Decades Before The Civil
War, Lincoln Saw An Approaching Storm. Every American Should Read His Warning
Beyond their brutality, the young lawyer feared these mobs for
the lawlessness they embodied -- and the idle familiarity with which his fellow
Americans seemed to accept these incidents.
FEBRUARY 12, 2021 By Christopher Bedford
To a hall filled with young men on a cold Illinois night in
January 1838, Abraham Lincoln delivered his earliest recorded public remarks.
For the 50 years prior, the living rooms, parlors, and public
offices of our country had been teeming with the brave Americans who’d fought,
struggled, and suffered to create these United States. “Nearly every American,”
Lincoln recalled, “had been a participator in some of its scenes.”
But now that generation was dying off. What no invading army
could, time, he lamented, had itself accomplished: “They were a forest of giant
oaks; but the all resistless hurricane had swept over them, and left only, here
and there, a lonely trunk… to combat, with its mutilated limbs, a few more
ruder storms, then to sink, and be no more.”
Without their life experience, he realized, his was the first
generation of Americans tasked with upholding their fathers’ noble experiment
simply by the strength of their own virtues. This, he warned, would be very
difficult.
As he looked around him, at both slave states and their northern
neighbors, he saw and feared the evil of swelling mobs not merely for their
unfortunate victims, but for our national tolerance of their violence and
misrule — and the effect this shrugging of shoulders and murmuring of approval
or disapproval would have on patriotic and unpatriotic men alike.
The incidents weren’t always seemingly connected by cause. A group
of gamblers hanged; a mixed-race murderer burned alive; black men suspected of
planning insurrection, and then white men suspected of sympathizing, and then
simply out-of-state strangers caught in the middle of swelling hate. But beyond
their brutality, the young lawyer feared these mobs were connected for the
lawlessness they embodied — and the idle familiarity with which his fellow
Americans seemed to accept these incidents.
While the 1830s mobs “hang gamblers, or burn murders,” he
cautioned, tomorrow’s mobs would hang and burn the innocent — “and thus it goes
on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and
property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded.”
While after January 2021’s Capitol riot we’ve all seen the
ruthless efficiency with which our government is capable of cracking down on
lawlessness, we too saw the summer before, when months of attacks on federal
officers, politicians, police, private homes, courthouses, and innocent
bystanders met calculated indifference and shrugged excuses for “historic
racial injustices.”
This too, was well familiar to Lincoln, who knew the mob will go
further and spread deeper, warning, “by instances of the perpetrators of such
acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless
in practice; and having been used to no restraint, but dread of punishment,
they thus become, absolutely unrestrained.”
“On the other hand,” he predicted, “good men, men who love
tranquility, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits, who
would gladly spill their blood in the defense of their country; seeing their
property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons
injured; and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better;
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.”
Combined, he warned, these seemingly opposing feelings come to one
terrible conclusion: “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.”
To ensure that the fading “scenes of the revolution are [not] now
or ever will be entirely forgotten,” Lincoln prescribed “in history, we hope,
they will be read of, and recounted, so long as the Bible shall be read.”
Yet today at The Washington Post, New York Times, and at the top
of our government, the privileged and ignorant children of our country tell
Americans our experiment is tainted, our Revolution was for evil, our Civil War
was not enough. They demand reparations through re-education, racist quotas,
kneeling subservience, and crude offerings of money. Neither the honored dead
of the Revolution nor the lives of 300,000 Yankee boys lying stiff in Southern
dust will appease them — they want more than the blood of our countrymen.
To “fortify against” the mob, Lincoln also prescribed an American
“political religion” rested on law, order, morality, and reason, yet today’s
revolutionaries reside at the very height of our government, inclined to rule
toward the same terrible ends the newspapers, college professors and street
activists demand. While we all agree the mob’s attack on the Capitol was
intolerable, many claim that mobs of Black Lives Matter and Antifa members
occupying and burning our cities are less wicked, justified by some imaginary historic
cause.
Black separatism, the left-wing
Southern Poverty Law Center claimed Thursday,
is no longer born of hate, but “out of valid anger against very real historical
and systemic oppression.” Lincoln, however, knew “there is no grievance that is
a fit object of redress by mob law.”
Just more than two decades after his remarks, Lincoln was
president. His office was characterized by a stunning bravery, as well as the
very principles he called for in 1838 — “general intelligence, sound morality
and, in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and the laws.”
Treading carefully but boldly between Southern sympathizers and
abolitionist radicals, the man who in 1838 lamented the passing of our Founding
Fathers would as president write the end of their page in history, uniting once
and for all the truths espoused in our Declaration of Independence with the
laws laid out in our Constitution.
For a century, Lincoln’s story was derided and dismissed by
Southern apologists seeking to strike his place in history for the fantasies
they preferred. Today, his story is derided and dismissed by racists and
radicals of different politics, working hard to undo the political religion he
cemented, and to strike his place in history for their own preferred fantasies.
Today, on Abraham Lincoln’s 212th birthday, Americans must
remember his life, his deeds, his sacrifice, and the lives, deeds, and
sacrifices of all who came before and after him in the service of these United
States. If we cannot quickly return to the vision they fought and died for,
heed the warnings of 1838, and remember the lessons of our Revolution and Civil
War, we are just as sure to lose our country as ever before.
