Aaron Sheehan-Dean
speaker
924 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 24 Aug
Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Garrison famously burns the Constitution in the 1850s and calls it a covenant with hell because it sanctions slavery.
But Lincoln does not see it that way.
Lincoln sees...
a kind of continuity of lowercase d democratic republicanism that will persevere.
And he's saying that November of 1863, maybe it seems more likely than less likely at that moment, though there's still a huge amount of hard fighting left in the Civil War.
And so Lincoln, in a way, is still using that to kind of inspire optimism and faith, I think.
It's true.
I mean, he famously says in that address, the world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but they should remember forever the sacrifice made by those people.
And of course, it's wound up being the opposite, as you point out.
Yeah, I do.
I mean, I think, you know, James McPherson has a collection of essays called The Second American Revolution of the famous Civil War historian.
And Greg Downs, a great Civil War historian, just recently had a book of the same title, sort of thinking about this as not a kind of smooth continuity, but as a moment of rupture in which something new is created.
And I think Lincoln is, in fact, performing, as I say, a kind of sleight of hand.
The term that Downs uses is whitewash.
That Lincoln is concealing the radicalism of what the Civil War is creating by talking about this continuity.
And for Lincoln, the preservation of democratic order
a democratic republic of a government of the people, by the people, for the people, is what's most important.
At the same time, the United States that exits the Civil War, particularly with the post-war amendments that transform us from a constitutionalism of negative liberty, those first 10 amendments are restrictions on the capacity of the state to do things interfering with the civil liberties that we enjoy as citizens,
And now we have a vision of positive liberty, a grant of power to the federal government to do things like end slavery, to ensure that all citizens are treated equal before the law.
This is a tremendously powerful idea and really a fundamental reshaping of how the American law at its core works.
Showing 461–480 of 924 · page 24 of 47
← Previous
Next →