What if Lincoln Had Lived?

Hope College, the History Department, and the Van Raalte Farm Civil War Muster of Holland are pleased to welcome world-renowned author, eminent Civil War historian, and prize-winning Lincoln scholar, Dr. Allen C. Guelzo from Princeton University. Professor Guelzo is the 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. The topic is What if Lincoln Had Lived?  Dr. Guelzo’s talk will touch on four likely scenarios for a very different reconstruction than the one we experienced at the hands of Andrew Johnson: Lincoln’s support for black voting rights, Lincoln’s encouragement of black economic integration, Lincoln’s interest in settlement of the west, and finally Lincoln’s desire to “clean the Confederate slate” by encouraging the Confederate leadership to flee into exile and be replaced by a new Unionist Southern leadership. 

Dr. Guelzo won book awards for Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, and Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America. His articles and essays have appeared in scholarly journals, and also in The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The National Interest, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times. He has been featured on NPR, the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, and Brian Lamb’s Booknotes.

He has been a member of the National Council on the Humanities, a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Charles Warren Center for American Studies at Harvard University. His most recent books are Reconstruction: A Concise History and Robert E. Lee: A Life.

Additionally, he will be speaking at Van Raalte Farm Civil War Muster, Saturday, September 17 at 11:00 am on the Farmhouse Porch, Van Raalte Farm, 1076 Sixteenth Street, Holland.  The topic is Our Shadow in the Storms: Ulysses S. Grant, The First Civil Rights President.

For more information on the Civil War Muster weekend activities, visit https://vanraaltefarmcivilwarmuster.wpcomstaging.com/