Lincoln saw a future that threatened all
You can just hear his tinny but sincere voice.
“The operation of this mobocratic spirit, which all must admit, is now abroad in the land… any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed…whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last.”
When 28-year-old Illinois state representative Abraham Lincoln felt the need to issue this stern warning one January night at the Springfield Lyceum 186 years ago, was he anticipating MAGA? January 6? The end of everything? Sounds like it. And this was Illinois, not a state where you’d think slavery was a hot button issue. Not in 1838.
The tall, clean-shaven Lincoln was then some 23 years and three months away from delivering his Inaugural Address on the steps of the Capitol in March of 1861, a surprising choice as our 16th President. A bare month after his Inauguration, a Confederate attack on Fort Sumter initiated the Civil War. Did Abe feel that all that coming on?
Lincoln was responding to the tribal fever he felt all around him in what was suddenly a hot-blooded Illinois. A few months earlier, a pro-slavery mob had murdered journalist Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist. Nobody at the time said anything about fine people being on either side. Yet the war, which wouldn’t start for many years and was several states away, somehow seemed to be in the Illinois air. Lincoln wanted to remind everybody what we had already, a democracy, was worth keeping.
He offered a simple solution. “Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.”
How would Honest Abe react to news of the plan of the alternate electors, the Insurrection, the Big Lie, the president himself — holding Lincoln’s own former office — calling the Secretary of State of Georgia asking for enough votes to swing an election? I think we have a pretty good idea.
Many years before Lincoln would assume the office of the presidency, he was speaking to the Springfield Lyceum as a two-time state representative, already thinking big and asking his audience to do the same.
“As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws,” he said that evening, “let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor; let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children’s liberty.”
To trample on the blood of his father. To tear the character of his own and his children’s liberty.
Remember, he wasn’t reading this from a teleprompter. He wasn’t campaigning, trying to win votes. Giving a speech for the newspapers. He was taking a stand because it was the right time to do so. Even if nobody particularly asked him to.
At the time, Lincoln was a scrawny, little known, two-time state rep from Illinois, years before the Great Conflict, almost psychically sensing what lie ahead for his country. Almost certainly never thinking on that January night in a few swift years, he would be the one to try to stitch that badly torn fabric back together.
“In short,” the young Lincoln continued that evening, “let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”
Let’s read that again.
“Of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions,” he said. This was 1838.
Most of us know about, maybe even memorized, his 272-word Gettysburg Address. Not as many study his brilliant 703-word Second Inaugural Address — “With malice towards none and charity for all…” where Lincoln, on the verge of winning the Civil War, found a way to cast the Great War as an scourge that came from Above. So that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash (or slavery) shall be paid by another drawn with the sword (the war).” One historian called it “the least triumphant speech ever delivered by a conqueror.”
Lincoln’s Lyceum speech — thank goodness someone wrote it down — came some 27 years before the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Great War. It came on a chilly January evening following the mob murder of an Illinois journalist who happened to be an abolitionist.
He wasn’t worried about his base. He wasn’t worried about the polls. Lincoln might have been a long way from the
White House that evening, but he saw a future that threatened all that had come before. He’s still right.