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Gettysburg Address

Chase Evans — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 15:57:18 +0000

By: Jason Jividen

Among the several documents featured in this exhibit, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is the most famous. Memorized by school children, read and revered throughout the world, and inscribed—with his Second Inaugural—upon the walls of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., this short address of roughly 275 words is striking in its brevity, eloquence, and gravity. Scholars of rhetoric note the speech’s deliberate language, structure, style, and rhythm. Historians and biographers explain the context, timeliness, and influence of the speech. Political theorists study the ideas in the address, especially Lincoln’s claim that the nation is “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Often considered a turning point in the American Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg took place from July 1-3, 1863. After a major victory at Chancellorsville, General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia sought to invade northern territory and surround the nation’s capital. General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac followed in pursuit. The armies met in southern Pennsylvania at the town of Gettysburg. After three days of intense fighting, Union forces won the battle, marking the northernmost point that Confederates advanced during the war. Combined with the successful siege of Confederate fortifications at Vicksburg on the Mississippi River, the battle of Gettysburg helped to shift the momentum of the war toward Union victory.

With more than 50,000 casualties, this was the bloodiest battle of the war. By October, some of the Union dead buried on the battlefield would begin to be relocated to Soldiers’ (now Gettysburg) National Cemetery, a portion of the battlefield consecrated on November 19, 1863. Invited to offer some remarks at the consecration ceremony, Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address, the opening of which contains one of the most famous sentences uttered by any American president. Immediately we should note that Lincoln dated the American founding to 1776 and the Declaration of Independence (four score and seven years ago) and, importantly, he suggested that the nation was at that moment “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” For some observers, Lincoln’s insistence that the Declaration somehow represents the American founding is debatable. Some claim that the founding is more reasonably dated to the writing and ratification of the Articles of Confederation or the U.S. Constitution. According to Lincoln, however, these frameworks cannot be understood properly in isolation from the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

For Lincoln, the notion that all men (i.e. human beings) are created equal was the bedrock principle of American government. In his speeches of the 1850’s, including his debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln routinely suggested that the equality of all human beings in their natural and unalienable rights is the founding principle of the American regime. For Lincoln, this natural equality serves as the moral and theoretical basis for government by consent of the governed and for majority rule. If all human beings—as creatures of the same species and rank—are equal by nature, then, whatever differences exist among individuals, no two of us are so different that our reason would suggest that one is a ruler by nature and another the natural subject. Thus, the only legitimate way one can claim a right to rule is through that other’s consent. According to Lincoln, any argument for self-government that denies these first principles is built on sand. This was the fundamental problem with Douglas’s “popular sovereignty” and Taney’s insistence on an indefeasible, constitutional right to slave property. For Lincoln, such positions were rooted, at bottom, in the tyrannical principle of might makes right, or the rule of the stronger.

However, historians and political theorists sometimes wonder about Lincoln’s claim that that the nation is somehow “dedicated” to this principle of natural equality. After all, some suggest, the Declaration of Independence does not say explicitly that the nation is dedicated to equality, or to any other abstract principle. Once again, we might turn to other documents to try to understand what Lincoln meant at Gettysburg.

Lincoln explained in his 1861 Fragment on the Constitution and Union that the animating idea of the American regime is the principle of “liberty to all,” or equal liberty. Echoing the language of Proverbs 25:11, Lincoln claimed that this principle was a word fitly spoken in the Declaration, a word that proved an apple of gold. The Constitution and Union are like a frame of silver meant to adorn and preserve the apple, the principle of equal liberty, which gives hope, enterprise, and industry to all. This is arguably what Lincoln meant in asserting at Gettysburg that the nation is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The Constitution and Union are meant to help realize and secure what is most fundamental, the equal liberty of all to pursue their interests, exercise their talents, and enjoy the fruits of their labor under the rule of law.

It should be obvious how all this speaks to the contradiction between chattel slavery and the principles of the Declaration of Independence. In the Dred Scott decision, Justice Taney claimed that, given their toleration of slavery, the authors of the Declaration could not have included black people in the phrase “all men are created equal.” The founders, Taney argued, believed that blacks had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect” and “might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery.” In response, Lincoln argued that, whatever differences or inequalities there might be among individuals, the founders declared all human beings—including slaves and free blacks—fundamentally equal in their natural and unalienable rights. For Lincoln, this meant that, as a matter of principle, a person ought to be able to eat the bread earned by the sweat of his or her own brow. According to Lincoln, the Founders “meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”

As Lincoln later declared in his July 4, 1861 Message to Congress in Special Session, for the Union, the war was “a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” Whatever prudential compromises had been made with the peculiar institution out of necessity, the founders knew the practice contradicted the principles of the Declaration, and Lincoln always argued that the founders sought to place slavery on the path to ultimate extinction (see, e.g., his 1854 Peoria Address and his 1860 Address at Cooper Union).

These claims give us some context for understanding Lincoln’s suggestion at Gettysburg that the war tested whether a nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, could long endure. For Lincoln, the American experiment was a novel one, and despite its compromises with slavery, it was dedicated to securing the rights of man with a faith in the people’s capacity for self-government. It served as an example to the world, and the crisis over slavery threatened the very existence of that regime. According to Lincoln, in order to preserve and transmit to future generations the regime handed down by the founders, the Union must finish the work of those who died at Gettysburg. They must win the war so that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The implications of Lincoln’s statements at Gettysburg were clear. A Union victory, and a “new birth of freedom,” necessarily looked toward the eventual abolition of slavery, which would ultimately require constitutional amendment. In the short term, however, it required emancipation and most likely the enlistment of freed slaves into the service of the Union army. Recall that the Final Emancipation Proclamation had been issued earlier that year. As many scholars have observed, along with some of the other documents mentioned above, the Gettysburg Address provided the moral argument for emancipation and abolition that was lacking in the dry, necessarily legalistic, and narrowly tailored Emancipation Proclamation.

Lincoln predicted that the world would little remember the things said at the consecration of Soldiers’ National Cemetery. Clearly, this is not the case with respect to his Gettysburg Address. However, we should note that Lincoln was not the main speaker for the day. That honor fell to renowned orator Edward Everett, who offered a very lengthy funeral speech before Lincoln took to the platform. Of course, many are today unfamiliar with Everett’s address. It is worth noting, however, that Everett apparently understood and appreciated the insight provided in Lincoln’s brief remarks. He wrote to the president the following day, praising the “eloquent simplicity” and “appropriateness” of his thoughts at the ceremony. “I should be glad,” Everett wrote, “if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

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First Inaugural Address

Chase Evans — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 15:29:34 +0000

By: Peter C. Myers

For many years a relatively minor figure in politics at the national level, Abraham Lincoln rose to prominence only in the late 1850s, largely on the strength of his performance in the 1858 campaign for the office of US Senator from the state of Illinois. Even after raising his stature in that debate and in subsequent speeches, he remained an improbable choice as the Republican Party’s nominee for the presidency in 1860. But once nominated, he was not an improbable victor, given the population advantage of the non-slaveholding states and the impending schism of northern and southern factions of the Democratic Party. Lincoln prevailed by a comfortable margin in electoral votes. Even if the electoral votes of the other three candidates had all gone to one, Lincoln still would have won the electoral college. Having won, Lincoln then faced the truly formidable challenges.

Lincoln acknowledged this the following February, as he headed to Washington for his inauguration on March 4, 1861. In his farewell speech to his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, the new president-elect remarked that the task before him was “greater than that which rested upon Washington.” The nation’s first president needed to establish the new national government on a firm footing of authority and thereby to solidify the union among the states, an enterprise fraught with great difficulty; but the sixteenth president had to restore the union in the face of a determined effort at secession that within five months after his election had spread over a third of the country. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to enact a secession ordinance. Six more states followed by the first week of the following February, and the eight remaining slaveholding states were considering the question seriously. On February 4, 1861, delegates from the first seven secessionist states met in Montgomery, Alabama to proclaim the birth of the Confederate States of America.

Despite Lincoln’s victory in the electoral college, secessionists regarded his election as illegitimate. The general objection, as the South Carolina ordinance put it, was that for the first time in the nation’s history the presidency would be awarded to the candidate of a purely sectional party, running on an overtly anti-slavery platform. The election came in the wake of what slaveholding interests viewed as unconstitutional resistance by some northern states to the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and it empowered the Republican Party’s desire to prohibit slavery in federal territories—a position they held also to be unconstitutional, with support from the U.S. Supreme Court in the notorious case Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). In affirming the power of constitutional secession, they acted pursuant to a doctrine Lincoln later labeled “an ingenious sophism,” propagated for decades by South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun and his acolytes.

Outgoing President James Buchanan reacted equivocally to the effort to dissolve the Union. In a message to Congress in early December 1860, he placed the blame for the conflict squarely on abolitionist agitation, even as he denounced secession as illegal. The secession theory, he maintained, was “wholly inconsistent with the history as well as the character of the Federal Constitution.” He added, however, that the Constitution delegated no power to Congress or the federal executive to compel a secessionist state to remain in the Union. After secessionists in the ensuing weeks seized federal forts and arsenals, Buchanan affirmed the federal “right and the duty to use military force defensively” against such acts but declared the situation, as a practical matter, “entirely above and beyond Executive control.” Only Congress, he maintained, possessed the power to meet the emergency.

In the meantime members of Congress were working on a plan of conciliation that became known as the Crittenden Compromise, named for Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden, who led the effort. The plan comprised six proposed constitutional amendments that, among other things, would have restored and extended the Missouri Compromise line in the remaining federal territories and further protected slaveholders’ claims to fugitive slaves. President Buchanan endorsed it, although his own recommendations for placating slaveholding interests went significantly further. Lincoln rejected it. In a private communication he instructed U.S. Representative E.B. Washburne, Republican from Illinois, to “prevent, as far as possible, any of our friends from demoralizing themselves and our cause by entertaining propositions for compromise of any sort on ‘slavery extension.’” Acceptance of the compromise would have amounted to an agreement by Lincoln’s party, after being duly elected by the constitutionally prescribed process, to purchase its right to assume the presidency by surrendering the central provision of the platform on which it had campaigned. Lacking Republican support, Crittenden’s and all other compromise proposals failed in Congress, and the nation was left to await the incoming chief executive’s understanding of his powers and duties.

Lincoln was studying events closely and was wary of issuing any premature declaration of intention as to his policy. He told a Buffalo, New York audience in mid-February, “when it is considered that these difficulties are without precedent … it is most proper I should wait and see the developments, and get all the light possible, so that when I do speak authoritatively, I may be as near right as possible.” A few days later in Philadelphia he was more forthcoming, although he continued his silence regarding particulars. “When I do speak,” he said there on February 21, “I shall take such ground as I deem best calculated to restore peace, harmony, and prosperity to the country, and tend to the perpetuity of the nation and the liberty of these States and these people.” The following morning, he reflected in Independence Hall on the promise embodied in the Declaration of Independence—the promise “that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and all should have an equal chance”—and he pledged with bracing resolve: “if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle … I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.” He reaffirmed his commitment to peace but added, “there will be no bloodshed unless it is forced upon the Government, and then it will be compelled to act in self-defence.”

The broad objectives Lincoln set forth as he traveled his winding route to Washington guided his composition of the speech he would deliver there upon his inauguration. Although he firmly rejected all proposed compromises that would tend to demoralize his supporters and delegitimate his party’s claim to power, he did not concede the inevitability of war. His broad objectives were to preserve the peace and to save the Union without relinquishing the principles of liberty and equality that made it, as he had said at Peoria in 1854, “forever worthy of the saving.” He was nonetheless clear-sighted about the possibility of a resort to arms. He framed his inaugural address as an endeavor to avert war, so far as honorably possible, and at the same time to maximize public support for the Union cause, in the event war proved unavoidable.

Divergent approaches remained conceivable. Lincoln could have taken a hard line against the secessionist states. He could have attempted to prevail upon them by direct intimidation, perhaps by a promise of war if they failed to repeal their disunion ordinances by a date certain. But he was unlikely either to intimidate or to persuade those already committed to secession; he needed more urgently to appeal to those slaveholding states that remained loyal and open to persuasion. A few months later he would remark, “to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.” No less urgent, too, was the need to solidify pro-Union sentiment in the states to the north, divided along partisan lines as well as in their degrees of readiness to compel the slaveholding, secessionist South.

Instead of intimidation, Lincoln chose his own form of conciliation. He sought to persuade rather than to coerce, appealing to his straying fellow citizens’ sense of lawfulness along with their self-interest. He argued, as his predecessor had argued, that secession was unconstitutional and thus qualified as a revolutionary act, not a legal one. He argued further that secession was illegitimate as a revolutionary act, because secessionists could not cite as justification any clear violation of their constitutional rights. He advised that it was contrary to their professed interests, as it would make more difficult their recovery of fugitives and it would establish a precedent that in time would undo their effort to establish a new union among themselves. He appealed in closing to all Americans’ patriotic sympathies. But above all, he placed repeated emphasis on his constitutional oath as president, which constrained him from any aggressive act against slavery in the states—and also compelled him, contrary to the opinion of President Buchanan, to defend the Union against any attempt to destroy it.

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Fragment on the Constitution and Union

Chase Evans — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 15:10:05 +0000

By: Lucas E. Morel

After his election to the presidency in November of 1860, Abraham Lincoln received a letter from Alexander H. Stephens, the future Vice President of the Confederacy. They were fellow Whigs when Lincoln served in the House of Representatives from 1847 to 1849. Writing after South Carolina claimed to have seceded from the United States on December 20^th, Stephens asked Lincoln on December 30^th to do what he could “to save our common country.” Quoting Proverbs 25:11, Stephens suggested to Lincoln, “A word fitly spoken by you now would be like ‘apples of gold in pictures of silver.’”ⁱ

Lincoln, however, thought that any statement issued as president-elect would simply be misconstrued by his enemies and exacerbate the national crisis. He, therefore, had decided not to give any speech clarifying his positions on slavery, secession, or the fugitive slave law before his March 4^th inauguration.ⁱⁱ Reflecting upon Stephens’s biblical allusion prompted Lincoln to jot a note to himself that explained what the nation needed was not new words from its new president but old words from men of old, the words of the Declaration of Independence. In short, the “word fitly spoken” had already been uttered, or at least written: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Lincoln had read a newspaper account of Stephens’s speech to the Georgia legislature arguing against secession. In that November 14, 1860, speech, Stephens highlighted Georgia’s “unrivalled prosperity in the Union” as a reason to stay in the Union. Given their significant exports of cotton, he pointed to the state’s “foreign trade” as “the foundation of all our prosperity,” which owed its increase to “the protection of the navy.” In sum, Stephens thought “such rapid progress in the development of wealth, and all the material resources of national power and greatness, as the Southern States have under the general government,” they owed to the American union.ⁱⁱⁱ But where Stephens highlighted the constitutional union as the sine qua non of American prosperity, Lincoln credited a higher cause.

In the note to himself, Lincoln acknowledged, “Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result,” but added that “even these, are not the primary cause of our great prosperity.”^iv He attributed America’s success not to a governmental system but to “a philosophical cause,” an idea “entwining itself more closely about the human heart.” Lincoln thought the Constitution and union existed for the sake of something higher, what he called “the principle of ‘Liberty to all.’” That principle summarized the noble ideals of the Declaration, a principle he clarified for himself at a time when the nation was perilously divided over the meaning of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Lincoln saw the union of American states and the Constitution as the setting or “picture of silver” created to secure the equal rights—the “apple of gold”—that all men and women possessed by nature. However, some Americans had lost sight of this. Having postponed the abolition of black slavery for so long, some had come to believe that liberty belonged only to white people. This disagreement over the purpose of the American union and Constitution led to the electoral crisis of 1860.

For South Carolina and eventually the other ten slaveholding states that seceded, equality and the Constitution had a meaning that would be undermined by Lincoln’s presidency and the growing Republican representation in Congress. Equality did not refer to the equal humanity of all people but to “the equal rights of the states” under a federal constitution understood as a compact among “free, sovereign and independent states.”^v Seceding states claimed that denying their citizens the right to take enslaved people to federal territories, as they feared the incoming Republican administration would do, would “deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the republic.”^vi

In his fragment, Lincoln observed, “No oppressed, people will fight, and endure, as our fathers did, without the promise of something better, than a mere change of masters.” If liberty belonged to all by nature, then those possessing that liberty had every incentive to erect a government to protect the liberty of each member of the community. It was that principle, Lincoln observed, “that clears the path for all—gives hope to all—and by consequence, enterprize, and industry to all.” Lincoln believed the “expression of that principle, in our Declaration of Independence” was “most happy and fortunate” precisely because it gave incentive to Americans to fight to establish “free government” and their “consequent prosperity.”^vii

Lincoln hoped “that neither picture, or apple shall ever be . . . broken.”^viii By this he meant actions like South Carolina’s “to dissolve the union between the State of South Carolina and other states united with her under the compact entitled, ‘The Constitution of the United States of America.’”^ix South Carolina thought it could leave the Union if the Constitution no longer served the purposes for which they thought it was established. The state’s December 20, 1860, secession ordinance therefore repealed its original ratification of the Constitution and declared that its union with the other American states was “hereby dissolved.”

Lincoln, on the other hand, believed the federal constitution was a real government, not a mere compact or league of sovereign states that endured only by the good faith of each state. South Carolina had broken the “picture of silver” by rejecting the outcome of a constitutional election and insisting their citizens were no longer obligated to obey the federal government. Most importantly, South Carolina “bruised” the apple by maintaining that enslavement of black people violated no moral law. Without a return to the Founders’ efforts to put slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction,” Lincoln thought the American union would not be “worthy of the saving.”^x

But as bad as the southern interpretation of the Declaration and Constitution was, Lincoln thought a more pressing danger lurked in a policy promoted by his Illinois rival, Senator Stephen A. Douglas—namely, the policy of popular sovereignty. To Douglas, the summum bonum of America was not the equal rights of every human being—“Liberty to all”—but merely the local expression of the will of white people. He argued that the enslavement of black people should be decided by the local white populations of territories or states, not by Congress, and steadfastly maintained a neutral stance towards the morality of slavery. The consent principle of the Declaration—which Douglas affirmed as “a sacred right of suffrage” and “that great principle of self-government”—was thereby neutered as a moral expression of the liberty belonging to every human being.^xi

Lincoln thought this understanding of the federal government divorced the connection between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It “blurred” or “bruised” the apple of gold by viewing the Constitution simply as a mechanism for uniting diverse American states but without a clear vision of “the blessings of liberty” to which that “more perfect union” was devoted.[xii] As he stated in his 1854 Peoria Address, it would be “sad evidence that, feeling prosperity we forget right—that liberty, as a principle, we have ceased to revere.”^xiii

Lincoln therefore argued that the most urgent need was not to refute slave-owning southerners but to thwart Douglas’s efforts to get white northerners not to care about the expansion of slavery in the federal territories. “I said that this insidious Douglas popular sovereignty is the measure that now threatens the purpose of the Republican Party, to prevent slavery from being nationalized in the United States.”^xiv The insidious aspect of Douglas’s rhetoric owed to his repeated claim of indifference toward the spread of racial slavery. This meant that slavery’s expansion would not require a positive argument. Simply persuade white Northerners not to care what happens to black people in the federal territories, and slavery would spread as far as self-interest could carry it.

Lincoln believed that if northerners accepted Douglas’s popular sovereignty, it would not be long before politicians argued for the repeal of the ban on the importation of slaves, there being no principled difference between allowing slavery to enter federal territory and permitting their purchase where they could be bought the cheapest—overseas. It would require only a simple change in law to relaunch the nation in the international slave trade. Lincoln called attention to this corrupting influence of Douglas’s rhetoric, “this gradual and steady debauching of public opinion,” what he would later refer to as “the plausible sugar-coated name of . . . ‘popular sovereignty.’”^xv

Lincoln’s “Fragment on the Constitution and the Union” shows that as important as the Constitution and union of American states were, they existed to fulfill the higher ends spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. Only by remaining committed to securing “Liberty to all,” which Lincoln believed required stopping the spread of slavery and putting it “on the course of ultimate extinction,” could the nation fulfill the promise of American independence.

ⁱ Alexander H. Stephens cited in a footnote to Lincoln, “To Alexander H. Stephens,” December 22, 1860, ed. Roy P. Basler, 8 vols., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (online edition by Abraham Lincoln Association; orig. publ. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 4:161n1.

ⁱⁱ See, for example, Abraham Lincoln, “To Truman Smith,” November 10, 1860, Collected Works, 4:138; Lincoln, “To Nathaniel P. Paschall,” November 16, 1860, Collected Works, 4:139–40; Lincoln, “To Henry J. Raymond,” November 28, 1860, Collected Works, 4:145–46; Lincoln, “To John A. Gilmer,” December 15, 1860, Collected Works, 4:151–53.

ⁱⁱⁱ Lincoln, “To Alexander H. Stephens,” November 30, 1860, Collected Works, 4:146; Alexander H. Stephens, “Union Speech of 1860,” Georgia Legislature, November 14, 1860, in Confederate Records of the State of Georgia, comp. Allen D. Candler, 1:194–95 (Atlanta, GA: Chas. P. Bird, State Printer, 1909), (accessed June 27, 2022).

^iv Lincoln, “Fragment on the Constitution and the Union,” c. January, 1861, Collected Works, 4:168–69 (for Lincoln texts, all emphases in original).

^v See for example “South Carolina Declaration of the Causes of Secession,” December 24, 1860, (accessed June 27, 2022).

^vi See for example “Georgia Declaration of Secession,” January 29, 1861, (accessed June 27, 2022).

^vii Lincoln, “Fragment on the Constitution and the Union,” 4:169. See also Lincoln, “Speech at Kalamazoo,” August 27, 1856, Collected Works, 2:364: “We stand at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world, and we must enquire what it is that has given us so much prosperity, and we shall understand that to give up that one thing, would be to give up all future prosperity. This cause is that every man can make himself.”

^viii Lincoln, “Fragment on the Constitution and the Union,” 4:168–69.

^ix “South Carolina Ordinance of Secession,” December 20, 1860, (accessed June 27, 2022); “South Carolina Declaration of the Causes of Secession” (December 24, 1860), (accessed June 27, 2022).

^x Lincoln, “Speech at Chicago, Illinois,” July 10, 1858, Collected Works, 2:491; Lincoln, “Speech at Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854, Collected Works, 2:276.

^xi Stephen A. Douglas, December 30, 1845, speech quoted in Martin H. Quitt, Stephen A. Douglas and Antebellum Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 94; Stephen A. Douglas, “Douglas at Chicago, July 9, 1858,” in Angle, Created Equal? 12. For the most authoritative commentary on Douglas and popular sovereignty, see Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, chaps. 2 and 16.

^xii Preamble, U.S. Constitution.

^xiii Lincoln, “Speech at Peoria, Illinois,” October 16, 1854, Collected Works, 2:274.

^xiv Lincoln, “Speech at Columbus, Ohio,” September 16, 1859, Collected Works, 3:423.

^xv Lincoln, “Speech at New Haven, Connecticut,” March 6, 1860, Collected Works, 4:18.

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Cooper Union Speech

Chase Evans — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 14:44:08 +0000

By: Andrew Lang

In February 1860, Abraham Lincoln delivered the most important speech to that point in his career. Lincoln’s powerful remarks at the Cooper Institute in New York City paved the way toward his receiving the Republican Party’s nomination for the presidency.

Abraham Lincoln earned national acclaim for his debates with Stephen A. Douglas during their 1858 campaign for the United States Senate. Though he did not win the seat, Lincoln continued to challenge Douglas’s doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” which allowed for local citizens to decide for themselves whether to permit slavery’s expansion into the federal territories. As he had done since 1854, Lincoln followed Douglas across the Midwest and exposed the Democrat’s hollow ambivalence on the slavery question. Indifference to the growth of slavery beyond its original limits, Lincoln argued, violated the founding generation’s effort to place the institution on the path of ultimate extinction.

Lincoln’s belief became more urgent by late 1859. A presidential election would take place the next year, testing the durability of a “house divided” between pro and antislavery alliances. In September, Douglas published an essay in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, “The Dividing Line between Federal and Local Authority,” and delivered speeches on the same subject. Aiming to secure his bid as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, Douglas claimed that the Constitution’s framers advocated popular sovereignty to solve the issue of slavery’s expansion. Then, in October, news of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, shook the nation. Slaveholders howled that the Republican Party fueled Brown’s insurrectionary tactics. Even President James Buchanan, a northern Democratic ally of southern slaveholders, condemned antislavery rhetoric as “an incurable disease of the public.” Brown’s violent abolitionist crusade, Buchanan warned, would spark ever “more dangerous outrages and terminate at last in an open war by the North to abolish slavery in the South.”

In this tense national climate, New York Republicans in October invited Lincoln to deliver a speech on the political moment. Scheduled for February 1860, the lecture would take place in the Brooklyn church of famed abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher. Lincoln could not pass up such a golden opportunity. An ambitious presidential hopeful, Lincoln needed to endear himself to the party’s influential northeastern politicos. New York was a key Republican stronghold, led by its favorite son, Senator William H. Seward. Insiders regarded the sterling and experienced Seward a lock on the presidential nomination. How would Lincoln, a lanky, disheveled westerner with a squeaky voice and an odd gait, secure his party’s coveted national blessing?

The confluence of events during the autumn of 1859 provided Lincoln with ample material as he prepared his speech. He spent weeks in the Illinois State Library organizing his refutation of Douglas’s claim that the Founders’ promoted popular sovereignty. Lincoln “was painstaking and thorough in the study of his subject,” recalled his law partner William Herndon. Pouring through congressional records, political history, and Jonathan Elliott’s multi-volume Journal and Debates of the Federal Constitution (1836), Lincoln aimed to prove the framers’ antislavery constitutionalism and their insistence on federal supremacy over the territories.

After months of careful preparation, Lincoln departed for New York. Awaiting him was the biggest political stage of his career. But Lincoln worried that the elite eastern audience would look askance at his homespun western flavor. Herndon agreed: “When at last he left . . . we had many misgivings—and he not a few himself—of his success in the great metropolis.”

On the eve of Lincoln’s speech, the New York organizers, anticipating a large gathering, moved the event from Beecher’s church to the Cooper Institute in Manhattan. On February 27, 1860, spectators filled the auditorium. At first, Lincoln sensed his observers sitting in silent judgment of the tall, awkward specimen, dressed in an ill-fitting suit, standing before them. But upon opening his speech, Lincoln settled into a confident rhythm. He captivated his listeners. Unlike romantic, Victorian-era harangues, the speech “was devoid of all rhetorical imagery, with a marked suppression of the pyrotechnics of stump oratory.” Instead, Lincoln the lawyer spoke to his jury. Appealing to logic and reason, he executed his brief.

At the outset, Lincoln accepted Douglas’s own proposition that “Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question [the dividing line between federal and local authority] just as well, and even better than we do now.” Lincoln ingeniously upheld Douglas’s premise that the Constitution and history itself offered clear evidence of the framers’ original intent on the territorial question. But with mathematical precision and expert historical analysis, Lincoln advanced his central thesis: “a clear majority” of “our thirty-nine fathers who framed the original Constitution . . . understood that no proper division of local from federal authority, nor any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control slavery in the federal territories.”

The address at Cooper Institute is a drama in three acts. First, Lincoln’s skillful grasp of history rebutted Douglas’s charge that the Constitution barred congressional regulation of slavery in the territories. Lincoln had studied the words and deeds of the thirty-nine delegates who signed the Constitution in 1787. He listed them by name and evaluated their congressional legislative actions taken before and after the Constitutional Convention. And he demonstrated that twenty-one of the thirty-nine had cast votes between 1784 and 1820 in favor of Congress’s authority to control, if not restrict, slavery in the territories.

Lincoln anticipated an inevitable rejoinder to his case: why should Americans, living decades after the Constitutional Convention, remain wedded to the precedents of a bygone era, especially if conditions in the present might not reflect those of the past? He acknowledged that no generation is necessarily obligated to bind itself to history. But to reject history itself, to reject rational, objective fact in the service of an immoral political agenda—as Douglas did—deceived a free citizenry and weakened the bonds of self-government. To stand in the face of truth and declare it a fiction shirked “the responsibility” of understanding previous generations as they understood themselves.

Lincoln thus believed that the framers had offered to posterity an ideal model by which to secure liberty and address the place of human bondage in a free republic: “As those fathers marked [slavery], so let it be again marked, as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity.” Until subsequent generations devised a better alternative to the founding—and certainly neither popular sovereignty nor the unchecked spread of slavery qualified—Americans would be prudent to heed the judgement of the fathers.

The second part of the speech addressed white southern slaveholders who had condemned Republicans as “revolutionary [and] destructive.” How, Lincoln asked, could the Republican Party be accused of being a fringe, sectional coalition when, in fact, southern law prevented them from testing their appeal to voters? (Southerners barred Republicans from appearing on electoral ballots.) How could Republicans allegedly promote universal, immediate, and unlawful abolition when their party platform pledged to uphold slavery in the states where it existed? (It was not they, but Southerners who had weaponized federal institutions to dismantle federalism, doing so to fuel slavery’s unchecked spread into the territories and even potentially in the free states.) Were Republicans hostile to national order and the rule of law, when it was the Democratic-controlled Supreme Court in Dred Scott (1857) that invented a constitutional right to hold slaves? And when had Republicans, in the vein of John C. Calhoun, ever disparaged the self-evident truths of the American founding as “the most false and dangerous of all political errors”?

Lincoln’s resounding “no” to these questions bolstered his claim that Republicans were a national party that rejected radical abolitionism and slaveholding extremism. The party pledged fealty to the rule of law, political equality, and constitutional restraints. In a compelling turn of phrase that underscores the inherent logic of the American political regime, Lincoln asked, “What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;’ while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new.”

Lincoln concluded his speech with a message to Republicans. The party confronted a political landscape frayed by competing claims to truths and alternative narratives of history. Citizens could no longer equivocate on the momentous issues that would decide the fate of the republic. Republicans had to conquer the “sophistical contrivances” of Stephen Douglas “who grop[ed] for some middle ground between the right and the wrong,” and the unholy appeal of “Disunionists” who compelled “the righteous to repentance.” In the end, an eternal truth offered guidance: “LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.”

Rising to their feet in ovation, Lincoln’s audience well understood his powerful closing statement. The “right” of which he spoke referred to the obligation of all citizens not to abuse the privilege of self-government. Stephen Douglas’s popular sovereignty and proslavery expansionists relied on majority “might” to suppress political minorities and justify human bondage. Anticipating the celestial conclusion to his Second Inaugural Address—“with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right”—Lincoln instead called for restrained conviction, moral clarity, and reasoned humility.

Lincoln’s performance met with near universal praise. The critics raved and the major northeastern newspapers published the speech in full. He had achieved his primary objective: offering a principled, unifying, national message that distanced himself and the Republican Party from abolitionist extremism while remaining committed to a principled antislavery program rooted in the American founding. When he spoke the following week at New Haven, Connecticut, Lincoln affirmed, “the question of Slavery is the question, the all absorbing topic of the day . . . the whole American people, here and elsewhere—all of us wish this question settled.” Lincoln’s achievement at the Cooper Institute convinced Republican powerbrokers that he might be the best hope to resolve the nation’s greatest crisis. On May 18, 1860, the party nominated him for the presidency.

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Speech on the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise at Peoria

Chase Evans — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 14:18:36 +0000

By: Joseph R. Fornieri

The Peoria Address represents the most comprehensive expression of Lincoln’s political thought and statesmanship on slavery. It provides a multifaceted critique of the institution on moral, political, legal, and historical grounds and a corresponding vindication of the Union dedicated to the twin covenants of the Declaration and the Constitution. Hereupon, Lincoln would consistently invoke the “ancient faith” of the Declaration of Independence as the moral cornerstone of the Union.

As Lew Lehrman has aptly noted, Lincoln’s Peoria speech marked a “turning point” in Lincoln’s life and that of the nation. In an 1859 campaign autobiography, he explained, “I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise [by the Kansas-Nebraska Act] aroused me again.” The three-hour speech took place as a reply to an earlier speech by Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who was touring Illinois in support of the newly enacted Kansas Nebraska Act (1854), which he had steered through Congress. As the architect of this measure, Douglas had acquiesced to southern demands to repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which hitherto had restricted slavery North of the latitude line 36° 30’. This repeal now opened the remaining territory of the Louisiana Purchase to slavery. The core principle of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was popular sovereignty, the right of territorial settlers to decide for themselves, without the interference of the federal government, whether or not to have slavery. Douglas championed popular sovereignty as the most democratic way to resolve the slavery question. However, the Kansas-Nebraska Act polarized sectional tensions as never before, leading to a political realignment of antislavery Whigs and northern Democrats, who formed the nucleus of the Republican Party. Lincoln became the new party’s first president in 1860.

The purpose of Lincoln’s speech was three-fold: 1) to repudiate the Kansas-Nebraska Act as inconsistent with the principles and practices of the founding; 2) to reveal popular sovereignty as a dangerous political heresy and a thinly disguised pretext to make slavery national; 3) to reclaim the authentic moral justification of the American Union. In support of these goals, Lincoln produced a rhetorical masterpiece in both substance and style. He would repeat many of the arguments he made against slavery at Peoria in the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 and throughout the remainder of his public life.

The Speech may be divided into four main parts: 1) an introduction that disclaims radicalism and positions Lincoln as an antislavery moderate; 2) an historical overview of federal precedent restricting and interfering with slavery in the territories; 3) a consideration of whether or not popular sovereignty and its “avowed principle” of moral neutrality is “intrinsically right;” 4) a rebuttal to Douglas’s claim that the historical and congressional record sanctioned popular sovereignty, thereby superseding earlier compromises and policies on slavery.

Lincoln introduces his speech by establishing himself as a pro-Union, antislavery moderate in contrast to radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who endorsed disunion and stigmatized the Constitution as a proslavery “covenant with death and an agreement with hell” (Isaiah 28: 18). Lincoln begins by making a clear legal distinction between the existing institution of slavery in the southern states, and its extension into new territories where it did not yet exist. This distinction is crucial to understanding Lincoln’s statesmanship in regard to slavery. At the time, antislavery moderates conceded that under the federal division of power the Constitution barred the federal government from interfering with slavery where it was already established. The territories, however, were a different matter, since they fell under the jurisdiction and control of the federal government. As such, slavery could be lawfully restricted there.

In the second part of the speech, Lincoln provides a masterful legal and historical overview of the federal policy of restricting slavery from the time of the Founding until the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Lincoln adduces the Father of the Democratic Party against Douglas, emphasizing that “the policy of prohibiting slavery into new territory originated” with Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. This policy led to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, a crucial federal precedent that barred slavery in the vast territory west of the Appalachian Mountains and north of the Ohio River. With lawyerlike precision and clarity, Lincoln amasses overwhelming evidence of the federal government’s restriction of slavery in its territories, from the Northwest Ordinance (1787), to the Louisiana Purchase (1807), the Missouri Compromise (1820), the Wilmot Proviso and the Compromise of 1850. This policy ended, however, with the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln’s concise narrative is an invaluable source for understanding the sectional debate over slavery extension.

Lincoln concludes this narrative with a strong condemnation of “the monstrous injustice” of slavery, repeatedly and atypically using the strong language of “hate” to characterize his feelings about the institution. It undermines sectional peace at home and undermines moral credibility abroad. Most insidiously, it places well-meaning citizens in an “open war with the fundamental principles of the civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.” By characterizing the struggle over slavery extension as an underlying conflict between self-interest and moral right, Lincoln displays his mettle as a philosophical statesman who demands a legitimate standard to judge federal policies.

Before transitioning to the next section of the speech, Lincoln tempers his remarks by considering the constraints and difficulties of dealing with “the existing institution.” The tone now shifts to sympathy for the moral and political dilemmas faced by southerners of good will. Lincoln notes that his own first impulse would be to return the slaves to Africa, the policy of colonization. However, he immediately raises questions about the practicality of this plan. He then considers the scenario of freeing the slaves and making them fully the social and political equals of whites, a status that was actually prohibited under Illinois law. He notes that his own feelings would not permit this, but that even if they did, others would object. Lincoln’s use of conditional language in regard to his “own feeling,” combined with his observation that “a universal feeling” (that African Americans cannot be the social or political equal of whites), “whether well or ill founded, can not be safely disregarded” raises questions about whether he actually shared—or was merely accommodating—the common racial prejudices of the time.

The third section of the speech considers whether or not the principle of popular sovereignty is intrinsically right. Here Lincoln integrates a number of cogent arguments against slavery. Addressing southerners as if they were in the audience, he asks a series of rhetorical questions about their own actions in punishing the international slave trader with the death penalty, despising the domestic slave dealer, and manumitting slaves at great cost. In each case, the actions of southerners themselves testify to their own intuitive recognition of and sympathy for the common humanity of the enslaved person.

Next Lincoln turns to the principles of self-government. Consent among equals is the only legitimate principle of governance, according to what Lincoln calls his “ancient faith,” as expressed in the Declaration. Without consent, the alternative is to rule another by either force or fraud. Here Lincoln contrasts the nation’s “ancient faith” with the “new faith” of popular sovereignty, which he likens to an idolatrous abandonment of the nation’s moral covenant. In sum, slavery is tantamount to the retrograde doctrine of the divine right of kings rejected by the Founders.

Lincoln then turns to the Constitution. An inspection of its language reveals the deliberate absence of the term “slave” or “slavery.” According to Lincoln, the Founders substituted euphemisms like “persons held to labor” as a mark of their disapprobation. In explaining the gap between the principle and practice at the time of the Founding, Lincoln uses the analogy of a sick man with a cancerous tumor. Slavery is a cancer that could not be removed at the time of the Founding without killing the patient, the Union. However, once the patient’s viability has been established, the cancer must be removed before it spreads. Slavery was thus tolerated only as a necessary evil. The Declaration, was, in effect, a promise that slavery would eventually be extirpated from the land.

Lincoln ends this section of the speech by defending American exceptionalism with an allusion to the Book of Revelation (7:13–14). He urges a recurrence to the spirit of the Revolution to purify the nation’s republican robe. The Union must be “worthy” of saving in view of the principles and practices that harmonize with its “ancient faith” in the Declaration.

In the final section of the speech, Lincoln rebuts Douglas’s claim that popular sovereignty was both anticipated and affirmed by the historical and legislative record. Neither the presence of slaves at one time in Illinois nor the territorial settlements of Utah, New Mexico, Washington and Oregon repealed the earlier principle of restriction, he says. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was a proslavery innovation inconsistent with prior compromises and settlements.

While the shorter Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address are both inscribed in the Lincoln Memorial, the more discursive Peoria Address should also be included in the ranks of Lincoln’s greatest speeches for its enduring vindication of the moral meaning of America and the principles of the Declaration. The strenuous path demanded by the “ancient faith” at Peoria would ultimately lead to “new birth of freedom” Lincoln spoke of at Gettysburg.

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Temperance Address

Chase Evans — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 13:59:00 +0000

By: David Tucker

On Washington’s birthday in 1842, in a Presbyterian church in Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln addressed a meeting of a new temperance society, the Washingtonian Society, which six alcoholics had started two years before in Baltimore, Maryland. Temperance movements aiming to moderate or ban the use of alcoholic beverages were one of a number of reform movements popular in antebellum America. This was in part the result of the American Revolution. The revolution had, after all, been a movement to reform political life, to remedy the failings of received European ideas and forms of government, establishing, as the motto on the great seal of the United States says, a new order for the ages. The reform movements so popular prior to the Civil War aimed to carry reform beyond politics to morality, to change how individual Americans lived. In this purpose, these reform movements were encouraged by the understanding of Christianity that motivated many of the reformers. One of them, Edward Beecher, argued in a sermon he preached in 1835 that Christians had to strive for holiness, to find sin vile and loathsome, and crucify it in themselves. They should seek communion with God, to share in God’s feeling and emotions. This kind of holiness, and the work of social reform it made possible, was necessary to bring about the millennium, the perfection of the world, after which God would return in his glory.

The Washingtonians distinguished themselves from other temperance groups by working to make individual drunkards temperate, rather than by trying to reform society as a whole. They also avoided religious rhetoric, emphasizing the practical benefits of sobriety. This is one reason Lincoln stated in the Temperance Address that in explaining the success of this new movement, which Lincoln said was greater than the success the older temperance advocates enjoyed, he would address only the rational causes of the Washingtonians’ success.

Lincoln identified several ways that the old and new reformers differed. First, they used different champions (advocates). The old reformers used people—ministers, lawyers, and paid speakers—whose self-interest could be said to motivate their work. The new reformers spoke from the heart and their own experience, and hence seemed to be sincerely engaged for the good of others. Their tactics also differed. Those of the old reformers, Lincoln argued, were both impolitic and unjust. They were impolitic because the old reformers denounced drunkards as if the reformers were lordly Judges, rather than erring brothers, which is what the new reformers were. No one, Lincoln argued, would reform their behavior if denounced in such a manner. The old tactics were unjust, because from the discovery of alcoholic beverages until very recently, no one had thought their use, as opposed to their abuse, a bad thing. It was unjust, Lincoln argued, to condemn suddenly as an evil and to punish the use of something that public opinion had previously condoned.

In considering the injustice of the old way of temperance reform, Lincoln made two other points. The old reformers acted as if drunkards were condemned for their vice without any remedy. This created an unbridgeable gap between them and the reformers. Lincoln considered this approach selfish and lacking in charity. The old reformers also expected to induce a change of behavior among drinkers by appealing to their sense of the distant future good they would do by giving up alcohol. Lincoln thought this showed a failure to understand what motivates people. The new reformers rejected the idea of unpardonable sin and, in doing so, got people to focus on both the immediate good they would do for themselves and the future good temperance would produce.

In the next section of his speech, Lincoln turned to encouraging those who are not drunkards to participate in the work of the society formed by those who were, since these reformed drunkards were doing such good work.

In the final six paragraphs of the speech, Lincoln compared the temperance revolution to the American Revolution, arguing that the former was greater than the latter. He did this, in such a flamboyant and exaggerated way, however, as to make us think he was being ironic. In pointing to the lofty goals of such a moral revolution, especially given the criticisms he had made of the old reformers, he conveyed subtly his sense that the moral revolution reformers aimed at might not be at all the good thing that they and his audience were inclined to think it was. To all who saw this irony, and to those who still see it when reading Lincoln’s speech, Lincoln suggested above all the worth of the supposedly inferior political revolution of 1776.

At the end the Temperance Address, Lincoln made clear what was implicit throughout: what he said about temperance reform applied to the abolition movement, and indeed to all religiously inspired moral reform. Using Biblical imagery and allusions, Lincoln’s speech offered a detailed, if largely implicit, critique of such reform movements. One question Lincoln raised was whether the theology of the saved and damned, central to the reform movements, was compatible with a politics based on the equality of all men. In contrasting the promised distant future good of reform with the harm done by it here and now, he was implicitly calling into question the worth of the millennial thinking central to the reform movement. Specifically, he was asking his audience to consider whether some distant, hoped for end could justify current unjust means. Finally, we can understand Lincoln to have questioned whether the spirit of religiously inspired moral reform was compatible with the friendship among fellow citizens necessary for republican government—the same friendship that he would appeal to at the end of his first Inaugural Address. If one loathes sin, as Beecher said one must, will it be possible not to loathe those whom one thinks are sinning?

In conclusion, we should recall Lincoln’s political courage and daring in giving the Temperance Address. Lincoln was a Whig and the Whig party had among its members many who were ardent moral reformers. As he stood in the Presbyterian Church in Springfield, Lincoln was addressing his “base,” as we would say. Yet, he took upon himself the politically dangerous but morally necessary task of trying to moderate it. This task of encouraging moderation was at the core of Lincoln’s political life. It was a task he would take up again in his Second Inaugural Address.

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Lincoln’s Address to the Young Man’s Lyceum “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions”

Emily Schramm — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 13:40:58 +0000

By: David Tucker

Benjamin Franklin famously told an enquirer that the constitutional convention had given Americans a republic, if they could keep it. Engaged in an unprecedented political act, the founders were aware how precarious their endeavor was. Historical examples canvassed thoroughly by James Madison, but to some degree generally known, suggested that perpetuating a republican government was more difficult than establishing one. ��ϲʿ��ֱ�� 50 years after Franklin’s remark, in January, 1838, a young lawyer and representative in the Illinois legislature took up the issue of perpetuating republican government. Abraham Lincoln, 29 years old, spoke at the Springfield Lyceum, an organization that sponsored speeches, debates, dramatic readings and other educational activities. The first Lyceum was set up in the 1820s and was soon imitated. Lyceums spread throughout the United States, although they were most prevalent in the northeast and midwest. A Lyceum was the sort of place where an ambitious young Illinois politician would want to give a speech.

As Lincoln explained in his address to the Lyceum, he believed that the survival of the republic was at issue because a “mobocratic spirit,” as he put it, was loose in the land. His analysis was more complicated than that, however. Lincoln considered the roles that both the people and the ambitious few played in the drama of republican survival, as well as contemporary and enduring threats to republican government. He also suggested remedies for the threats and, in doing so, raised questions about the relationship between reason and the passions. That relationship, he argued, affected the likelihood that republican government—self-government—could survive.

As Lincoln’s analysis is complex, so is the structure of his speech. The Lyceum Address consists of a brief introduction (paragraphs 1–3), two long central sections, the first focused more on the contemporary threat to the American Republic (paragraphs 4–15), the second more on the enduring threat (16–23), and a brief conclusion (paragraph 24).¹ Lincoln indicated the two sections by starting each with a version of the same question and giving each section a structure the inverse of the other. Paragraph four begins “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?” Paragraph 16 begins “But, it may be asked, why suppose danger to our political institutions?” The first section discusses the passions of the people and their lawlessness, and then mentions the few who might exploit that lawlessness to destroy self-government. The second section inverts this relationship, beginning with a consideration of the ruling passion of what we might call the historically few (Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon) and then discussing the passions of the people. The remedy in the first section, which focuses on the people, is political religion, although Lincoln acknowledges that there are instances in which obedience to the law is not all that is required because there are bad laws that need to be changed. The remedy in the second section, which focuses on the ambitious few, is “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason.” We may connect the remedies in the first and second sections of the speech by asking if it is not reason, “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason,” that must tell us when obedience to the law is not enough.

If we consider the sections of the speech in more detail, we see that in the first section Lincoln argued that the American people in the 1830s were disregarding the law and substituting for it the rule of what he called “the wild and furious passions,” and that men of talent and ambition could exploit this situation to overthrow republican government. (Historians have claimed that there was more mob violence in America in the 1830s than at any other time in American history.) The second section begins by considering men not just of talent and ambition, those who might be satisfied with being President, but those of towering genius and ambition, who could not be satisfied with any merely republican honor. If such a person arose, Lincoln argued, the people would need to be united to resist the threat he posed. Lincoln went on to explain, however, that this unity would be difficult because of the passions “incident to our nature,” or as he also said, “the basest principles of our nature.”

In the first section of his speech, Lincoln described the mechanism by which republican government could be lost in some detail. He distinguished between the direct and the indirect effects of lawlessness. The direct effect is lynching. The indirect and worse effect was that such brutal lawlessness would make good people lose faith that government could protect what was important to them—indeed, to doubt that republican government was good for anything. If this occurred, the people would see little reason to defend the government when it was threatened by a man of talent and ambition. Indeed, they might think that government by a strong man was better than self-government.

In the second section of the speech, Lincoln did not describe in any detail how the man of towering genius and ambition, aided by the basest passions of the people, would overthrow the republic. He did cite three historical examples, however: Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon. All three were military geniuses who helped turn republics into empires. They extended power over other nations and then, having forced other nations to submit, demanded that their own submit as well. Divided by their base passions, Lincoln suggested, the people would be unable to resist towering ambition.

Despite their differences, both sections of the speech show a similar route to republican ruin. In the first section of the speech, the “wild and furious passions” of the people create lawless mobs that breed indifference to the fate of the republic. In the second section of the speech, the lawlessness typical of men of rare ambition, which is “their ruling passion,” takes advantage of the typical passions that divide the squabbling people to overthrow the republic. Lawless passion is the theme that unites the two sections. Recognizing this, we may well wonder if in the passionate nature of their lawlessness there is much difference between the people and the few.

Having seen Lincoln’s analysis of the threat to republican government, a reader may wonder at how adequate his remedies are. Political religion, the remedy in the first part, is reverence for the laws and constitution. Lincoln said such reverence is to be taught everywhere and that all Americans should “swear by the blood of the Revolution never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country.” But in acknowledging that there are bad laws that need to be changed, is Lincoln not acknowledging an attitude toward the laws that is something other than simple reverence?

Lincoln seems to amend or amplify his advice about political religion at the end of the second part of the speech. There he remarked that “passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy.” During the revolution, the passions of the people were bound up and directed to a good end—defeating Britain and establishing a republic—but that work is done. No longer directed to a good and transcendent end, popular passions were rudderless and the people thus prey to a man of towering ambition. The remedy Lincoln proposed for this illness was a reliance on calculating, unimpassioned reason, which would furnish materials from which will be molded new pillars for the temple of liberty: “general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.” One would like to ask Lincoln some questions. First, what are the materials you are talking about and how does calculating reason furnish them? Second, who then molds these materials into the new pillars of the temple of liberty? Lincoln suggested that “a reverence for the constitution and laws” was the most important of the new pillars. “Reverence” recalls political religion, the remedy offered in the first section of the speech. But is not reverence a passion? Passions were no longer supposed to help us. And if this passion is still helpful, can reason, “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason,” generate the passion of reverence?

Instead of elaborating on the remedies, Lincoln closed his speech by invoking the name of Washington and by quoting the Bible. If freedom rests upon the new pillars, we may say of our republican government, as of the only greater institution, “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”²

The rhetoric of Lincoln’s speech served the public good by stigmatizing passion-driven lawlessness and encouraging a reasoned respect for the law. Within this rhetoric, however, Lincoln raised questions that he would deal with for the remainder of his life.

¹ Paragraph numbers refer to the paragraphing in the version of the Lyceum Address found in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), vol. I, 108–115.

² Matthew 16:18.

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