Allen C. Guelzo > Quotes

“Patriotism without criticism has no head; criticism without patriotism has no heart.”
― Allen C. Guelzo

“The promoters of emancipation were not bent on promoting a revolution so much as they were intent on snuffing one out – a backward-looking, aristocratic revolution – in order to put the South back on the track it should have been on from the beginning of the republic.”
― Allen C. Guelzo

“It seems only human nature to hang the label irrational on what we do not understand, since it is easy for us to assume that something must be irrational if our ingenuity is unequal to the task of deciphering it. That may actually reflect more on the limits of our ingenuity than on any supposed irrationality in what we are studying. For that reason, it should come as a practical and fundamental warning not to impute irrationality to people in the study of history (or any other human endeavor) too quickly.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“have got Lee just where I want him; he must fight me on my own ground.” So he waited to see what would happen—which was usually a fatal thing to do in the vicinity of Robert E. Lee.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”23”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“Dan Sickles belonged in a novel rather than an army. Corrupt and confident, he coruscated political charm, talked in the grandest of hotel manners, and oozed sleaze and dissimulation from every pore.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen? … It is absolutely certain that the African race were not included under the name of citizens of a State… and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them. The government did”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“all men are created equal.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“Of course, for many of the Civil War’s cultured despisers, the Union is old hat and liberal democracy the listless desert of history’s last—and very dull—man. Emancipation makes a better story for our times. But emancipation cannot be so easily detached from union (which is another way of saying that racial justice and liberal democracy rise or fall with each other). Lincoln insisted that the Civil War was being fought by the United States in order to restore the constitutionally mandated union of those states, and the Gettysburg Address was his most eloquent declaration that the ultimate purpose of the war was the test it afforded of the practical viability of democracy. This was not because race, slavery, and emancipation were unimportant to Lincoln, but because the Union (and the liberal democracy it represented) and emancipation were not, after all, mutually exclusive goals. Unless the Union was restored, there would be no practical possibility of emancipation, since the overwhelming majority of American slaves would, in that case, end up living in a foreign country, and beyond the possible grasp of Lincoln’s best antislavery intentions.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“And so Jefferson wrote the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which organized the new territories of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin so that slavery would be permanently illegal there.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. …”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“how ignorant he was; how childlike … He was simply beyond analysis; so simple”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“they saw in democracy something more than opportunities for self-interest and self-aggrandizement,”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“its more famous neighbor in Lexington, the Virginia Military Institute (150). The outbreak of the Civil War nearly blotted Washington College from view, first by diverting students to Confederate military service (in the 4th, 25th, 52nd, and 58th Virginia Infantry and 14th Virginia Cavalry), and then by attracting the unwanted attention of marauding Union forces under David Hunter in 1864. “Hunters Army” ensured that “all closed doors were broken down” and “Window Glass & Sash were smashed to pieces,” so that the trustees were “compelled to report the buildings in a very dilapidated condition.” By that summer’s end, Washington College barely had a”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Robert E. Lee: A Life

“of his rank.” When the federal advance on”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Robert E. Lee: A Life

“Mercy—or at least a nolle prosequi—may, perhaps, be the most appropriate conclusion to the crime—and the glory—of Robert E. Lee after all.32”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Robert E. Lee: A Life

“refusal to abide by the rules of democracy”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“Men who are industrious, and sober, and honest in the pursuit of their own interests should after a while accumulate capital, and after that should be allowed to enjoy it in peace, and also if they should choose when they have accumulated it to use it to save themselves from actual labor and hire other people to labor for them is right. In doing so they do not wrong the man they employ.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“On the side of the Union,” Lincoln said, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.70”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“The Cashtown area did not afford nearly enough of such space to support three of Hill’s divisions plus two of Longstreet’s. Hill”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“proclaimed a predictably democratic unwillingness to be disagreed with, and used that unwillingness to pull down the entire house.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“But it is not clear that even the best of democracies can count on disagreement always being held within the bounds of mutual political forbearance or producing untroubled outcomes.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment

“enrolled, and just seven sophomores and ten freshmen. All that remained of the college’s endowment was $2,458.29 in worthless Confederate currency, a few minuscule real estate investments, and George Washington’s original stock gift. When it prepared to open for classes in 1865, it could count on the services of only four instructors: James J. White, a classics professor; John L. Campbell, a chemist, geologist, and Presbyterian elder; Carter Johns Harris, another classicist; and Alexander L. Nelson, a mathematician.2”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Robert E. Lee: A Life

“Wisconsin Volunteers: War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865 (Madison, WI: Democrat Printing, 1914),”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“Lincoln was “the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, or the difference of color.”92 Nor did Lincoln mean”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“Before the Civil War, Mark Twain would write, “there was nothing resembling a worship of money or its possessor” among Americans. But the politicians and financiers “reversed the commercial morals of the United States. . . . The people had desired money before his day,” but now they had been “taught . . . to fall down and worship it.”2”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Reconstruction: A Concise History

“This was, after all, an army whose cause was inextricably bound up with the defense of black enslavement.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“the eve of the Civil War, Washington College’s student body—just 93 students in 1859—lagged behind the student population of the University of Virginia (419), Hampden-Sydney College (119), and even”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Robert E. Lee: A Life

“The struggle of the Union and Confederate economies to supply and support their armies thus became a reflection of the prewar antagonism between liberal democracy and slavery. The free-labor ideology of the Republican Party, with its confidence that a “harmony of interests” naturally existed between capital and labor, found convenient expression in Stanton’s decision to step back from drastic economic interventions and allow Northern capitalism to lay its own golden eggs for the war effort. The Confederacy, insensibly obeying the logic of an authoritarian labor system, conscripted, confiscated, and imposed state-ordered controls. And within that logic lay many of the seeds of the Confederacy’s destruction.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“The end of Reconstruction is often spoken of in psychological terms, as a collapse of white Americans’ nerve, or as a failure of Republican political will, when in cold truth Reconstruction did not fail so much as it was overthrown. Southern whites played the most obvious role in this overthrow, but they would never have succeeded without the consent of the Northern Democrats, who had never been in favor of an equitable Reconstruction, much less a bourgeois one.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Reconstruction: A Concise History