Decades Before The Civil War, Lincoln Saw An Approaching Storm. Every American Should Read His Warning

The Federalist ^ | 02/12/2021 | Christopher Bedford

[SeekAndFind]

To a hall filled with young men on a cold Illinois night in January 1838, Abraham Lincoln delivered his earliest recorded public remarks.

For the 50 years prior, the living rooms, parlors, and public offices of our country had been teeming with the brave Americans who’d fought, struggled, and suffered to create these United States. “Nearly every American,” Lincoln recalled, “had been a participator in some of its scenes.”

But now that generation was dying off. What no invading army could, time, he lamented, had itself accomplished: “They were a forest of giant oaks; but the all resistless hurricane had swept over them, and left only, here and there, a lonely trunk… to combat, with its mutilated limbs, a few more ruder storms, then to sink, and be no more.”

Without their life experience, he realized, his was the first generation of Americans tasked with upholding their fathers’ noble experiment simply by the strength of their own virtues. This, he warned, would be very difficult.

As he looked around him, at both slave states and their northern neighbors, he saw and feared the evil of swelling mobs not merely for their unfortunate victims, but for our national tolerance of their violence and misrule — and the effect this shrugging of shoulders and murmuring of approval or disapproval would have on patriotic and unpatriotic men alike.

The incidents weren’t always seemingly connected by cause. A group of gamblers hanged; a mixed-race murderer burned alive; black men suspected of planning insurrection, and then white men suspected of sympathizing, and then simply out-of-state strangers caught in the middle of swelling hate. But beyond their brutality, the young lawyer feared these mobs were connected for the lawlessness they embodied — and the idle familiarity with which his fellow Americans seemed to accept these incidents.

While the 1830s mobs “hang gamblers, or burn murders,” he cautioned, tomorrow’s mobs would hang and burn the innocent — “and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded.”

While after January 2021’s Capitol riot we’ve all seen the ruthless efficiency with which our government is capable of cracking down on lawlessness, we too saw the summer before, when months of attacks on federal officers, politicians, police, private homes, courthouses, and innocent bystanders met calculated indifference and shrugged excuses for “historic racial injustices.”

This too, was well familiar to Lincoln, who knew the mob will go further and spread deeper, warning, “by instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint, but dread of punishment, they thus become, absolutely unrestrained.”

“On the other hand,” he predicted, “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 defense 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.”

Combined, he warned, these seemingly opposing feelings come to one terrible conclusion: “the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed — I mean the attachment of the People.”

To ensure that the fading “scenes of the revolution are [not] now or ever will be entirely forgotten,” Lincoln prescribed “in history, we hope, they will be read of, and recounted, so long as the Bible shall be read.”

Yet today at The Washington Post, New York Times, and at the top of our government, the privileged and ignorant children of our country tell Americans our experiment is tainted, our Revolution was for evil, our Civil War was not enough. They demand reparations through re-education, racist quotas, kneeling subservience, and crude offerings of money. Neither the honored dead of the Revolution nor the lives of 300,000 Yankee boys lying stiff in Southern dust will appease them — they want more than the blood of our countrymen.

To “fortify against” the mob, Lincoln also prescribed an American “political religion” rested on law, order, morality, and reason, yet today’s revolutionaries reside at the very height of our government, inclined to rule toward the same terrible ends the newspapers, college professors and street activists demand. While we all agree the mob’s attack on the Capitol was intolerable, many claim that mobs of Black Lives Matter and Antifa members occupying and burning our cities are less wicked, justified by some imaginary historic cause.

Black separatism, the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center claimed Thursday, is no longer born of hate, but “out of valid anger against very real historical and systemic oppression.” Lincoln, however, knew “there is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”

Just more than two decades after his remarks, Lincoln was president. His office was characterized by a stunning bravery, as well as the very principles he called for in 1838 — “general intelligence, sound morality and, in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and the laws.”

Treading carefully but boldly between Southern sympathizers and abolitionist radicals, the man who in 1838 lamented the passing of our Founding Fathers would as president write the end of their page in history, uniting once and for all the truths espoused in our Declaration of Independence with the laws laid out in our Constitution.

For a century, Lincoln’s story was derided and dismissed by Southern apologists seeking to strike his place in history for the fantasies they preferred. Today, his story is derided and dismissed by racists and radicals of different politics, working hard to undo the political religion he cemented, and to strike his place in history for their own preferred fantasies.

Today, on Abraham Lincoln’s 212th birthday, Americans must remember his life, his deeds, his sacrifice, and the lives, deeds, and sacrifices of all who came before and after him in the service of these United States. If we cannot quickly return to the vision they fought and died for, heed the warnings of 1838, and remember the lessons of our Revolution and Civil War, we are just as sure to lose our country as ever before.

[griffin]

If you read Bushwhacker, by Sam Hildebrand, you see Lincoln’s own men and those they encouraged ‘mobed’ plenty of innocent Southerners.

[nathanbedford]

ping

[Jacquerie]

While patriots today lament the widespread intentional ignorance of our founding and traditions, Abraham Lincoln similarly worried that the founding principles of our republic were fading from view. In an 1838 speech to the Springfield Illinois Young Men’s Lyceum, he warned of the profound consequences; those founding principles he proclaimed, “were a fortress of strength; but what invading foes could never do, the Silent Artillery of Time has done; the leveling of its walls. ”

The Silent Artillery of Time left its mark. Few Senators, newspapers or anyone else in the late 19th and early 20th centuries argued against popular election of Senators from the standpoint of the threat it posed to limited and stable government. So well-designed was the Framers’ structure, that America had forgotten the problematic nature of purely popular government which plagued and eventually destroyed overly democratic societies since the ancient Greek city-states.

Direct Election of Senators and the Silent Artillery of Time.

[Conservative4Life]

for future reference

[M Kehoe]

Ping.

5.56mm

[Chgogal]

Bookmark

[Sergio]

bkmk

[CodeToad]

Well said.

[liberalh8ter]

Thank you! As I read the OP’s description of Lincoln I thought, “which Lincoln are they talking about?”

[Tijeras_Slim]

They didn’t have many in the Warsaw ghetto but made them count. A lesson to be learned.

[thecodont]

Thanks for posting this. People need to remember Lincoln and his accomplishments.

Happy Birthday, President Lincoln.

[JudgemAll]

I am not going to go there between North and South, subconsciously blackmailed either way. Obviously you are too dumb to realize it was a bipartisan ploy to murder and control both the North and the South,

Nor the South nor the North won this battle, except present day bipartisan tyranny. Get a grip, good grief. Lincoln is a traitor and manipulator, a coward who has a King wanted to avoid the heat for himself, but eventually paid anyways.

[JudgemAll]

Lip service Lincoln. He avoided the responsibility as a King for the very downfall of those values by not protecting the states and going bipartisan.

To this day both parties blame Americans left and right to divided them, blaming the average Joe for racism or corporate welfare.

[Rummyfan]

Marking.

[BroJoeK]

Levy78: "Add ‘insatiable desire for the northern descendants of the puritans to impose their will on everyone’ busy body Yankees caused the CW and are the root of our ills today."

Nonsense, you have it exactly backwards.
Even in 1860 something like 90% of Northerners (along with Lincoln) were content to let slavery exist, unmolested, in the South.
For decades Northerners had helped elect Southern slaveholder Presidents like Democrats Andrew Jackson & James Polk and Whigs William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor.

In the 1850s Northerners helped elect Democrat Doughfaced Northerners Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, men happy to advance the Southern agenda, including a Southern transcontinental rail route and the SCOTUS Dred Scott ruling.

So most Northerners were not opposed to either the South or to slavery, and many understood how much of American prosperity depended on them.
What Northerners did oppose and would not tolerate was the expansion of slavery into US western territories (i.e., Kansas) and even (via the SCOTUS Dred Scott ruling) to their own states.

As Lincoln said in 1858:

"We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State."

That was too much to swallow and that's what flipped many previously sympathetic Northern Democrat voters to the anti-slavery Republican party.
It wasn't hatred of the South, it was fear that slavery would be forced down their own throats.

[BroJoeK]

muleskinner1: "Horse Manure!!!!"

*

muleskinner1: "Lincoln was not a saint,hero or superman."

Lincoln was a good man in an impossible situation.

muleskinner1: "He was a conniving corporate lawyer who represented most of the major rail roads in the US. "

Unlike Mississippi Senator then Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, Lincoln never used the Federal government to purchase a huge tract of land (1853 Gadsden Purchase) roughly the size of South Carolina for an amount equivalent today to $65 billion just so he could have the transcontinental railroad pass near to his own house.

muleskinner1: "He fabricated the notion of a supreme federal government from thin air..."

No, that would be the US Constitution:

Article 6, section 2: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."

muleskinner1: "subverted the Constitution..."

No, to the best of his ability he preserved, protected and defended the Constitution of the United States.

muleskinner1: "locked people up without due process..."

According to the US Constitution:

Article 1, Section 9: "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

Jefferson Davis also suspended habeas corpus and locked people up "without due process."

muleskinner1: "threatened to arrest the Chief Justice for opining that a state could leave the union,"

Allegedly, never proved and Crazy Roger Taney was never arrested or spent a night in jail for his lunatic opinions.

muleskinner1: "...rewarded his railroad cronies with cabinet positions and even made his old boss, McClellan, the supreme commander of the army."

Indiana's Doughfaced Democrat Caleb Smith was Lincoln's friend & supporter, apparently had some railroad connections and Lincoln appointed him Secretary of the Interior.
Smith served less than two years then resigned due to poor health.

George McClellan was another Democrat who had a promising start to his Civil War career in West Virginia.
Winning two minor battles against CSA Col. Porterfield and Gen. Garnett McClellan became a national hero who Lincoln promoted to replace McDowell after Bull Run.
He proved to be good at training & equipping troops, poor at leading them in battle.
McClellan eventually ran as the Democrats' peace candidate against Lincoln in 1864.

Lincoln, like Donald Trump, had great difficulty finding subordinates who were both capable and loyal to their shared vision.

muleskinner1: "On top of all that he believed Blacks were inferior genetically to Whites and wanted them all repatriated back to Africa."

Lincoln knew nothing about genetics, that's just silly.
Augustinian friar Gregor Johann Mendel's first book on the subject was published in 1866, after Lincoln's death.

As for what was then called "recolonization", that had been official US policy since the times of Presidents Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.
Over decades, the US government and several state governments had invested large sums in support of recolonizing free slaves to Liberia, Africa.
But the results were meager and the costs high, most freed slaves did not want to "return" to Africa, but the idea did not finally die until Lincoln's failed efforts finally killed it.

When Lincoln realized that recolonization was impossible, he turned to the course of action which got him murdered: full citizenship for freed slaves.

[BroJoeK]

JudgemAll: "Lincoln was the first RINO who unconsciously allied with democrats, the very reason for all the terrorism trouble."

What a crock!!
The fact is that Lincoln helped define what the word "Republican" means, so you judge every other alleged Republican by Lincoln, not the other way around, fool.

And President Trump made that clear many times -- even in the South (where it was not a great applause line) Trump was not afraid to tell his people: "We are the party of Lincoln"

So FRiend, you head is totally screwed up.
Get it out of your rear and screw it on right, the world will seem a much different place then.

[BroJoeK]

Dick Bachert: "Some folks have been telling us this was coming for over 70 years!
They were members of the John Birch Society (JBS).
Thanks to ridicule and lies by the 5th column - now called the “mainstream media”- not enough of you listened."

I remember the John Birch Society -- conservatives who got into trouble over Civil Rights and calling out President Eisenhower.

"Could Eisenhower really be simply a smart politician, entirely without principles and hungry for glory, who is only the tool of the Communists?
The answer is yes..."
"With regard to ... Eisenhower, it is difficult to avoid raising the question of deliberate treason."[65]"

As a result prominent conservatives like Barry Goldwater & William F Buckley condemned or shunned JBS.

Today JBS still has some prominent supporters, apparently including the Paul's with alleged influence over President Trump.

I personally had not heard of them in... decades.

[JudgemAll]

Lincoln was known to be a schizophrenic freak. He attacked the South knee jerk behavior allying with democrat terrorists against family collected southerners.

Lincoln is the first antifamily president. For him it was lawyer DC bureaucracy schizo dealings before anything, an America imaged as a club after himself.