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The Lyceum Address
1787 and Reverence for the Constitution and Laws
The Constitution of the United States protects “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” In the wake of the murder of George Floyd by those responsible for public safety, many Americans have been exercising this right. In giving vent to their grievances, a few of those assembling have not been peaceable; the very gear they wear indicates non-peaceable intentions or expectations. Of the freedoms protected by the 1st Amendment (religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition), the right of assembly is the only one to contain an adverbial specification, “peaceably,” describing the proper disposition of those engaged in communal expressions of dissent. Peaceableness is a demanding standard—more demanding than non-violence since it applies to the attitude of those gathered, not just their actions. Yet, if being aggrieved and, indeed, outraged is the motive for coming together, then peaceability will be hard, requiring individual and collective self-restraint. The language of the Constitution indicates an awareness of how fine the line is between an assembly of the people and a mob.
The most profound analysis of the dangers of mob rule was offered by Abraham Lincoln in 1838, during another time of national conflict that would, within a quarter-century, eventuate in civil war. Only twenty-eight years old, but already in his second term in the Illinois House of Representatives, Lincoln was invited to deliver a lecture to the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum. The occasion called for political reflection on a fundamental matter, with an expectation to avoid overt partisanship. The theme that the young Whig politician chose was “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.”
Presenting a frightening sketch of democratic dysfunction, Lincoln traced a rise in incivility and discord tipping over into political violence and mob action. He showed how the growing lawlessness—and worse, the tolerance for lawlessness—eroded the people’s trust in their government. Looking into the future, he predicted that disgust with an ineffectual government would provide an opening for demagogic populists across the political spectrum. Individuals of unbounded ambition would seize upon the disaffection to undermine the constitutional order. From small beginnings in disrespect for the law, the entire experiment in self-government might be overturned.
Having described the disease, Lincoln prescribed the cure: fidelity to the Constitution and laws. Democratic citizenship does not admit of “civil” disobedience. Even unjust laws must be religiously obeyed until they are repealed or reformed through constitutional channels, which include not only election but the broad avenues of persuasion: the rights of free speech, press, peaceable assembly, and petition. This is a cure that is easy to state but not easy to instantiate. The course of antebellum events shows that Lincoln’s speech did not bring his generation to worship at the altar of law-abidingness.
If we listen more attentively, perhaps we can do better. With its warning against politically degenerative passions, the Lyceum Address is timeless, speaking to our generation as much as his own. While the basic lines of Lincoln’s argument are clear, the details of the speech are complex in their layering and challenging to many of our contemporary prejudices. Our commentary on the text will proceed slowly as we grapple with these difficulties. To prepare, please read through the Lyceum Address, preferably out loud.* Alternatively, you might listen to an audio version, available on YouTube,1 which will be about the length of a TED Talk.
PERPETUATION
We begin with the title, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” a phrase drawn from Lincoln’s opening paragraph. “Perpetuation” is not just Lincoln’s subject but his aim, and as an aim, it might be thought to have a conservative or backward-looking character. The task of the current generation, at least as presented early in the speech, is “only” the task of transmission, passing along our grand and lucky inheritance. Yet, “perpetuation” also breathes hope for the future. Lincoln did not select as his subject “The Decline of Our Political Institutions.” That refrain has become a favorite of grumpy conservatism, from Robert Bork’s 1996 Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline to Patrick Deneen’s 2018 Why Liberalism Failed. Lincoln is plenty worried, but the aim of perpetuation is uppermost. He diagnoses the disease with a view to supplying the remedy. Still, he didn’t choose a more progressive formulation, like “The Improvement of Our Political Institutions.” The Whig standard-bearer Daniel Webster had blazed that path in the peroration of his well-known Bunker Hill speech of 1825. Having praised the founding generation to the skies, Webster confidently declared that the “Principle of Free Governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it; immovable as its mountains.” Confronting the dilemma of what exactly was left for the sons to do, Webster said:
We can win no laurels in a war for Independence. Earlier and worthier hands have gathered them all. Nor are there places for us by the side of Solon, and Alfred, and other founders of states. Our fathers have filled them. But there remains to us a great duty of defence and preservation; and there is opened to us, also, a noble pursuit, to which the spirit of the times strongly invites us. Our proper business is improvement. Let our age be the age of improvement.… Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.2
In the Lyceum Address, Lincoln sounds the same note of generational obligation. However, he does not take the easy route of material development, relying on a progressive “spirit of the times” to ensure that the epigones are kept busy. For Lincoln, time has a more grim and foreboding aspect. As a Whig, Lincoln certainly supported his party’s policy of “internal improvements” (what we today call “infrastructure”). Yet, in the Lyceum Address he makes no mention of it; or rather, he gives it a startling and spiritualizing twist. His version of internal improvements applies directly to the substrate of the individual soul. The only use of the word “improve” comes in the penultimate paragraph, where it refers not to the building of bridges and canals but to the mining of the “solid quarry of sober reason” in order to fashion “other pillars” for “the temple of liberty.” Lincoln’s peroration is more foundational and audacious than Webster’s.
Assuming Lincoln chose his words carefully, it’s worth noting that “perpetuation” has a different valence than either “conservation” or “preservation,” both of which are rooted in keeping and guarding (the Latin servare). They describe defensive acts. And if we remember their household meaning—the putting up of preserves and conserves—they involve altering the original (by canning and pickling) as a hedge against future need. By contrast, the entire focus of “perpetuation” is on the everlasting, the eternal, the unchanging. To perpetuate is to cause to endure indefinitely. However, the word by itself does not indicate the means (old modes or new) by which to achieve that result. Lincoln’s subject of perpetuation requires an inquiry into the nature of time and causation. It hints at metaphysical as well as political questions.
Unlike “conservation” or “preservation,” Lincoln’s choice of “perpetuation” has religious resonance. That note is heard, with trumpet clarity, in the very last line of the address, when Lincoln compares our political institutions to “the only greater institution”—the Church—so rock-solid in its foundations that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” The Bible reference is to Matthew 16:18, where Jesus founds his Church on Peter’s faith in the revealed Messiah. Could a political founding rival that? Is there a death-proof form of government? Lincoln does declare in paragraph 4 that “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” This question of whether free government can endure—and what is necessary to make it endure—preoccupied Lincoln from the beginning.
Lincoln will return to this word “perpetuation” with a vengeance in his contest with Stephen Douglas, beginning with the Peoria Address in 1854 and peaking in the Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858. There he sets the perpetuation of free institutions, premised on the principle of human equality, in direct opposition to the perpetuation of slavery. The sure consequence of allowing slavery to spread throughout the territories would be its perpetuation. Not by accident did the most radical supporters of slavery become known as the “Perpetualists.”3 Lincoln countered that the perpetuity of the Union could be secured only by placing slavery back where the founders had originally placed it, namely, “in the course of ultimate extinction” (a phrase he employed dozens of times in his campaign speeches of 1858). Understood as a transient evil, the institution of slavery could be temporized with (to a degree), but if ever it became “perpetual and national,” it would mean that the gates of hell had prevailed.4
By their nature, political communities aim to endure. Rome is not uniquely “the eternal city.” As Lincoln would assert in his First Inaugural, “Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments.” Even the earlier and less “national” of our national charters, the Articles of Confederation, bore as their full title, “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.” The first object of the Constitution is the formation of “a more perfect Union,” one more likely to be perpetual because less prone to disintegration.
GEORGE WASHINGTON AND OUR POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
Having explored some of the connotations of “perpetuation,” what can be said about the rest of the title: “our political institutions”? Nowhere does Lincoln define this term, although he does on second reference call it “a system of political institutions.” Moreover, when he initially spells out the “something of ill-omen amongst us,” what he describes is how mob rule displaces each of the three branches of government. There is “increasing disregard for law” (the legislative function); there is a “growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts” (the judicial function); and finally, “the worse than savage mobs” replace “the executive ministers of justice” (the executive or police function). Although the phenomenon he describes goes by the name “mob law,” strictly speaking the mob is lawless and despotic. It fits the very definition of arbitrary rule: unlimited, unrestrained, capricious. By contrast, these constitutionally articulated parts divide and check power through their complex relation to one another. They are what Lincoln means by “our political institutions.”
The modifier that Lincoln more frequently attaches to the word “institutions” is “free.” In his first appearance on the political stage, announcing his candidacy for office in 1832, Lincoln endorsed public education so that citizens might, through the reading of history, “duly appreciate the value of our free institutions.” He makes a similar linkage here, telling us that the system of political institutions serves “the ends of civil and religious liberty” and that the whole elaborate arrangement requires “general intelligence” on the part of the people. Interestingly, Lincoln rapidly shifts from the flat and nearly always boring word “institutions” to something more tangible—“the fabric of freedom”—and architectural—“a political edifice of liberty and equal rights” and a “temple of liberty” supported by “props” and “pillars.” Along with enlivening the subject, these images imply that means and ends are inseparably joined into one structure. Of course, this manner of speaking is not Lincoln’s invention; these are well-worn republican tropes.
George Washington in his Farewell Address had deployed many of these same metaphors while highlighting his concern for the nation’s institutions. The verbal echoes between Washington’s last address and Lincoln’s first are numerous, suggesting that the primary text to which the Lyceum Address is beholden is that most famous speech of warning from 1796. Washington celebrates Union as “a main Pillar in the Edifice of your real independence,” and “a main prop of your liberty.” Lincoln, too, sees “props” and “pillars,” but in examining the materials out of which they are formed, he finds some to be “decayed, and crumbled away.” Washington warns against sectionalism that would “tend to render Alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection”; Lincoln worries about “the alienation of their affections from the Government”—a generalized, rather than sectional, alienation felt by “the American People.”5 Washington announces in the strongest terms that compliance with the law and the Constitution is “sacredly obligatory upon all”; the lesson in democratic theory is reiterated by Lincoln and supplemented with his call for a “political religion” of “reverence” for the Constitution and laws. Washington inveighs against the dangerous effects of “the strongest passions” and the “cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men” who would “usurp for themselves the reins of Government”; Lincoln, too, disparages passion—calls it “our enemy”—and puts us on guard against the unbounded ambition of the republic-destroyers.
Despite his clear debt to Washington (and Washington’s dynamic speechwriting duo, Hamilton and Madison), Lincoln did not just present a warmed-over version of the Farewell Address. Nonetheless, his route to originality was through the fullest possible assimilation of his borrowed sources, thinking through and then beyond them. Lincoln achieves this internalized appropriation with many authors who were dear to him. So, for instance, while erudite preachers and public men could high-tone their rhetoric with a spot-on quote or two from Shakespeare, Lincoln did something quite different. He rarely quoted or made any direct application of his sources; instead, he made the insights and phraseology his own to such an extent that he could refigure and transpose them, like a musician whose innumerable borrowings and variations are bodied forth in new and unexpected forms. Through the compressive power of his mind, Lincoln metamorphizes his sources.6
By many measures, Washington’s is the more comprehensive of the two addresses. He discusses matters that Lincoln does not, such as sound fiscal practices and prescriptions for good administration. He devotes considerable attention to matters that Lincoln mentions dismissively, such as threats from abroad. Lincoln’s unconcern about foreign interference—“Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!”—is probably the most noticeable difference between the two addresses. Although they share an interest in the health of institutions, for Washington this includes fears about the possible skewing of the separation of powers; thus, he warns against “the spirit of encroachment” on the part of officeholders and the danger of “change by usurpation.” (This incremental erosion of limited government is today justified under the fetching name of “the living Constitution.”) Although Lincoln will also employ the word “usurpation,” he frames it quite differently—extra-constitutionally, we might say.
While his reflections encompass the whole political scene, Washington is most concerned with the character of the citizenry, which he regards as the precondition for the maintenance of free institutions. As Lincoln put it in the debate at Ottawa, having learned it from Washington:
In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.
In the Farewell Address, Washington is engaged in this ultimate task: shaping a fundamental and enduring public sentiment that will shore up—and just as importantly, frame (by restricting or keeping within bounds)—the efforts of future American statesmen. Hence Washington’s unabashed appeal to “religion and morality” as the “indispensable supports” of “political prosperity,” the “great Pillars of human happiness,” and the “firmest props” of citizen duty. While political institutions are distinct from the institutions of civil society (families, schools, and churches), Washington believes these two sets of institutions are profoundly interdependent. Lincoln also summons these other institutions (starting with “every American mother”) to come to the aid of our political institutions by inculcating “the political religion” of law-abidingness. Neither statesman subscribes to the view that political institutions alone can produce the required republican mores. In this, they dissent from the modern (or Enlightenment) confidence that public benefits can reliably flow from the clever channeling of private vices. They would not have joined in the optimistic prediction made by Immanuel Kant in “Perpetual Peace”: “The problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent.” While not scorning the ingenious mechanics of “the new science of politics”—summed up in Federalist 51’s motto: “ambition must be made to counteract ambition”—Washington and Lincoln keep foremost a concern for character, morality, and virtue. It is on this score especially that Lincoln’s address is the more profound one. Like a river through a narrow canyon, the Lyceum Address cuts deeper in its analysis of the passions of both the few and the many, deeper in its grappling with the human temptation to tyranny, deeper in its portrait of the mob and its motives, deeper in its understanding of public opinion, and, consequently, deeper in its rhetorical presentation.7
THE DOUBLENESS OF TIME
Having forthrightly stated his topic, Lincoln devotes a substantial paragraph to describing the enviable heritage of the post-founding generations. He begins: “In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American People, find our account running, under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era.” Don’t be too quick to dismiss this as the kind of boilerplate typical of an immature writer living in an age that favored the florid. I submit that anyone who can compose such a sentence is engaged in serious reflection on the human situation and its horizoning. Lincoln adopts a dual perspective. There is the order of nature, “under the sun,” and there is a human calendar, an agreed-upon measurement of time that sets us in the nineteenth century. There is Nature and there is Convention. However, it’s more complicated than that, since the Gregorian calendar begins from a world-historical event, the birth of Jesus, that marks—or is understood by believers to mark—the most dramatic entry of God into human history. This great diremption divides time into B.C. (before Christ) and A.D. (anno Domini, in the year of our Lord). We live under the sun and under the Son—Nature and Revelation. Even those who today wish to remain neutral with respect to the truth of that event by adopting B.C.E. (before the common era) and C.E. (the common era) are still acknowledging its trans-political, epoch-making significance. Moreover, if what the date marks is true, then God is superior to the order of nature, acting at will in contravention of that order. Lincoln’s presentation suggests questions—centering on how nature, convention, and revelation are related—but does not resolve them.
Lincoln’s sentence echoes the opening clause of the Declaration, “When in the course of human events,” as well as the opening clause of the Constitution, “We the People,” except that the human event that formed the “American People” is situated by Lincoln within two wider realms: cosmic nature and Christianity. While the Declaration included a reference to the “laws of Nature and Nature’s God” (deistic at best), along with references to a creating and providential God (monotheistic but not specifically Christian), Lincoln does not elide or subsume the tension between physics and metaphysics in a bland, generalized theism. If anything, he doubles down on the dualism. Thus, a few lines further on, he invokes “fate.” We are encouraged to carry out our task of perpetuation “to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know.” Why fate? Why not the Almighty? What will determine the end of the world? Will it be an ineluctable chain of cause and effect, the entropy of the second law of thermodynamics, or the return of Christ in power and glory? In the peroration of the Lyceum Address, Lincoln will circle back to the end times, but for now, he starts us off with hints and flashes.
THE AMERICAN ACCOUNT
Another unusual feature of Lincoln’s scene-setting is the presentation of the world as a kind of text, like a ledger or almanac. Whereas the Declaration of Independence described human events as having a “course,” like the flow of a river, thus assimilating political history to nature, Lincoln nearly reverses this. He speaks of an American “account” within “the great journal of things happening.” It is as if his intense bookishness turns all things into documents that can be read. Accommodating the passage of time, the American “account” is said to be “running.” Now, Lincoln knew a bit about “running accounts” (that is, open, unsettled, revolving credit); his partnership in a general store that went bankrupt in 1833 saddled him with debt that he was still paying down at the time of the Lyceum Address. This is not the only occasion on which Lincoln conceives of the nation itself as a tally sheet of debits and credits. Just as he deploys religion for political effect, he does the same with economic language and concepts. The most profound instance will come in the Second Inaugural, with its vision of a blood price coming due. Post-Lincoln, the best-known example of such appropriation is probably Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech. Describing “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence” as a “promissory note” for every American, King then demands that the nation stop kiting checks.
If the beginning is half of the whole, Lincoln’s beginning promises much. He has introduced the twin themes of time (itself double) and text. Both themes will be extensively developed as he revisits, intertwines, and extends their meanings. Only after this complex positioning of his generation does Lincoln survey the situation, informing the Americans of 1838 that they are the “legal inheritors” of two “fundamental blessings”: basically, land and liberty. The analysis follows the nature/convention distinction already established. Americans enjoy both a natural environment—“the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate”—and a built environment—with a “government” that comes closer to “civil and religious liberty” than any before it. Both legacies must be transmitted to the next generation. As already mentioned, Lincoln foresees no difficulty in passing along “this goodly land … unprofaned by the foot of an invader.” Serving as a caretaker of the “political edifice,” however, is trickier, since the initial threat to it comes from an unavoidable source: time itself. Lincoln says it is our task to transmit the “political edifice … undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation.” The first threat is insidious. As time elapses, we lapse. Almost imperceptibly, institutional decay sets in. The second threat sounds violent. Presumably, usurpation could occur either as the coup de grâce toppling already hollowed-out institutions or, more dramatically, as an assault on a relatively healthy body politic, tearing into it. Both dangers—the chronic one of time and the acute one of usurpation—arise from within. They are forms of suicide, bringing about the self-destruction of self-government.
DOUBLE VISION
Lincoln’s penchant for viewing things from different angles, and even from radically reversed perspectives, continues throughout the speech. These doublings and reconsiderations are, in fact, a major structural feature of the address. Among the main ones: Lincoln gives two very different accounts of the founding generation; he gives two very different accounts of the lynchings that occurred in Mississippi and St. Louis; analytically, he divides the effects of mob rule into two categories (direct and indirect); he discerns two types of danger (current and prospective) and, accordingly, offers two different solutions (reverence and reason); finally, he examines the problem of the passions in its different manifestations in the few and the many (those timeless political categories).
The most dramatic of these doublings are his stories of mob rule in action. He tells of two instances—and then retells each one. Calling these instances “revolting to humanity,” Lincoln describes how in Mississippi the mobs first targeted gamblers, then proceeded to lynch negroes, “white men, supposed to be leagued with the negroes,” and finally visitors from other states. He develops a lurid simile: “dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.” Not by accident, Lincoln will return to the forest imagery at the very end of the address when he laments the passing of “the forest of giant oaks.” The nation’s degeneration over time is captured in these twin images, as the majestic oaks (emblem of the revolutionary generation)—now “despoiled,” “shorn,” and “mutilated”—are replaced by the corpses of the innocent. The whole passage is reminiscent of a lyric written a full century later by Abel Meeropol in 1937, and recorded most famously by the great Billie Holiday: “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”
Moving to “that horror-striking scene at St. Louis” (again, note the parallel and contrast to “the interesting scenes of the revolution”), Lincoln does all he can to shock his audience into sympathy with the victim: “A mulatto man, by the name of McIntosh, was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman, attending to his own business, and at peace with the world.” After relating these “most highly tragic” tales, Lincoln interrupts himself with a question—a question that he attributes to his audience: “But you are, perhaps, ready to ask, ‘What has this to do with the perpetuation of our political institutions?’”
This is a favorite rhetorical technique of Lincoln’s. Through the judicious use of questions, he often creates a dialogic engagement with the audience. Sometimes, as here, he puts words directly in the mouth of an objector or naysayer, thus allowing likely grounds of resistance to be expressed and responded to. Other times he poses the questions himself, as a way of advancing the argument and helpfully signaling its new phases. Before this present question, he had already posed five others; and there are seven more that follow.8 Significantly, however, this is the only one of the thirteen to be ascribed to “you”—his listeners.
Why does Lincoln anticipate push-back at this point? Today, we are properly horrified by the nation’s history of lynchings and mob violence. But Lincoln was addressing an audience that might have felt some sympathy with the mob or, at least, sympathy with its motives if not its actions. What were those motives? We might assume “racism,” but during these decades, from 1830 to the Civil War, the majority of extrajudicial hangings were actually of whites. Lincoln’s examples, however, were not of cattle-rustlers or horse thieves subject to frontier justice. He cites Mississippi, noting that the outbreak of violence there began with opposition to riverboat gamblers. Although gambling had been recently legalized in the state, many citizens, and those perhaps the most upstanding, were morally outraged by the activity. They were angry at the perceived injustice of the gamblers as well as the perceived injustice of the new law allowing gambling. Anger is a potent sign of a thirst for justice, a thirst powerful enough to send human beings outside the law, especially when the law is slow or unreliable or simply wrong. The quest for morality and justice (as those concepts were understood by popular sentiment) drove the formation of vigilance committees in Mississippi and the eventual resort to extrajudicial violence.
Copyright © 2021 by Diana Schaub
