Of course we can't know exactly and precisely what anyone thought. Of course we have to look at their actions. But after saying that you proceed to ... list a grab bag of Lincoln quotes claiming that they show "equivocation." You can't have it both ways: you can't attack Guelzo for simply including quotes and other written material, and then try to build a case out of written materials. If we judge wholly on actions we can discount your verbiage. If we do take his speeches into account, we can't confine our data to the few that you like to cite.
Any politician is going to tailor his statements to his audience and to the circumstances of the time. If he doesn't he's out of politics very shortly. I think you've been unduly influenced by the current concept of politicians as ideologues who simply repeat one extreme idea over and over again, but if you look at any elected politician's statements, especially those who've held administrative office they don't add up to such a monolithic picture.
I can't help noticing the slight of hand in your original post. You don't deal with what Guelzo said about Lincoln's economic ideas. Instead you launch into an attack on what you see as his wavering commitment to abolishing slavery and then on his lack of commitment to racial equality, finishing up with tariffs. That's four or five issues there: Lincoln's economic support for free labor and open competition in the free states, his opposition to the expansion of slavery, abolitionist tendencies he didn't share, a commitment to racial equality that wasn't his either, and his views on free trade and tariffs.
There may have been contradictions or "equivocations" in Lincoln's views, as there are in the views of all politicians if they are half-way honest with themselves and their public -- or if they aren't, but in the context of the times it wasn't an equivocation to oppose the expansion of slavery and accept slavery where it existed or to oppose slavery and not favor full racial equality.
Opposition to Kansas-Nebraska and Dred Scott, abolition, and racial equality were separate issues to the Northerners of the day and one's views on one issue didn't determine one's opinion about the others. Southerners tended to lump them together and attack Lincoln as an abolitionist and racial amalgamator. If you really want to represent the Southern point of view, maybe you should look into that aspect. Maybe they were on to something there. Ask lentulus.
What you offer up as contradictory or equivocal wouldn't appear that way to someone alive at the time. What is your normal baseline for unequivocal, uncontradictory politics anyway? Secessionists who screamed about freedom and equality while they got their living by exploiting unfree labor? The idea of Lincoln as uniquely hypocritical and scheming really doesn't fit the realities of his day.
It took 100 years to get from emancipation to a national commitment to racial equality. Lincoln was right in believing that the feelings of Whites would not accept equality for African-Americans. He may have been wrong in not pursuing that goal, but it would have meant an end to his political career and whoever became president in his place would not have been anymore inclined to support full equality.
I'm not nonsequitur. I don't enjoy putting up with all this nonsense and making the same response over and over again against other people's specious arguments. I miss him because he never tired of all this stuff and never let it get to him. He might have seemed testy at times, but given the provocation he handled himself quite well and put up with things that no ordinary mortal should be expected to put up with. If you relished the give and take of argument and finding someone who'd respond critically and seriously to every little claim and complaint you had, rather than people who'd simply agree with you and attack anyone who disagreed or people who'd simply dismiss your maunderings, maybe you miss him too.
Pardon us for not being familiar with Guelzo; I had to look him up in Wiki and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard, where Guelzo has a vita posted (why, I'm not sure, I couldn't see him listed as a Fellow, although he'd studied at Harvard). So granted that Guelzo, as the holder of an endowed chair (named for Henry Luce) at Gettysburg College, has chops and awards as a writer, it's still true that he writes down one side of the page, as a Unionist memorializer of Lincoln and his athloi on behalf of the proprietors of the Gilded Age.
It would have been nice, though, if Guelzo, knowing that National Review doesn't footnote, had provided a little context for some of his quotes -- although that might have been difficult, given his extensive use of them.
That all said, Guelzo's claims that Lincoln was an antisocialist and that the National Democracy was the forerunner, the spiritual cradle, of today's neo-Stalinists, are novel to say the least. One senses a stretch in pursuit of a cribbed point here, and so it'll have to be argued out.
One notices, too, that Guelzo confines his discussion of Lincoln's economic ideas to the sphere of books and public legislation, and does not show how it's of a piece with Lincoln's toleration and even fostering of access-capitalists and war profiteers like Ben Butler who were involved in the clandestine cotton trade through the front lines and the business of buying up confiscated Confederate properties that Lincoln taxed precisely so they could be confiscated -- demanding in his legislation that the taxes be paid in person, even by serving Confederate officers. Which doesn't exactly strike me as the kind of classical economic liberalism Ayn Rand would endorse.
Plus the added bonus of your usual feigned humility. But to no end, You just can't resist your need to amuse yourself by inserting numerous insults; some obvious, some disguised as ‘scholarly’ appearing commentary, while laying out your favorite canards.
Just look back....nine paragraphs to support your contentions. You must have exhausted yourself in defending what this writer is up to.
If one wanted to establish another Lincoln myth, then what would be the methodology to quickly obtain acceptance and source credibility in today's historical publishing community? You would begin with a general, loosely examined place to posit your contentions...say a blog. So you write a thesis like contention and post it on the web, knowing that you and others will refer back to it in future expansions of this Lincoln lore.
Then on to some other publication with obvious liberal standards of scholarly documentation. One uses this to quote the original blog, as well as now inserting other writers or historians that can be quoted, without adding their sources. So, what do you have? Nothing more than a superficially convincing series of contentions that appear to be documented, while in fact containing nothing but the opinions of others.
Then once you have deposited your assertions in several places that can be sourced, you move on to another publisher that will accept your work if you have the educational credentials and some relevant source, like National Review.
Voila!.....Mr. Guelzo gets his opinions posted without sourcing himself. Now he is free to make opinion seem like scholarly fact.
Since you believe that this is scholarly work for your thinking, fine.
But others do not agree with yours and his contentions, which is acceptable in the world of historical examination and scholarly query.
Unless you disagree with this, then why don't you post his sources, his secondary sources, and their sources. Then point out specific patterns of Lincoln behavior that manifest the Guelzo contentions. This will completely clear any conflict. If you are willing to spend the time composing nine paragraphs of rebuttal, you can do a search.
Let us see the evidence that Mr Lincoln's actual behavior was affected by the Guelzo factor.