A Relevant Letter

For the past week, I have been watching the wonderful, insightful, and engaging lectures on Abraham Lincoln by Dr. Allen C. Guelzo. I like such thirty-minute "Great Courses" lectures, since they fit perfectly with the duration of my workout routine (on an elliptical machine). 

At the time he taped these lectures, Dr. Guelzo was a professor of history at Gettysburg College, which is an institution of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Now he is a Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities and Director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. In addition to his other academic degrees, he earned a Master of Divinity degree from Philadelphia Theological Seminary. Given his interest in Christian theology, it is not surprising that his most well-known and award-winning book is on Lincoln’s religious views: Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Eerdmans, 1999). (For Brian Lamb’s excellent interview with the author, go here.) (Further aside, but relevant for what follows: Back in the day, Dr. Guelzo supported Jack Kemp for president.)

I cannot help but draw attention to the lecture I watched this morning. It is the penultimate one in the course. Its title is “The President’s Sword.” While the second half of the lecture does, indeed, examine the failures and successes of U. S. Grant, the first half is all about Lincoln’s own “sword,” namely, his pen.

In the lecture, the professor reminds us of the president's 1861 letter to a special session of congress that he had called. Lincoln's letter, dated July 4th of that year, ought to be read by every American citizen, especially now, when, in our present national crisis, we have a sitting president who refuses to accept or publicly acknowledge the will of the majority of citizens who voted in the last presidential election. Would that the current leaders of the Republican Party would take to heart these words of their party’s most famous father.

According to Dr. Guelzo, “[Lincoln’s] first message to congress... turned into one of the greatest defenses ever offered for the essential role of [the] peaceful transfer of power as a key element of democracy…. In a democracy, majority rule, and therefore minorities must submit…. When minorities rise up against that rule and refuse to abide by the decision of the majority, then the very operations of democracy are disrupted, and the only result can be anarchy.”

The context to which Dr. Guelzo’s analysis applies, of course, was the aftermath of the 1860 presidential election.

Here’s a key paragraph from Lincoln’s letter:

"Our popular Government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled--the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains--its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets, and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided there can be no successful appeal back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace, teaching men that what they can not take by an election neither can they take it by a war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war."

To read the full letter online, go here.

I look forward to watching the final lecture, "The Dream of Lincoln," during tomorrow's workout.