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There is no end to the flow of books written about Abraham Lincoln. But Allen Guelzo's 1999 book, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, is a solid part of the canon. An intellectual biography of Lincoln, the book won the Lincoln Prize for 2000 and the 2000 Book Prize for the Abraham Lincoln Institute. Guelzo won both prizes again in 2005 for Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America.

Now Guelzo has followed up with Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), a collection of essays on key (and sometimes conflicting) aspects of Lincoln's thought. From 1998 to 2004, Guelzo was the dean of the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University. Since 2004 he has been the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College.

In the introduction to Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas, you write about the way people frequently ask, "What would Lincoln do?" WWLD, if you will. Given the tremendous technological, political, and cultural gap between Lincoln's time and ours, how realistic is it to ask that question?

It's not realistic at all.The interest in WWLD is more metaphorical, more a matter of character questions. People are really asking what kind of a person Lincoln was. When we see intractable political or economic problems, we want those traits to be deployed and to succeed in the same way that Lincoln succeeded in facing the Civil War.

Since Lincoln was not a religious believer in the way that most other Christians of his time were, where did Lincoln's morality come from?

It came from a number of sources, the most important of which is natural law theory. But Lincoln, not a professional philosopher, dabbled in a number of systems or theories about virtue. He didn't really feel under any particular compulsion to be completely consistent in how he used them.One part of Lincoln embraced utilitarian ethics. And I literally mean utilitarian in the sense of 19th-century British liberal utilitarianism.

"The greatest good for the greatest number"?

Exactly. He even quotes that line of Bentham's. And we know that Lincoln read very extensively in liberal Utilitarians like John Stuart Mill. In one of Lincoln's most famous descriptions of the ideal economy, he says that the prudent penniless beginner works for someone else, then the next year, having saved that money, he works on his own account, and then the year after that he's acquired so much success he hires someone else. Lincoln says that's the ideal system.

From his earliest entrance into politics in the 1830s until the mid 1850s, Lincoln is dealing pretty much on the basis of liberal utilitarianism. But when he encounters the slave crisis, he has to find another base from which to operate, because liberal utilitarianism's fixation on nonmoral considerations—on property rights, on economics, as the basis for understanding human relations—didn't offer a very stable ground from which to criticize slavery. In searching for an alternative ground on which to base his opposition, Lincoln started reaching for natural law.

That's significant for the religious part because the moment he does that, he steps into a circle that is shared widely in the 19th century in America by religious thinkers. The founding of the American republic is very much an epoch in the Enlightenment. And in the 1780s and 1790s, that meant the marginalization of religion, which in this case, really, was Christianity.

How do you get belief out of the prison of these marginalized religious institutions and back on the public square? The method for doing that is natural law because Christianity certainly had a long record of appealing to natural law as being the same message as that which is preached by Christian revelation. The one is natural revelation; the other is special revelation.This became a default position for American religious figures who no longer could get the attention of the American system by appealing to divine revelation.To appeal instead to natural revelation is not denominational, it's not institutional, and it's something that can appeal to everyone because the Enlightenment itself did a lot with natural law. With Lincoln appealing to natural law as a basis to oppose slavery, he suddenly finds himself standing side by side with Christian thinkers who are preaching natural law.

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