By Tony Williams
On
January 27, 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln addressed a Young Men’s Lyceum
debating club in Springfield. The
topic of the speech was “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions” and
addressed the tumult in American society raised by radical abolitionism who
were willing to sacrifice the laws to the “higher law” of justice for slaves. The address, however, raised
fundamental questions about human nature, the authority of law, and the
American founding. Lincoln’s
speech raises an interesting counterpoint to Martin Luther King’s “Letter from
Birmingham Jail” which I wrote about on the WJMI recently.
Lincoln
begins the speech by expressing reverence for the American political tradition
of self-government which was more conducive to “the ends of civil and religious
liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.”[i] The Founders left a legacy that was
“hardy, brave, and patriotic” to the present generation. They inherited that gift of republican
self-government and had a grace responsibility to transmit it to their
posterity: “This task gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to
posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us
faithfully to perform.”
The
greatest threat to ensuring the survival of that inheritance was not from
outside enemies but from the suicide of a nation of free men who lived by
license rather than ordered liberty.
“I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the
growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the
sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive
ministers of justice.”
Lincoln
is assuming a classical and Christian position in which man is a rational being
who can master his passions and become a self-governing individual. In Book IV of The
Republic, Plato has Socrates explain that, “Moderation is surely a kind of
order and mastery of certain kinds of pleasures and desires, as men say when
they use . . . the phrase ‘stronger than himself.’”[ii] In second book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us
that, “Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean
. . . this being determined by a rational principle” over irrational passions
and desires.[iii] St. Paul tells us in Romans 6:12, “Therefore do not let sin
reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts.” These thinkers agree with Lincoln that
rational man can gain self-mastery by controlling his passions through
reason.
Many
Founders adopted this classical and Christian stance on human nature such as
James Madison when he wrote about the danger of factions in The Federalist. In
Federalist #10, Madison wrote, “By a faction I understand a number of
citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are
united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse
to the right of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of
the community.”[iv]
For
Lincoln, moral license leads to vice, violence begets violence, and unpunished
acts spawn a lawless spirit among the American people. Soon, both the guilty and innocent
“fall victims to the ravages of mob law . . . till all the walls erected for
the defence of the persons and property of individuals are trodden down, and
disregarded.” The result is
ultimately that the “strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of
those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed – I
mean the attachment of the
People.”
Lincoln’s
answer to the destruction of law and liberty in the land is poetic, reasonable,
and practical:
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. As the
patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence,
so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his
life, his property, and his sacred honor; - let everyman 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. Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American
mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap – let it be taught in
schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling
books, and in Almanacs; - let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in
legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation.
Lincoln
wants to build laws rooted in reason to frustrate the designs of ambition of a
Caesar or Napoleon, and to foil the passions of a mob. He admits near the end of the speech
that the passionate mobs of the American Revolution were dedicated to liberty
and threw off British rule to advance the “noblest cause – that of establishing
and maintaining civil and religious liberty.”
However,
the Founders had passed away, and a new generation has been given the reins of
self-government. Lincoln finishes
with another poetic appeal to reason, law, and the name of Washington:
That temple must fall, unless we, their descendents, 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 defence, - Let those materials be molded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws:
and, that we improved to the last; that we remained free to the last; that we
revered his name to the last; that, during his long sleep, we permitted no
hostile foot to pass over or desecrate his resting place; shall be that which
to learn the last trump shall awaken our WASHINGTON. Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock
of its basis; and as has been said of the only greater institution, “the gates of hell shall not prevail against
it.”
That same
burden to preserve the laws, the Constitution, and American principles of
religious and civil liberty binds us.
May we do so through well-reasoned, civil discourse rather than partisan
demagoguery.
Tony Williams is the Program Director of the WJMI and the
author of America’s Beginnings: The Dramatic
Events that Shaped a Nation’s Character.
[i] All quotes from Lincoln’s speech can be
found in Roy P. Basler, ed., Abraham
Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (New York: Da Capo, 2001), 76-85.
[ii] Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 109.
[iii] Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980),
39.
[iv] Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and
John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed.,
Clinton Rossiter (New York: Signet, 1961), 72.
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