The greatest of our presidents, a Republican — by chance the first and originator of that clan — had good sense to impart, this long before any thought of heading to Washington. Those leading that party today would do well to attend to what he had to say in 1838.
“The American People … find ourselves in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves 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. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them. They are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Their’s was the task to possess … this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ‘tis ours only, to transmit these … to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.”
This passage is from Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln’s “Lyceum Address,” the speech occasioned by the burning in St. Louis of a Negro man by a mob.
“How then shall we perform it? At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!–All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.”
Twenty-eight-year-old Abraham Lincoln went on, “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
Lincoln was, of course, totally aware of all the contradictions between the expressions of freedom in our revered national documents and the reality that in that hour well over a million ethnically different, darker skinned persons, and their heirs, were held in perpetual bondage in his country.
“I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. 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. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, … it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times … whatever their cause may be, is common to the whole country.”
Lincoln sums up the horrors of Southern news, the little insurrections of slaves and swift reprisals of the masters – the dead men dangling from the boughs of trees like the native Spanish moss.
He asks, ”What has this to do with the perpetuation of our political institutions?
What prescience, in 1838 — and now!
The danger Lincoln spoke of was not just the evil of slavery but the evil of men, of men in power and the dangers they posed, to others and to the idea of the nation. A return to what was designed, was what he intended.
Had he not been savagely cut down, Abraham Lincoln’s plans for peaceful transition to “the United States” might well have preventedthat century more of violence to people of color.
Some might say I’d do better to leave the lecturing to Lincoln, but I must add, Republicans in Washington would do well to think upon what Lincoln has to offer.
Charlemont resident Carl Doerner is an author and historian currently at work on a re-examination of and challenge to the “American narrative.”