For historians, hindsight can be a treacherous ally. Enabling us to trace the hidden patterns of past events, it beguiles us with the mirage of inevitability, the assumption that different outcomes lay beyond the limits of the possible.

Freedom has been privatized - it is how you dress, what your sexual orientation is, choosing your own life. That's fine. But that is not what Thomas Jefferson was talking about.

A man working for wages his whole life is not really free. That is why Jefferson said, you have to own land. Southerners said, - and they weren't being hypocritical - they said slavery is the foundation of freedom because if you own slaves, you are freer yourself.

Lincoln sees slavery in some ways as a theft of labor. A slave is a laborer who is being denied the fruits of his labor.

Lincoln was a modernizer, so to speak. He believed in economic development. As a Whig before the war he favored what we would call infrastructure spending, government appropriation for canals, railroads, river and harbor improvements, and a tariff to protect industry. He believed in this market revolution that was sweeping across Northern society. He himself benefited from it in his own life.

There are those who view the abolitionists as just maniacs, apolitical fanatics who helped to cause the war, and Lincoln is the model of responsible statesmanship. I think that is a misconception, the idea that Lincoln knows what's possible and the abolitionists don't.

For historians, hindsight can be a treacherous ally. Enabling us to trace the hidden patterns of past events, it beguiles us with the mirage of inevitability, the assumption that different outcomes lay beyond the limits of the possible.