Lincoln’s Lyceum Address
Abraham Lincoln was not yet 29 years-old when he stood before the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, on Saturday, January 27, 1838. His youth, however, did not suggest a lack of wisdom.
Lincoln’s speech addressed “the perpetuation of our political institutions.” Specifically, Lincoln sought to advise that his young audience, indeed all Americans, secure those institutions from the pervasive and divisive forces of mob rule that seemingly dominated headlines in the latter half of the 1830s.
“We toiled not in the establishment of them,” Lincoln reminded his audience of the country’s institutions, “they are a legacy bequeathed to us by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors.”
Lincoln’s use of italics was not random: there was a distinction he sought to clarify between now and then, the present and the past. The distinction, that “ill-omen amongst us,” was to Lincoln “the increasing disregard for the rule of law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgments of the courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.”
Lincoln had specific examples in mind: “Accounts of outrages committed by mobs” were not of little quantity by 1838. In Mississippi, a mob detained and then hanged a group of gamblers; blacks suspected of raising a slave insurrection were hanged, as were whites and even strangers suspected of aiding the conspiracy.
“Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers” until, Lincoln added, “dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every roadside” and served “as a drapery of the forest.”
In St. Louis, a mob grabbed “a mulatto man” rightly accused of murder and decided to pass judgment and execute him in morbid fashion: they “chained him to a tree” and burned him alive. In Alton, Illinois, a mob of disgruntled whites assassinated the abolitionist minister and printer Elijah Parish Lovejoy.
“Such are the effects of mob law,” Lincoln said, “and such are the scenes, becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order.” And such mobbish behavior was not “confined to the slaveholding, or the non-slaveholding states.” Instead, it was a “common” phenomenon “to the whole country.”
The central issue—and danger—that America faced was not the threat of an external foe. Rather, it was the very real and tangible threat of internal discord and its consequences—what the founders had dreaded as “anarchy and confusion.”
Sooner or later all people would “fall victims to the ravages of mob law,” Lincoln warned, “till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals are trodden down and disregarded.” There is nothing that the mob cannot do. Thus, Lincoln warned that danger must, if it ever reaches the communities of American democracy, “spring up amongst us” and not “from abroad.”
Lincoln added, memorably, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or did by suicide.”
As the source of the problem, the people naturally held the 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,” Lincoln said. “As the patriots of seventy-six did… let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor,” and remember “that to violate the law is to trample the blood of his father, and tear the character of his own and his children’s liberty.”
Lincoln clarified that he did not mean to say that “there are no bad laws.” Instead, he argued, as Jefferson had done, that evils should be suffered as long as they are sufferable. “Let them if not too intolerable, be borne with.”
In the end, the principles and spirit of the founding “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.”
The founders had staked their all in “the capability of a people to govern themselves.” To that end, Lincoln said, there must be “general intelligence, sound morality, and, in particular, a reverence for the constitution and the law.” Without such things, American democracy is no democracy at all—it becomes popular tyranny by the people and over the people.
“Upon these let the fabric of freedom rest as the rock of its basis,” Lincoln said, “and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution, ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’”