When Abraham Lincoln agreed to speak at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois on January 27th, 1838, it was almost certainly not for the sole purpose of burnishing his political reputation. So often this seems to be the only reason anyone in public service deigns to address the people they claim to serve outside of certain prescribed occasions, and 1838 was indeed an election year in Illinois. But the Representative of Sangamon County was plainly not attempting to sell any particular brand of ideological orthodoxy when he delivered the address in question. Rather than attempt to point up the inadequacies of the contemporary Democratic Party while also advertising for his audience the integrity and wisdom of the Whigs – a fruitless endeavor, given that he was speaking to a group of men largely too young to vote – he instead set himself to the task of describing and diagnosing a very specific problem which he had observed as acting to weaken the essence of American republicanism. His attitude was accordingly one of sincerity rather than salesmanship, caution rather than charm. “The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions” was not a campaign speech, in short, but an urgent call to action. Something was wrong with America, Lincoln believed, and it was up to each and every American to help set things right.
Structurally speaking, the result
was a fairly straightforward mix of observation and argument. Lincoln described
for his audience what he believed was the matter – citing specific incidents
from recent history to help clarify his point – and then proceeded to explain
why it was he believed that the trend in question was a worrying one and what
it was he felt that his countrymen ought to have done in response. For the sake
of examination – and because Lincoln method suggests as much on its own – the
examination that follows will approach each of these aspects separately and
distinctly. The first section – indeed, the one you are reading right at this
very moment – will explore the nature of the threat which Lincoln attempted to
describe and the examples which he cited as evidence of the same. The second
section – which you may now commence to awaiting with bated breath – will then
proceed to delve into the broader framework of Lincoln’s stated position. Why
was this thing he believed to be a problem such a problem? What was it that he
feared, and what solutions did he offer? These questions, and others, will be
answered therein. At this point – having sufficiently explored the “what” and
the “why” of it all – the discussion will then shift into a third section in
order to explore some of the implications of both the problems Lincoln
identified and the solutions he sought to offer. The man was a cogent thinker,
to be sure – keen-eyed and blessed with a sharp mind – and much of what he had
to say in 1838 remains startlingly relevant almost two hundred years later.
That said, he was also speaking from within a very specific cultural and
political context, and it would quite simply be foolish to take all of what
Lincoln had to say to heart without making note of some of the man’s more problematic
assumptions.
Which brings us back – back, back,
back – to the speech, the lyceum, Lincoln, and 1838. What was it, according to
Lincoln, that his countrymen urgently needed to confront? What was going on in
the contemporary American republic that threatened to unravel the very fabric
of self-government? Violence, in a word. Mob violence, in two words. Sanctioned
mob violence, in a pithy but still descriptive three. As discussed in the
previous entry in this selfsame series, the United States of America had
witnessed dozens of civil disturbances over the course of the 1810s, 1820s, and
1830s between recurrent slave revolts and race riots in major urban centers,
and it was the extent to which he believed his fellow Americans were becoming
inured to the resulting bloodshed that most disturbed the young legislator from
Sangamon County. The violence itself was bad enough, of course. Hundreds of
people had been needlessly killed, often by shockingly cruel and brutal means.
But what really seemed to bother young Lincoln was the degree to which these
kinds of deaths were becoming an accepted aspect of American life. “There is
even now something of ill omen amongst us,” he warned.
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.
As a dark reflection of the promise at the heart of the American experiment in self-government, this was an alarming development indeed.
The United States, after all, was possessed of what Lincoln described earlier in the same address as, “The fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate [,]” and operated, “Under the government of a system of political institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us.” What did it say, then, when a people so blessed by nature and their forefathers still managed to sink themselves into a morass of lawlessness and violence? What hope remained for the prospect of self-government if the people best suited to it still failed to master their self-destructive impulses? It did not bode well, to be sure. “Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times,” Lincoln accordingly observed.
They have pervaded the country from
New England to Louisiana, they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the
former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creature of
climate, neither are they confined to the slaveholding or the non-slaveholding
States. Alike they spring up among the pleasure-hunting masters of Southern
slaves, and the order-loving citizens of the land of steady habits. Whatever
their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.
Make no mistake, this was quite the
claim at the time that Lincoln offered it. Still lacking anything on the order
of a national media landscape, news tended to travel fairly slowly in the
United States of the 1830s, and there existed no entity – publicly-funded or
otherwise – which was either inclined to or capable of compiling comprehensive
statistics on instances of civil disorder. That being said, Lincoln did not
come to the Springfield Lyceum wholly unarmed. While he lacked specific
evidence of any violent incidents taking place amidst the “eternal snows” of
New England, he did describe three recent occasions of the kind of “mobocratic”
behavior – having occurred in Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois, respectively
– which he claimed were at that moment threatening to unravel the very fabric
of American republicanism. The first, and the earliest, took place in
Mississippi, commencing when a group of gamblers were hanged. True, Lincoln
admitted, not everyone would have considered this such a tragedy on its own,
gamblers being, “A set of man certainly not following for a livelihood a very
useful or very honest occupation [.]” Nevertheless, “Far from being forbidden
by the laws, [gambling] was actually licensed by an act of the legislature
passed but a single year before.” Already, then, as far as Lincoln was
concerned, something had gone terribly wrong. Men who had committed no provable
offence against the laws of the land had been sentenced to death by their
neighbors and henceforth summarily executed. But then, somehow, things got even
worse. “Next,” Lincoln continued, “Negroes suspected of conspiring to raise an
insurrection were caught up and hanged in all parts of the State; then, white
men supposed to be leagued with the negroes; and finally, strangers from
neighboring States, going thither on business, were in many instances subjected
to the same fate.” This process went on, evidently,
From gamblers to negroes, from
negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers, till dead men were seen
literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every roadside, and in numbers
that were almost sufficient to rival the native Spanish moss of the country as
a drapery of the forest.
While Lincoln provided no more detail to this narrative than to say that it took place in Mississippi – imagining, no doubt, that it was notorious enough for his audience to require little more than that to jog their memory – a review of the various civil disturbances which occurred in the state within the span of the decade preceding turns up what is almost certainly the mass slaughter in question. The so-called “Murrell Excitement” took place – or at least had its origins – in the cities of Vicksburg, Mississippi and Nashville, Tennessee between July 4th and July 6th, 1835 as a result of an almost certainly erroneous pamphlet that was being distributed at the time. The “Murrell” in question was a petty thief named John Andrews Murrell (1806-1844) who had operated mostly in Tennessee during the 1820s and 1830s, stealing horses and slaves and being twice sentenced to long stays in prison. Early in the summer of 1835 – at a point, it bears noting, when Murrell himself was still incarcerated – a man named Virgil Stewart published and began distributing what he swore was a factual account of a conspiracy by which Murrell and his followers intended to spark a nationwide slave rebellion on Christmas Day in order to distract from their actual goal of turning the South into their own personal empire. While anyone who knew Murrell, or knew any of the details of his escapades, would have seen clear to charging Stewart – writing under the pseudonym of “Augusts Q. Walton, Esq.” – with giving the twice-convicted horse thief far too much credit, Stewart’s rather fantastical claims nevertheless succeeded in tapping into a vein of latent anxiety that ran through a large portion of contemporary Southern society.
Notwithstanding the laughable miscasting of John Murrell as some kind of criminal mastermind, the memory of Nat Turner’s failed slave insurrection – having taken place less than five years prior in the summer of 1831 – was still fresh in the minds of many white Southerners, to the point that even the barest hint that something like it was yet in the offing could convince otherwise law-abiding citizens to abandon all reason and start casting about for supposed agents of chaos. The result, in short order, was a brief but bloody panic. On July 4th, across several locations in Tennessee, twenty slaves and ten white men were lynched after supposedly confessing their participation in Murrell’s plot. Two days later in the city of Vicksburg, a mob formed – evidently having been advised that such men formed a key constituency of Murrell’s support – with the intention of expelling all known gamblers from the community. When the individuals in questions understandably resisted such an intrusion upon their liberty of person, they were accordingly seized and five of them were hanged. None of these vigilante actions turned up any real evidence of a conspiracy, of course. Nor did the committees formed thereafter in communities across the South for the purpose of hunting down and punishing Murrell’s supposed co-conspirators. What they did accomplish, however, is what they were really intended to accomplish all along. Southerners who were anxious about the possibility of slave insurrections, troubled by the apparent lawlessness of their communities, and concerned by what they perceived to be the moral laxity of contemporary urban life were allowed – by way of state-sanctioned murder – to blow off some steam.
The second incident which Lincoln described took place more recently and in the comparatively nearby environs of St. Louis, Missouri. “A single victim only was sacrificed there [,]” he admitted, compared to the several dozen who were killed in far distant Mississippi, and the story itself, he noted, was also “very short [.]” Nevertheless, he considered the account in question to be, “The most highly tragic of anything of its length that has ever been witnessed in real life.” The plain facts of it, as related by Lincoln, were as follows:
A mulatto man by the name of McIntosh
was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a
tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time
he had been a freeman attending to his own business and at peace with the
world.
While this account, like his retelling of the Murrell Excitement, is likewise somewhat short on detail, the incident which it describes is substantially more well-known. Francis McIntosh (1810-1836) was a mixed-race man from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who, at the time of his grisly death, worked as a porter and a cook aboard the steamboat Flora. Flora had just made port in St. Louis on April 28th, 1836, it seemed, and McIntosh decided to take the opportunity to visit with some of the crewmembers of another steamship, the Lady Jackson, which had docked the same day. As McIntosh was departing the Flora, a pair of police officers called out to him and requested his assistance in apprehending another sailor who had apparently been involved in a fight. When McIntosh declined, the officers placed him under arrest for interfering in the capture of a fugitive. Subsequently detained and brought before a local magistrate, McIntosh found himself charged with disturbing the peace. And when he asked how long he was likely to be imprisoned if convicted, McIntosh was told that his sentence was likely to amount to no less than five years. It was at this point, shocked and horrified, that the young man pushed back.
Convinced, evidently – and not without reason – that he was unlikely to receive a fair trial and that his liberty was as good as forfeit, Francis McIntosh responded to his captor’s dour evaluation of his near-term prospects by promptly drawing a knife and stabbing the two officers who had taken him into custody. One of them was killed, the other was severely wounded, and McIntosh, in the resulting confusion, made good his escape. He managed to flee down the street, jump a fence, and take shelter in a nearby outhouse before the crowd that had coalesced as a result of the commotion caught up with him and returned him to police custody. At this point he was charged with murder and locked in the local jail. Sometime later, once news of what had transpired had spread throughout the neighborhood, a mob descended on the jail, dragged McIntosh into the street, took him to what were then the outskirts of St. Louis, and chained him to a locust tree. A pyre was built around his feet, said pyre was lit, and over the course of twenty minutes, Frances McIntosh was burned to death. When, the following month, a grand jury was convened to investigate the incident and potentially lay charges, the presiding judge – whose name, ironically enough, was Luke E. Lawless – succeeded in having the matter entirely dismissed. Naturally, Judge Lawless declared to the jury, he would have recommended the laying of charges if evidence of a crime existed on the part of any identifiable individual. But the lynching of Frances McIntosh was a mob action, responsibility for which was so completely disbursed among its faceless preparators that no case could possibly be made against them. And anyway, the judge elaborated, didn’t McIntosh sort of have it coming? Weren’t free black men like him just the tools of white abolitionists? Wasn’t it the duty of law-abiding white communities to protect themselves against such people and their radical agendas?
The third such incident which Lincoln called to mind was also the most recent and the one least in need of detailed description. It had occurred, after all, but two months prior, and at a distance of less than one hundred miles. So familiar, indeed, was Lincoln’s audience likely to be with the event in question that he saw fit to mention it almost in passing. “Whenever the vicious portion of [our] population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands,” he lamented, speaking of the dangers which he felt such occurrences represented, “And burn churches, and ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing-presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity, depend upon it, this government cannot last.” Though he seemed to give them no special emphasis himself, it was the mention of editors and printing-presses that were almost certainly calculated to spark a specific remembrance in his audience.
Elijah Lovejoy (1802-1837) had been the editor of an anti-Jacksonian newspaper called the St. Louis Observer which he had established in its namesake city in 1833. While at first taking on a specifically Presbyterian editorial position – from within which he criticized the Catholic Church and spoke out against the consumption of tobacco and alcohol – he gradually shifted his focus to the question of slavery, thus incurring the displeasure of a large portion of the local community. Indeed, more than once, as Lovejoy’s abolitionist bone fides became clear, were his person and his property the subject of shockingly violent threats. But while his printing presses were more than once damaged as a result of mob agitation, and while his friends more than once pleaded with him to avoid speaking out against slavery, the erstwhile editor refused to relent. It was only after Lovejoy began decrying the recent lynching of the aforementioned Francis McIntosh and writing critically of the behavior of the aforementioned Judge Lawless that he was forced to admit that he was no longer safe in St. Louis. His solution? Move the entire operation, otherwise unaltered, to Alton, Illinois.
Alton, in fact, was not far at all from St. Louis proper, located but a stone’s throw away on the opposite bank of the Mississippi. And while Illinois was a free state in which the practice of slavery was legally prohibited, Alton was not exactly a haven of anti-slavery agitation. In some ways it was, of course. Because of its proximity to a major pro-slavery urban center, Alton was often the first place slaves seeking to escape bondage in Missouri took refuge when attempting to flee into the Midwest or points north. But it had also originally been settled by pro-slavery southerners, and as a result of its status as one of the first stops on what would at length become known in abolitionist circles as the “Underground Railroad,” it was regularly frequented by slavecatchers in pursuit of their quarry. By settling in a place like Alton, therefore, Lovejoy was arguably making something of a statement on the nature of his own activities and intentions. It was certainly not the safest place to which he could have re-located himself. Massachusetts would have been safer. Or Connecticut. Or New Hampshire. Really, anywhere in New England. And he was bound to continue facing criticism for his anti-slavery stance, particularly from those among his new neighbors who would have been quite content if Illinois became a slave state overnight. The fact that he nevertheless chose Alton would accordingly seem to indicate that he had not been driven out of Missouri solely on the basis of fear.
Where Lovejoy ended up, he would still face threats. He would still have cause to be afraid to leave the house in the morning. But Alton was a much smaller community than St. Louis. And while it was, as the crow flies, not far away at all from that selfsame metropolis, it did have the added advantage of being in another state. This meant that while Lovejoy could be assured that copies of the newly rebranded Alton Observer would almost certainly make their way across the Mississippi into St. Louis, the kinds of people who had several times previously damaged his equipment in an attempt at putting a stop to his activities would be forced to think twice before trying something on that order again. Because while legal authorities in Missouri had plainly shown themselves to be perfectly willing to turn a blind eye to the at-times deadly activities of pro-slavery mobs, it was not quite so clear how legal authorities in Illinois would react if a gang of vigilantes from St. Louis attempted to cross the river into Alton so that they might damage the property of, or visit body harm upon, certain people residing therein. Clearly, there were people in Alton itself who would not have objected in the slightest, but would state authorities have been so lenient? Were anti-slavery Missourians confident enough in the laws of the state of Illinois to risk being indicted there, potentially for murder? In relocating to Alton, Lovejoy was arguably answering both of these questions in the negative. He was not going to stop speaking out against slavery, and he was not going to run away and take refuge in the comparatively welcoming embrace of anti-slavery East. But he was going to make a point of complicating the efforts of those who found his views to be objectionable.
Lovejoy’s relocation into Illinois, for the record, took place at some point in the late spring of 1836. It was not until the end of the following year that managed to recover sufficiently from the damage done to his operation to fully re-establish the Observer and commence with his anti-slavery activities. And when he finally did so, his tone was more militant than ever. Emboldened, no doubt, by Illinois’s status as a free state, Lovejoy began advocating not just for the moral condemnation of slavery, but for sustained political organization for the purpose of abolishing the institution in all forms across the nation. To that end, in October of 1837, he helped organize the Illinois Anti-slavery Congress at the Presbyterian Church in Upper Alton where he had been serving as a pastor since his arrival in the middle of the previous year. While the gathering in question was reportedly well attended, however, it also happened to coincide with a degree of heightened economic tension brought about by the Panic of 1837. The product, ultimately, of a long-running conflict between the Jackson Administration and the leadership of the Second Bank of the United States, the Panic witnessed a nationwide credit crunch, falling wages, rising unemployment, and a general economic downturn. For certain people in Alton, the resulting financial instability made them exceptionally sensitive to any source of further economic disruption, particularly as it might have affected their trade with neighboring communities in the South. If merchants in Missouri, say, or Kentucky decided for whatever reason to cease doing business with firms or individuals located in Alton, the Panic left said firms or individuals with very little to fall back on. And what was Lovejoy’s ongoing anti-slavery agitation if not a prime reason for Southern producers and consumers to avoid doing business with the people of Alton? If the most famous thing about the Alton was that it was home to one of the most vocal abolitionists in the region, how could locals possibly hope to cultivate fruitful economic relationships with nearby communities in the slaveholding South? Something, clearly, had to be done.
The “something” in question finally was done on November the 7th, 1837. Having evidently learned from the many previous occasions during which he and his property became the subject of mob violence, Lovejoy had since taken to operating his printing press from a secret location rather than as part of a newspaper office that was clearly marked and publicly accessible. To that end, the Alton Observer was, by the end of 1837, being printed out of a warehouse owned by a local firm called Gilman & Godfrey. On November 7th, having discovered that this was where Lovejoy had sought to hide his operation, a mob of disgruntled locals approached said warehouse with the intention of yet again destroying the press and putting a stop to the Observer’s publication. Finding the premises locked – and presumably convinced that someone was inside – several armed members of the crowd began firing on the building so as to drive any occupants out into the street. Lovejoy, who was indeed inside at the time, responded by gathering his assistants to the defense of the building and commenced to firing into the gathered crowd. Several of the vigilantes were injured as a result, one – a man purportedly named Bishop – was killed, and “the Siege of G&G Warehouse” was effectively commenced. When the mob attempted to lay a ladder against the building so that one of their number could set fire to the roof, Lovejoy and one of his assistants emerged just long enough to push it over. When the same tactic was tried again and Lovejoy emerged a second time, he was shot by members of the crowd and killed on the spot. Later, when the mob finally succeeded in breaching the building, the printing press was thrown out a window onto the riverbank and its pieces scattered and tossed into the Mississippi. While the matter did later come to trial, the proceedings were something of a farce. The jury foreman had been one of the besiegers. The presiding judge had been a witness. The final verdict, unsurprisingly, was a resounding, “not guilty.”
As noted previously, Lincoln’s address to the Young Men’s Lyceum took place less than two months after this disgraceful episode and less then one hundred miles away. Surely no one, in consequence, needed to be reminded as to the details thereof. What they may well have required, however, as far as Lincoln was concerned, was for someone to explain to them just why it was that the death of some abolitionist down south had a bearing upon their collective future. Indeed, upon the future of the nation itself. Lovejoy was just a newspaper editor who had gone out of his way to make himself obnoxious to certain of his neighbors. And Frances McIntosh was just a black man who had committed cold-blooded murder. And those gamblers in Mississippi were hardly blameless in their own right. But the direct consequences, Lincoln argued, formed but a small part of the issue. Men had died and would die, for reasons just and unjust, by way of chance and choice. This was unquestionably the way of the world. But, he cautioned,
When men take it into their heads
to-day to hang gamblers or burn murderers, they should recollect that in the
confusion usually attending such transactions they will be as likely to hang or
burn some one who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is, and that,
acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow may, and probably will,
hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake.
The issue, it seemed, was not the deaths themselves, regrettable though they may have been. Rather, it was the manner in which these deaths came about. Lynching. Mob violence. Vigilantism. Such things function by way of passion, and once set in motion do not easily give way to second thought. Someone truly guilty of murder may be their victim one day, but what of the next? Are the methods by which guilt is determined in such cases so unerring as to be infallible? In the absence of investigators and litigators, is it not possible for someone otherwise innocent to become a victim?
Lincoln, for his part, answered very much in the negative. Police forces, and courts, and the very concept of law existed for many reasons, he urged, and not the least of them was because rumor and rage made poor substitutes for fact and forbearance. Blinded by anger, sometimes people made mistakes. Sometimes they accused those who were blameless, killed those who were innocent. The existence of basic rights and liberties, and the due process of law, were intended to prevent such occurrences from ever taking place. They did not always succeed, to be sure, but the lives they saved were far from inconsiderable. And while it might have seemed, once again, that the only victims of “mob rule” were those who did everything to deserve their fate, Lincoln endeavored to assert that such thinking was utter folly. “The innocent, he declared, “Those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and this 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.” And from thence, what was bound to occur? Once people grew to accept that justice was theirs to dole out as they wished, what would become of a society so debased?
For those who view government as an obstruction to their own ambitions, Lincoln declared, such a breakdown would represent the culmination of all their hopes. “By instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished,” he thus explained, “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.” As with his previous attempt to spell out the practical utility of the presumption of innocence, Lincoln here seemed intent on explaining to his audience the essential purpose which certain moral and legal principles embedded in contemporary American culture and jurisprudence were ideally supposed to serve. Indeed, he seemed to harken back to the same 17th century English political philosophy to which so many of the Founders had declared themselves indebted. As Enlightenment scholar John Locke (1632-1704) famously asserted in his famous Two Treatises of Government (1689), individuals living in s state of nature would feel compelled to surrender a certain portion of their individual sovereignty to a supervisory entity – i.e., the state – in order to alleviate the need for every individual to see to the integrity of their persons and their property constantly and without relief. By the terms of the resulting “social contract,” the state thus assumes a monopoly on coercive violence with the understanding that force will only be applied to those who refuse to abide by the common will of the majority. Law represents the codification of this common will, and punishment represents the application of collective violence against its violators.
Without necessarily citing Locke or making use of the term “social contract,” Lincoln nevertheless used some part of his speech at the Young Men’s Lyceum to essentially explain and reaffirm the validity of the principles thereof. When legal authorities in Mississippi, and Missouri, and Illinois shrugged their shoulders and looked the other way when confronted with blatant violations of the laws of those same jurisdictions, they effectively served to facilitate the surrender of the state’s monopoly on coercion. Granted, at the outset, license was likely only to be granted when the victims were those whom the authorities in question found to be most obnoxious. Gamblers, say, or black people, or those who dared to argue in favor of the fundamental equality of humankind. But how long before such a precedent would give way to a wider application? How long until death ceased altogether to be the exclusive tool of the state and became instead a matter of individual discretion? Until the only laws that mattered anymore were those of chance and public opinion? At this point, violence would be the norm, the law would cease to perform any useful function, and all that matters would be the possession and application of force. The people who committed such heinous acts as Lincoln described would most certainly be at the forefront of this process of social degradation – this return, as it were, to Locke’s purported state of nature. But even those who continued to hold fast to the law would be forced to play a part in its gradual decline.
The purpose of the state, after all – certainly as Locke described it – was to provide a degree of protection to the individual, regardless of their ability, which the individual might not have been able to provide on their own. Freed from the need to maintain a constant watch on their personal integrity, or from being forced into servitude to those whose strength proved greater than their own, the individual was thus permitted to pursue ventures whose value was less immediate but still real and substantial. As the realization of certain of these ventures in turn serve to benefit society as a whole, the exchange by which coercion was made the sole possession of the state is arguably shown to be a reasonable one. But what if, over time, the state begins to surrender it monopoly on violence? What if the individual must once again devote some portion of their time to perpetually guarding against the violation of their personal sovereignty? This, in Lincoln’s opinion, was the direst potential consequence of the trend which he was seeking to describe. Much evil, to be sure, would be done by those who actively disregarded the law and attempted to dole out justice as they themselves saw fit. But the gradual disenchantment of the otherwise law-abiding would amount to a much greater evil in the long run. In time enough, Lincoln avowed,
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.
This, in essence, was the crux of
Lincoln’s dire forecast for the United States of America. It wasn’t just that
he believed that the kinds of murders lately committed in Mississippi,
Missouri, and Illinois would become more frequent as legal authorities
increasingly declined to prosecute the perpetrators. To be sure, this did
concern him. But what seemed to trouble him to an even greater extent was the
notion that over time, as instances of mob violence became the norm, even those
who would otherwise have counted themselves among the friends of the law would
begin to lose faith in its efficacy. If people so inclined could commit murder
at will, and if standing in opposition to those people was likely to result in
being murdered yourself, then what was the point of the law? Indeed, what was
the point of the government whose sole purpose it was to make and uphold the
law? Why bother trying to defend any of it if it no longer served any useful
function? Let it fall, let it be torn down, let the mob do as they please.
Provided that the level of popular violence in the American republic reaches a
level whereby all that is required to get away with murder is sufficient
popular support, it would seem to matter very little whether the government of
the day stands as it is or is replaced by something else. The people, by that
point, will have learned to look to their own defenses, and the political
institutions which their forefathers handed down to them will scarcely be
worthy of further perpetuation.
