{"id":1439673,"date":"2022-04-15T08:00:59","date_gmt":"2022-04-15T12:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1439673"},"modified":"2022-04-15T08:01:09","modified_gmt":"2022-04-15T12:01:09","slug":"how-abraham-lincolns-speeches-preserved-american-self-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/how-abraham-lincolns-speeches-preserved-american-self-government\/","title":{"rendered":"How Abraham Lincoln\u2019s Speeches Preserved American Self-Government"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">14<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fhow-abraham-lincolns-speeches-preserved-american-self-government%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1439673&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/Lincoln_Schaub.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p>In his day, members of upper-class society likely viewed Abraham Lincoln with a mixture of amusement and revulsion. With his high, shrill voice, Lincoln had neither an impressive family lineage nor much of a formal education, save for less than a single year of schooling. <\/p>\n<p>Cartoonists and political opponents regularly assailed his gangly, awkward features and unfairly attempted to portray him as a country bumpkin. Especially as a young man, Lincoln was generally not surrounded by individuals of \u201capproved intellectual distinction.\u201d Instead, he mostly interacted with \u201ccrude people within a narrow horizon,\u201d according to his renowned biographer Lord Charnwood.<\/p>\n<p>Despite his odd features and lack of credentials, he was a man of prodigious talents who possessed a steel-trap mind. Our nation\u2019s greatest president, Lincoln was also its most profound thinker and speaker. He sat at the feet of William <a href=\"https:\/\/ashbrook.org\/viewpoint\/oped-schramm-00-lincoln\/\">Shakespeare<\/a> and the King James Bible, whose cadence, word choice, and poetry shaped his soul. Combining penetrating political analysis and deep theological insights, his speeches feature some of the greatest rhetorical feats in human history with an even nobler purpose: the salvation of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.encounterbooks.com\/books\/the-statesman-as-thinker\/\">free government<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In <a href=\"https:\/\/us.macmillan.com\/books\/9781250763457\/his-greatest-speeches\"><em>His Greatest Speeches: How Lincoln Moved the Nation<\/em><\/a>, Diana Schaub gives a close reading of three of Lincoln\u2019s landmark speeches: the well-known Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural and the less celebrated but vital Lyceum Address. A professor of political science at Loyola University Maryland, Schaub reads these speeches together as an extended commentary on human nature, the ever-present threats to republican government, the habits and virtues self-governing citizens need to possess, and the God who watches over His natural order.<\/p>\n<h2>The Proposition of Equality<\/h2>\n<p>Schaub argues in this brief but deeply learned work that these speeches lay out Lincoln\u2019s sustained reflections on the crucial years of 1787 (the Lyceum Address), when the Constitution was written; 1776 (the Gettysburg Address), when the nation declared its independence; and, more controversially, 1619 (the Second Inaugural), the year she says the first slaves were brought to America. In her patient, careful excavation of each speech, she uncovers many hidden riches along the way.<\/p>\n<p>For example, most people know that Lincoln\u2019s famous invocation of \u201cfour score and seven years ago\u201d in the Gettysburg Address points back to 1776. Continuing to dig, Schaub discovers in previous speeches that Lincoln regularly used the phrase \u201ceighty years ago\u201d in different variations rather than the famous language taken from the 90th Psalm. <\/p>\n<p>She convincingly argues that Lincoln made this change to strike a \u201csomber,\u201d \u201cdarker tone\u201d and show his audience there could be limits \u201con the lifespan of mankind\u2019s political collectives\u201d just as there are on \u201cindividual life.\u201d Self-government is a fragile thing, and its transmission from one generation to the next is fraught with difficulties that Lincoln\u2019s audience then\u2014and modern audiences now\u2014may not fully appreciate. Page after page brims with similar insights.<\/p>\n<p>Schaub contends it is impossible to appreciate Lincoln\u2019s speeches fully without understanding the foundation on which they rested: the Declaration of Independence. Although he often drew his audience back to the \u201cframe of silver,\u201d the constitutionalism of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.realclearpublicaffairs.com\/articles\/2020\/02\/14\/lincoln_the_american_founding_and_the_moral_foundations_of_a_free_society_484127.html\">American Founding<\/a>, his most weighty and lucid thoughts came when discussing the \u201capple of gold\u201d of the Declaration.<\/p>\n<p>Lincoln made \u201cappeals to the Declaration not only in nearly every major speech but in letters and even scraps of paper,\u201d she writes. As Lincoln himself once stated, \u201cI have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.\u201d Of all the presidents, he was unquestionably the Declaration\u2019s greatest interpreter; only Calvin Coolidge and John Quincy Adams have come close to matching his perspicacity and interpretative depth.<\/p>\n<p>Of Lincoln\u2019s meditations on the Declaration, his most famous (and shortest) occurs in the Gettysburg Address. There, he calls the principle that \u201call men are created equal\u201d\u2014what the Declaration labels a \u201cself-evident\u201d truth\u2014instead a \u201cproposition,\u201d a term borrowed from Euclidean geometry. Unlike self-evident, which Schaub notes \u201cdoesn\u2019t require proof,\u201d a proposition \u201cmust be demonstrated in practice.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Due to the efforts of southerners like John C. Calhoun and northerners such as Indiana Sen. John Pettit, she reasons that natural human equality in 1863 had to be \u201cproved in action\u2014that action being the restoration of a Union dedicated\u201d to that ontological and moral principle. In the Civil War, Schaub contends, Lincoln saw that not only was the nation dedicated to that foundational axiom at stake but also \u201cthe very possibility of political life based on such premises.\u201d A failure of self-government in America \u201cwould constitute the failure of popular government altogether,\u201d she argues.<\/p>\n<h2>The Rule of Law<\/h2>\n<p>In Lincoln\u2019s estimation, while slavery presented the most obvious challenge to republican government, the rise of mob rule was another grave, and likely related, threat. In the Lyceum Address, he said this popular form of despotism was \u201ccommon to the whole country,\u201d where \u201coutrages committed by mobs\u201d were in the \u201cevery-day news of the times.\u201d Mobs in Mississippi and St. Louis, for instance, indiscriminately lynched blacks and whites who were thought to be helping them, gamblers, and even random out-of-state visitors.<\/p>\n<p>As Frederick Douglass would write of slavery, Lincoln maintained that the effects of lawlessness were not simply confined to the ones committing it. Patriotic Americans who saw lawless acts go unpunished and the blatant hypocrisy of the rule of the strong would eventually turn against the government:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>While, on the other hand, good men, men who love tranquility, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the defence of their country; seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons injured and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better; become tired of, and disgusted with, a Government that offers them no protection; and are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>A growing disregard for the rule of law among the demos, Schaub argues, will ultimately result in the \u201coverthrow of popular government.\u201d Lincoln predicted that a tyrant from the \u201cfamily of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle\u201d would rise and use the nation as a playground for his own inexhaustible ambitions and passions.<\/p>\n<p>Lincoln\u2019s solution, Schaub says, was to elevate absolute fidelity to the law through \u201ccold, calculating unimpassioned reason.\u201d Although this proposal seems utopian considering human nature\u2014which is anything but coldly logical\u2014she maintains he was fully \u201caware that reason\u201d alone would \u201cnot secure the required obedience.\u201d Lincoln made clear that the \u201cmaterials\u201d reason provides would need to be \u201cmoulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws\u201d among citizens.<\/p>\n<p>She writes that \u201cmothers, teachers, and preachers\u201d would need to help inculcate a civic education worthy of republican citizenship through \u201chabituation and piety.\u201d Through this hard work, reverence for the law would become the \u201cpolitical religion of the nation,\u201d a commonly over-interpreted phrase of Lincoln\u2019s that should be read in a straightforward manner.<\/p>\n<p>Lincoln taught that an important condition of lawfulness was following bad laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Schaub notes that he believed all laws should be \u201creligiously obeyed until they are repealed or reformed through constitutional channels\u201d\u2014that is, by political representatives of a rightful majority. Government either by a majority or minority acting in violation of the law, in Lincoln\u2019s view, would ultimately descend into anarchy, as evidenced by the secession crisis that preceded his presidency.<\/p>\n<p>Zeroing in on an implication of this argument, Schaub contends that the concept of civil disobedience thus had no place in Lincoln\u2019s politics. She contrasts Lincoln\u2019s\u2014and, surprisingly, Malcom X\u2019s\u2014strict adherence to the twin alternatives of ballots or bullets, free government or appealing to the right of revolution, to Martin Luther King, Jr.\u2019s \u201cantinomian\u201d advocacy for civil disobedience.<\/p>\n<p>King, she argues, \u201cinflated the role that disobedience played in bringing about positive social change\u201d and could have had the unintentional effect of eroding \u201crespect for the rule of law\u201d in our world today. Although this argument challenges part of our modern moral consensus on King and the civil rights movement, Schaub\u2019s contention needs to be taken seriously and thought through.<\/p>\n<h2>Our National Struggle<\/h2>\n<p>Finally, she turns to the Second Inaugural, in which Lincoln \u201creads our national story as a struggle between the principles of natural right, enshrined in the Declaration and the Constitution, and the violation of those principles in American Slavery.\u201d Rising above even the category of political thought, the speech is ultimately a profound meditation on the judgment God exacted on America due to the presence of chattel slavery.<\/p>\n<p>In writing that Lincoln\u2019s Second Inaugural \u201cdeserves to be called his 1619 address,\u201d Schaub is not validating the ideological revisionism of The New York Times\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.realclearpublicaffairs.com\/public_affairs\/american_civics\/1619_project\/\">1619 Project<\/a>. Instead, she argues that Lincoln\u2019s citing of the \u201cbond-man\u2019s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil\u201d dates back nearly to 1619, the year \u201cof the arrival of the first slaves on American shores.\u201d She contends that Lincoln\u2019s source was likely the eighteenth-century historian William Grimshaw, who described \u201ccaptives \u2018from the coast of Guinea\u2019 arriving on a \u2018Dutch ship\u2019 and being sold to Virginia planters\u201d between 1616 and 1619.<\/p>\n<p>Some historians have disputed this claim. <a href=\"https:\/\/claremontreviewofbooks.com\/cancel-the-new-york-times\/\">According<\/a> to Richard Samuelson, it is not \u201cclear that the slaves the Dutch brought to Virginia in 1619 were, after their sale, treated as slaves.\u201d In fact, he notes, \u201cSlavery did not yet exist in colonial law. Some may very well have been treated as slaves as the term came to be defined, but others probably were not.\u201d Kevin Gutzman has <a href=\"https:\/\/lawliberty.org\/reclaiming-1619\/\">voiced<\/a> a related concern: \u201cRecent archival research has established that John Rolfe\u2019s famous letter referring to the arrival of \u201820. and odd Negroes\u2019 may well not have referred to the first blacks in the colony.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Nevertheless, whatever the specific date when the first slaves arrived, Lincoln saw slavery as a malignant cancer upon the nation that was allowed to fester and grow, a cancer the nation excised at the unfathomable cost of approximately 620,00 deaths and 1.5 million casualties. \u201cBecause the offense of slavery belongs to the nation,\u201d Schaub writes, \u201cthe punishment is meted out to both North and South.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She is right to highlight the contrast between Lincoln\u2019s attempts at reunion and the national discord that has resulted partly due to the 1619 Project\u2019s teachings. In her view, the 1619 Project is at its core a full-scale \u201cattack on 1776, 1787, and even 1865.\u201d Rather than issuing an invitation for a conversation between fellow citizens, it harangues and cajoles citizens using slanted and false history, weaponizing their sincere morality to secure specific political ends. The 1619 Project undoubtedly strikes at the heart of civic friendship and the very possibility of a unity of the American mind on principles and practices.<\/p>\n<p>Contrary to the 1619 Project\u2019s teaching \u201cthat the nation is irredeemably racist,\u201d Schaub argues that \u201c1776 was not a continuation of the spirit of 1619 but its antithesis\u201d; instead, \u201cIt was the Confederate constitution of 1861 that enshrined the spirit of 1619.\u201d Rather than sowing division and disunion, \u201cLincoln\u2019s speeches were directed toward recovery of the nation\u2019s integrity, re-conjoining word and deed, promise and performance.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>He did not blame sociological abstractions such as \u201cwhite privilege\u201d or other charged terms that are often used to browbeat opponents into submission. Lincoln nationalized the wrong of slavery rather than racializing it.<\/p>\n<p>Schaub shows that Lincoln attempted \u201cto blunt the force\u201d of \u201cnorthern moralistic arrogance, southern regressive resentment, white race hatred, and Black rage\u201d by insisting \u201con the complicity of both North and South in American Slavery.\u201d He emphasized a \u201cshared national suffering as a consequence of shared national transgression,\u201d calling citizens to adhere to the country\u2019s founding principles, quashing enmity and malice, and restoring civic friendship and peace.<\/p>\n<p>By reading and studying \u201cthe compelling quality . . . grammar, logic, and rhetoric\u201d of Lincoln\u2019s speeches, Schaub writes that they \u201ccan once again restore the promise of America by reminding us of the promises we have made as democratic citizens.\u201d For the restoration of America to be realized, however, word must be translated into deed; citizens need to take action to restore the blessings of liberty for future generations. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cMere words,\u201d she notes, \u201ccould not bring forth the \u2018new birth of freedom\u2019\u2014only battlefield victories could do that.\u201d Logos, in other words, should lead to praxis.<\/p>\n<p>Lincoln\u2019s speeches were aimed at refashioning new props and pillars to support self-government in his time. But what props and pillars are necessary for us today? How can reverence for the law and peace between citizens be secured in an age of increasing lawlessness and bifurcation? And who among us has the ambition necessary to carry out this national recovery?<\/p>\n<p>Once again, we can turn to Lincoln\u2019s wisdom in our quest to find answers to these difficult questions: \u201cThe dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise\u2014with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.\u201d<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n<p>\n  Mike Sabo is the editor of RealClear\u2019s American Civics portal. He is a graduate of the Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College. He and his wife live in Cincinnati, Ohio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In his day, members of upper-class society likely viewed Abraham Lincoln with a mixture of amusement and revulsion. With his high, shrill voice, Lincoln had neither an impressive family lineage<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":675,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1439673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/675"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1439673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439673\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1439673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1439673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1439673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}