The US has recently seen a number of statues being toppled, but are they an example of mob rule or democracy in action? Here, Mac Guffey returns and presents his views by considering events of 1776 and an 1838 speech by Abraham Lincoln.
A painting showing the pulling down of the Statue of King George III in New York City in 1776. This is an 1859 painting by Johannes Adam Simon Oertel.
On July 9, 1776, seven days after its passage, George Washington had the Declaration of Independence read to his troops and the citizens of New York City. In the document, its author, Thomas Jefferson, cited 27 colonial grievances against King George III. After the list of grievances, Jefferson succinctly summarized the end of British dominion in the colonies with “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” (Ruppert, 2014)
Impassioned by the rhetoric of the Declaration, a large mob of citizens, soldiers, sailors, and even some members of the Sons of Liberty raged throughout the city, tearing the British Royal Coat of Arms from official buildings and smashing them and burning paintings of the British monarch. (Ruppert, 2014)
Still angry, the growing crowd marched down Broadway to Bowling Green, a small oval area on the southern tip of Manhattan, where a gilded lead statue of the King on horseback stood. The mob, screaming and yelling, threw ropes around it and toppled the statue erected six years earlier. After breaking up the statue, parts of it were hauled to a foundry in Litchfield, Connecticut and melted down to make 42,088 musket balls for use in the coming revolution. (Marks, 1981)
The raging mob and the statue toppling is celebrated in American history as a symbolic act of dissolving all connection with the rule of kings and the beginning of that grand experiment of a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Mobocratic spirit
Sixty-two years later, on a cold January evening in a small Illinois town in 1838, a newly minted lawyer by the name of Abraham Lincoln was invited to give a lecture at a local lyceum gathering. He titled his talk “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions”.
That night, Lincoln shared with his audience his concerns about what he perceived as the growing disregard and indifference for the rule of law around the country. He felt this lack of responsible citizenship posed a grave threat to the institutions of that government begun so symbolically by the Founding Fathers in 1776.
He called it a mobocratic spirit. This spirit he defined as a growing propensity for violence, and the people who participated, he labeled as a mobocracy. The effect of this increasing frequency of violence, he asserted, would be a growing indifference or a numbness by the citizenry as the violence became more commonplace.
Therein, he cautioned, lays the beginning of the end because the numbness to this increasing violence leads to even more violence by the mobocracy as their fear of the government grows less, and their contempt for it grows more.
The other effect of the escalating violence, he pointed out, is when the numbness by law-abiding citizens to the frequency of violence now turns to fear – fear for the safety of their person and property. Actually, he said, it’s when the citizens believe their RIGHT to be safe in person and property is threatened. For that, he predicted, they’ll blame the government.
So, contempt for the government from one faction of citizens and a loss of faith in the government from the other faction creates the perfect storm of destruction of support or allegiance to that form of government.
That’s when it happens, Lincoln said. From among us, comes a person who promises to fix the problems.
Driven by a desire for power, this person uses the moment of wavering allegiance to stir up support for another way to run things, to tear down the way it is, and to suggest to our citizens a better way to solve the problems in order to maintain their RIGHT to be safe in person and property.
But his intent is to pull down Democracy and to substitute in its place, something selfish - something self-glorifying - something non-democratic.
The solution to this human threat, said Lincoln, is three-fold: One, for the citizens to be aware that THEY are the weak link in a Democracy. Two, the citizens must remain united with one another as a nation, and three, they must continue their allegiance to our way of governing. These three steps, he said, will successfully frustrate that person’s designs to destroy the perpetuation of our political institutions.
History is Now
Abraham Lincoln was concerned that the passions regarding the slavery question to which he alluded that night would lead the citizens of America to destroy the Union, which they did twenty-three years later. Ironically, Lincoln himself was at the helm of our Ship of State when it happened, and because of his genius, character, and personality, he was able to save us from becoming a nation permanently rendered.
Now, we again face statue-toppling protests. This time, it’s against the systemic racism that still pervades our nation even after that horrific civil war, and Lincoln’s fatal efforts make these words of the Declaration of Independence - read to those patriotic rioters that day in 1776 - finally ring true:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Are these statue-toppling protests just mob rule or are they Democracy in action?
I vote for the latter. So would Lincoln.
What do you think of the arguments in the article? Let us know below.
Now you can read Mac’s articles on the 1918 Influenza Pandemic and its lessons for today here.
References
Abraham Lincoln Association. (1953). Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield Illinois January 27, 1838. In A. Lincoln, R. P. Basler, & et.al. (Eds.), The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (pp. 109-116). New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Marks, A. S. (1981). The Statue of King George III in New York and the Iconology of Regicide. The American Art Journal Vol. 13, 62.
Ruppert, B. (2014, September 8). The Statue of George III. Retrieved June 28, 2020, from Journal of the American Revolution: https://allthingsliberty.com/2014/09/the-statue-of-george-iii/
