A lanky, tall and ungainly figure strode awkwardly to the rostrum. His limbs were long, and his hands were huge. His abundant black hair was unruly, and his clothes fit exceedingly ill. The audience must have found his looks unpromising, but as soon as he began to speak, it was clear that he commanded uncommon rhetorical power. He was all of 28 years old.
Abraham Lincoln’s “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” delivered on January 27, 1838, is not his most famous speech, but it is his first famous speech. In it, he gave glimpses of the qualities that would one day make him the greatest orator, and perhaps the greatest leader, in American history. His stated topic, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” has a haunting relevance for us today in a time of toxic polarization, rhetorical stridency and, increasingly, more-than-rhetorical calls for political violence. Ninescore and six years ago, the young Lincoln issued a warning that was wise beyond his years — one that beckons to us now.
Lincoln began by describing what he called an “ill-omen amongst us.” That omen, he continued, was “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgement of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.” For Lincoln, law was the civic embodiment of reason. Passion, including political passion, was reason’s enemy and opposite.
Lincoln worried that an increasing tendency to defy established laws and to flout inherited institutions had unleashed a “mobocratic spirit” that would undermine the people’s attachment to constitutional government. If popular commitment to constitutional structures weakened or waned, the country would grow correspondingly vulnerable to the influence of demagogues — to “men of … talent and ambition” who were willing to manipulate popular passions to serve their personal ends at the expense of the common good.
The problem, Lincoln predicted, would intensify as the republic matured. The founding generation, he explained, was committed to the constructive project of establishing a durable government on the principle of personal liberty and popular rule. In words that foreshadowed a more famous speech he would give a quarter-century later, Lincoln observed that “(t)heir ambition aspired to display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition, which had hitherto been considered, at best no better, than problematical; namely, the capability of a people to govern themselves.”
We face a real risk to our republic in the increasing willingness, from uber-partisans of all political stripes, to defy established laws and to assail established institutions.
The founders, on Lincoln’s telling, succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. But the demagogues of future generations would not be content to operate within existing structures. “Towering genius,” Lincoln warned, “disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.” If a future demagogue arose whose ambition outstripped his devotion to the Constitution and the laws, the results could be catastrophic. With “nothing left to be done in the way of building up,” Lincoln warned, “he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.” If that happened, “it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”
In response to the threats he described, Lincoln called for a full-bore reinforcement of the country’s civic culture and the citizenry’s devotion to the rule of law. “Let every American,” he roared, “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.” Lincoln called on all Americans to pledge “to the support of the Constitution and Laws” their lives, their property and their sacred honor. “Let reverence for the laws,” he continued, “be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles in her lap — let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; — let it be written in Primmers, 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’s rhetoric might strike us as overwrought, and his talk of a “political religion” might make us squirm. But we face a real risk to our republic in the increasing willingness, from uber-partisans of all political stripes, to defy established laws and to assail established institutions. We desperately need precisely the return to civic virtue and the reinvigoration of constitutional culture for which young Lincoln pleaded.
In his own era, alas, Lincoln proved prophetic. In his eyes, the secession of slaveholding Southern states from the Union represented the triumph of mobocracy, the apotheosis of demagoguery and lawlessness. In an era of mounting impatience with legal limitations and constitutional restraints, we would do well to heed Lincoln’s warning before the forces of disunion gain any additional ground.
Justin Collings serves as academic vice president, law professor and Wheatley Institute scholar at Brigham Young University.
This story appears in the July/August 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.