There seems to be ever-growing division and bitterness in American politics today – but there have been warnings this would happen before. Here, Mac Guffey explains an important speech – the Lyceum Address - by Abraham Lincoln on January 27, 1838.
You can also read Mac’s past articles: A Brief History of Impeachment in the US (here), on Franksgiving (here), the Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War Two (here), and Christmas 1855 in the USA (here).
Abraham Lincoln in the mid-1840s.
One hundred and eighty-one years ago, on a January evening in a small Illinois town, a man talked about the way Democracy will die in America.
It won’t be from another country, he said. “It must spring up from amongst us,” and we, America’s citizens, will be both its author and its finisher, he warned.
The blueprint that he laid out that night for this collapse was two-phased.
The first phase will involve a nation-wide increase of what he called a “mobocratic spirit”. He defined this spirit as a growing propensity for violence, and those people who participate in this violence, he labeled as a “mobocracy”. The effect of this increasing frequency of violence will be a growing indifference - a numbness - by the public as the violence becomes more commonplace.
Therein, he said, lays the beginning of the end for Democracy.
This ‘numbness’ to violence will lead to even more violence by the mobocracy as their fear of the government decreases, and their contempt for its ineptitude grows.
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. Then he qualified that statement: It’s when the citizens believe their RIGHT to be safe in person and in 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” that weakens or destroys any sense of allegiance or support for that form of governance.
At that point, from among us, comes a person who promises to fix the problems.
Driven by a desire for power or fame, 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 this person’s intent is to pull down Democracy - to substitute in its place, something selfish, something self-glorifying, and something non-democratic.
The solution to this human threat, said the speaker, is three-fold: One, our citizens must always be aware that THEY are the weak link in any Democracy. Two, our citizens must remain united with one another and united as a nation. Last, our citizens must maintain their allegiance to and their faith in our way of governing. These steps, he said, will successfully frustrate any person’s designs to interrupt the ‘perpetuation of our political institutions’. [1]
The View Now
In his lecture - that cold winter evening in 1838 - Abraham Lincoln perfectly described the grave threat that currently faces America’s participatory Democracy. As he said then, the responsibility for the perpetuation of our political institutions lies with its citizens.
Now, it’s up to US to put Lincoln’s solution to work.
What do you think of Abraham Lincoln’s speech? Let us know below.
Works Cited
[1] Lincoln, Abraham. “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions – A speech at the Young Men’s Lyceum”. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln – Vol. 1.New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953.pp. 109-116.
