Colloquium: Lincoln as President
Allen C. Guelzo and Mark E. Neely
“My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks.... My father ... removed from Kentucky to ... Indiana, in my eighth year.... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.... Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all.”
Abraham Lincoln, considered by most our greatest President, and certainly the most complex person to occupy the White House, remains an enigma. His interior life is veiled from view, as it was in the campaign biography he wrote for the 1860 election. As a result, historians have often underestimated Lincoln. This colloquium, led by two of the most sophisticated Lincoln scholars, will offer a deeper understanding of Lincoln and his time, as he rose to meet the greatest challenges our nation has ever faced.
We will examine the relationship between Lincoln’s views on slavery and economics, and situate his political beliefs in the policies of the Whig party. We will also consider the ways in which his views on religion informed his behavior. We will pay particular attention to Lincoln as wartime President and the suspension of Habeas Corpus, as well as the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln’s little understood strategy for eliminating slavery.
Allen Guelzo and Mark Neely are two of the leading historians on Lincoln. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College and a two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize, for Redeemer President and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Neely is a professor in the history department at Penn State and the winner of a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties.