A Lesson from Abraham Lincoln

I am reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Leadership in Turbulent Times, in which she explores how four American presidents—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson—developed their personal leadership qualities.  She describes how a young Lincoln, still in his twenties, became concerned about leaders, in Goodwin’s words, “in whom ambition is divorced from the people’s best interests” and who had the potential to become despots.  I was fascinated by the story and searched out Lincoln’s original speech, which I found on Abraham Lincoln Online. 

            It was 1838—26 years after the start of the War of 1812 and 27 years before the Civil War.  Lincoln was an Illinois State Representative.  As his future law partner, William Herndon described it,  “. . . the speech was brought out by the burning in St. Louis a few weeks before, by a mob, of a negro. Lincoln took this incident as a sort of text for his remarks ...”  Lincoln noted that his audience had benefited greatly from a now-past generation that saw the nation through its revolution and initial expansion, just as, in our times, the younger generation is now feeling the passing of the “Greatest Generation” that saw the nation through the Depression and World War II and into an era of civil rights.  As Lincoln said:

“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.”

The challenge to this generation, he told his young audience, will not be from foreign invaders, but from within.  Danger, he warned, “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 cited the recent mob-based killing in St. Louis.  “Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana . . . Whatever, then, their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.”  The larger lesson of mob rule, Lincoln tells his young listeners, is the death of democracy:

“When men take it in their heads today 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. . . and thus 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. . . . Thus, then, by the operation of this mobocractic spirit, which all must admit, is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed--I mean the attachment of the People.”

The key to avoiding this outcome, Lincoln maintained, was education:

“Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap--let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, 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 went on to emphasize that this does not mean that citizens should not work to end bad laws, but that “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”  The long-term success of democracy, he argued, “. . . will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”  He concluded:

“Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.--Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws: and, that we improved to the last; that we remained free to the last . . .”

Here we are today, at a time when technological and social change have empowered individuals while endangering our understanding of community.  Two days ago, one home-grown terrorist killed eleven Jewish worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue—the single largest act of terror against Jews in American history, but just another in a growing list of mass killings in schools, churches, and other settings across America.  It is time to take Lincoln’s advice to heart.  We need to instill in all citizens—from grade school through high school and on to vocational and professional education—a sense of their responsibility as citizens and members of a democratic society.  There is, of course, much more we need to do, from a serious commitment to gun control to providing social, psychological, and medical services to all Americans in need.  But first, we need to understand better and more deeply the nature of our country and of our roles as citizens.