflects the halves of Lincoln's own character - one all jokes and buffoonery, the other all high-minded seriousness. If he could absorb both into his personality, I think I can, too.
Allen C. GuelzoPatriotism without criticism has no head; criticism without patriotism has no heart.
Allen C. GuelzoWhat Thomas DiLorenzo misses is that the other abolitions were either very limited as in the liberation of the serfs by Alexander II or far away from the metropolitan center of those nations - the French and British abolitions were of slavery in the West Indies.
Allen C. GuelzoWhat Abraham Lincoln had to face was a culturally and politically cohesive bloc of states comprising half the country, refusing to discuss even the limitation of slavery; while he had only the most feeble means of enforcement. The British and the French could do their emancipating at a distance; Lincoln had armed resistance almost literally at his doorstep.
Allen C. GuelzoAbraham Lincoln did speak about keeping the man before the dollar, but he was talking at that moment about slavery, and referring to keeping the humanity of the slave higher in view than the self-interest of the slaveholders. This does not quite make Lincoln a challenger of the corporations; in fact, he prefaced those words by saying that Republicans were for the man AND the dollar.
Allen C. GuelzoWe still know so little about how the brain interacts with the body chemistry or, for that matter, whether we should be talking about the brain or the mind, that it would be perilous to hazard any guess about the way Abraham Lincoln's biological health may or may not have affected him. Of course, we don't have Lincoln on hand to ask him directly; but even if we did, we still might not be able to make sense of how all the parts worked together.
Allen C. GuelzoUntil the early 90s, when I was working on a project about the idea of free will in American philosophy. I knew that Lincoln had had something to say about "necessity" and "fatalism," and so I began writing him into the book. In fact, Lincoln took over. I wrote instead 'Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President,' in 1999, and I've splitting rails with Mr. Lincoln ever since. If there's a twelve-step process for this somewhere, I haven't found it yet.
Allen C. Guelzo