Democracy’s Documents: Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Address

(Note: This is the third in the series of notable documents/speeches in American history.  All invite reflection about their relevance for strengthening democracy today.)

In January 1838, Abraham Lincoln was just 28 and in his second term as a representative in the Illinois state legislature.  The Lyceum Movement in the mid-nineteenth century encouraged the presentation of ideas to improve society. Having recently moved to the small town of Springfield, Lincoln spoke at a Lyceum meeting there.

Already an astute observer of American history, he had grown increasingly concerned at the violence threatening the republic that was then just fifty years old. A vigilante band in Mississippi had executed gamblers and a mulatto in St. Louis was burned to death without trial after being accused of murder.  Closer to home, Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist and newspaper editor, was murdered the previous November after a pro-slavery mob attacked the building where he had hidden his printing press.

Lincoln chose as his subject “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.”  While he decried recent instances of mob law, he was concerned about its more profound and long-lasting impact – the danger to American democracy itself.

He told his audience that America was so strong that it need not fear attack from abroad.  The greater peril was the violence within.  “[A]s a nation of freemen, we must live through all times, or die by suicide,” he said, a self-inflicted wound coming from “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country.”  The mob behavior his listeners had recently witnessed, as horrific as it was, constituted in the scale of things “a small evil.”  It was the spread of that mentality, the indirect consequences of it, that was the larger threat. 

This Lincoln said was true in two senses.  First, he warned his audience that the mobocratic spirit would lead people “to hang or burn someone who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is” and that they in turn might be killed “by the very same mistake.”  This could go on, he warned, “till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals are trodden down, and disregarded.”

Second, when the laws were this ignored, government would cease to be seen by the people as a guarantor of their safety.  People would:

“become tired of, and disgusted with, a Government that offers them no protection; and are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose. Thus,  then, by the operation of this mobocratic spirit, the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly those constituted like ours, may eventually be broken down and destroyed. - - I mean the attachment of the People.”

Lincoln leaves little doubt of what might well follow:

“At such time and under such circumstances, men of sufficient talent and ambition will not be wanting to seize the opportunity, strike the blow, and overturn the fair fabric” of self-government.

 “. . . men of ambition and talents will . . . continue to spring up amongst us.  And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passions, as others have so done before them.”

Recalling the deeds of “an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon” Lincoln understood that:

 “Towering genius disdains a beaten path.  It seeks regions hitherto unexplored . . . It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor. . . It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.”

There is but one alternative to prevent the dangers that the course of the mobocratic spirit will take, Lincoln argues.  Citizens must follow the law.  If bad laws exist, they “should be repealed as soon as possible” but should be “religiously observed” until they are.  As for the danger of a demagogue on the road to becoming a tyrant, the people must be united and “attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”

To do so, Lincoln ends his oration, they must no longer rely on the passions which helped our founders win the Revolution and forge the nation under the Constitution.  Reflecting on that generation which has passed, Lincoln notes:

“They were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.  Passion has helped us; but can do so no more.  It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.”

The Lyceum Address is a warning and a reminder.  It was a warning that the rule of law essential to self-government is not assured.  Citizens must have an underlying moral code that renders adherence to law expected and honored.  It was a reminder that they must also use their intelligence to recognize the dangers of demagogues who flout the rule of law.  Finally, citizens must use reason to conquer the passions threatening their hard-won liberty.   Both Lincoln’s warning and reminder are as relevant today as ever.

Photo Credit: National Park Service

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