Allen C. Guelzo

"hat Reconstruction succeeded in doing: it helped us avoid a renewed outbreak of civil war ; it laid the legal and constitutional foundations for a more egalitarian America, foundations that it took on…"

"n the whole, given that the environment of the U.S. in the middle of the 19th century is so white supremacist in its assumptions, Lincoln is actually quite remarkable for standing apart from that."

"Defending slavery deprived the Confederate soldier to the same claim to nobility, but not to tragedy."

"The real crime of white supremacy was not that it put up statues, or even that it made speeches, but that it attacked citizens and passed laws."

"he very people who write so disparagingly about it either do not understand it, or I suspect even more, understand it all too well and do not like the implications of it."

"Lincoln was not eloquent in the usual 19th century way, certainly not in the romantic way. He was not a man of frothing at the mouth or shaking his fist in a dramatic way. Lincoln was logic, and when …"

"Where a republic demands equality, and equality tends to ensure mobility, oligarchy is about hierarchy and stasis."

"Union 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 America…"