Quotes from Allen C. Guelzo

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.

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.

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

Patriotism without criticism has no head; criticism without patriotism has no heart.

proclaimed a predictably democratic unwillingness to be disagreed with, and used that unwillingness to pull down the entire house.

refusal to abide by the rules of democracy

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.

they saw in democracy something more than opportunities for self-interest and self-aggrandizement,

that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. …

This was, after all, an army whose cause was inextricably bound up with the defense of black enslavement.

One voice was raised in dissent. A Springfield lawyer, a former member of Congress and longtime Whig named Abraham Lincoln, took up Douglas's defense of Kansas-Nebraska at the Illinois statehouse in Springfield the day after Douglas spoke at the state fair. In the course of a three-hour speech, Lincoln proceeded to tear Kansas-Nebraska and popular sovereignty to shreds.

how ignorant he was; how childlike … He was simply beyond analysis; so simple

Whatever moments he could spare from self-adornment were devoted to the neglect of his duties, and he was so little good as an officer that Longstreet had to assign staffers to Pickett to explain things "very fully; indeed sometimes stay with him to make sure he did not get astray.

Whatever the reason for enlisting, by 1865 the Union had sworn in 2,128,948 men, approximately one-third of the military-age male population of the northern states, while the Confederacy probably enrolled a little under 1 million men, about four-fifths of its military-age male population.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

No one loves an archive better than I do. I can smell a good one half-a-block away - all that brittle papyrus dust is music to my nostrils.

It's often said that leadership is the art of getting people to do what you want, and making them think it's what they want. This captures a lot of what Abraham Lincoln did.

It is possible to have pardon without forgiveness-a murderer can be pardoned by the governor, but that does not mean the victim's family has forgiven him. And there can be forgiveness without pardon.