The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It by Richard Hofstader

“If there was a flaw in all this, it was one that Lincoln was never forced to meet. Had he lived to seventy, he would have seen the generation brought up on self-help come into its own, build oppressive business corporations, and begin to close off those treasured opportunities for the little man. Further, he would have seen his own party become the jackal of the vested interests, placing the dollar far, far ahead of the man. He himself presided over the social revolution that destroyed the simple equalitarian order of the 1840’s, corrupted what remained of its values, and caricatured its ideals. Booth’s bullet, indeed, saved him from something worse than embroilment with the radicals over Reconstruction . It confined his life to the happier age that Lincoln understood—which unwittingly he helped to destroy—the age that gave sanction to the honest compromises of his thought.”

-Richard Hofstader, 1948