An early speech by Abraham Lincoln from 1838 against the supremacy of the Mobocracy is striking for its warnings about the fragility of the rule of law in America:

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Abraham Lincoln was a fledgling lawyer and legislator of 28 when he gave an address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois on ‘The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions’. It was 27 January 1838, and the Young Men’s Lyceum was a society ‘which contained and commanded all the culture and talent of the place^’. Lincoln had only moved to Springfield, Illinois from New Salem the year before. The town was less than 20 years old; it was first visited by trappers in 1818 and the first cabin had been built in 1820. By all accounts it was rancorous and odorous, notorious for stinking piles of rubbish and effluent, roaming hogs, mosquitoes in the stagnant summer ponds. Lincoln was a young legislator, elected to the first of five terms in the Illinois legislature in 1834 as a member of the Whig party (later to evolve into the Republican party). He had been instrumental in the decision to move the state capital to Springfield.

His own position at that time was hardly more salubrious. He arrived so depressed by his debts that his friend William Butler sold his horse – without consulting Lincoln – to clear them. For five years Lincoln took his meals free of charge at Butler’s house, whose wife provided his shirts and socks. From 1837-41 he shared a room and bed with a Kentucky-born merchant, Joshua F. Speed in a room above Speed’s general merchandise store, with two clerks also sleeping in the room. This level of relative deprivation was common in frontier towns and for Lincoln, who was born in a log cabin in Kentucky. Brought up by his sister after his mother died when he was nine, he worked as a farm labourer and received little formal education. When the family moved west to Illinois in 1830 he worked at the general store in New Salem, before joining the Illinois militia to fight in the Black Hawk War (against the Sauks, led by Black Hawk, who disputed the validity of a treaty which granted the US government the rights to open Sauk territory east of the Mississippi to settlement). Lincoln ran a general store, served as postmaster and county surveyor, and studied borrowed legal texts, eventually becoming a lawyer through grit, being admitted to the Illinois bar in 1836.

America was still a new country, barely 60 years old, and Lincoln’s speech shows how fragile it all still felt. Longevity, instead of being a guarantee of increasing security, instead became a vulnerability as the revolutionary generation died and their efforts became a memory: ‘But, it may be asked, why suppose danger to our political institutions? Have we not preserved them for more than 50 years? And why may we not for 50 times as long?’, asked Lincoln. ‘That our government should have been maintained in its original form from its establishment until now, is not much to be wondered at. It had many props to support it through that period, which now are decayed, and crumbled away.’

Lincoln identified a very human concern: that each new generation would be further removed from the motivations of the Founding Fathers and would no longer see their successes as sufficient. New dynasties with new ambitions would arise; new individuals seeking to make a glorious name for themselves would not be satisfied with maintaining a status quo:

Then, all that sought celebrity and fame, and distinction, expected to find them in the success of that experiment. Their all was staked upon it: their destiny was inseparably linked with it. Their ambition aspired to display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition, which had hitherto been considered, at best no better, than problematical; namely, the capability of a people to govern themselves. If they succeeded, they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties and cities, and rivers and mountains; and to be revered and sung, and toasted through all time. If they failed, they were to be called knaves and fools, and fanatics for a fleeting hour; then to sink and be forgotten. They succeeded. But … This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated. But new reapers will arise, and they, too, will seek a field. It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them. The question then, is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot.

The immediate backdrop to the speech was the economic crisis known as the Panic of 1837. This followed a boom in prices of land, cotton and slaves, with speculative expansion westwards across America being funded on credit often lent by British banks. A sudden fall in the price of cotton, a rise in the local price of wheat and an increase in interest rates in 1837 led to a bank run which drained the banks in New York City of gold and silver; this was followed by an economic collapse and seven years of recession, bringing unemployment, deflation and collapsing businesses. The political mood was recriminatory: President Andrew Jackson (a Democrat) was blamed for the lack of a Central Bank, while his successor – also a Democrat – President Martin Van Buren (who took office in March 1837) was accused of not doing enough to intervene to stop the crisis worsening.

This compounded an already worsening political situation caused by a surge in mob violence, which escalated suddenly and rapidly during Jackson’s presidency (1829-37). Jackson was a general who had become a national hero and also a wealthy planter, owning hundreds of slaves in his lifetime. He was a pragmatic, forceful and divisive character, whose actions exacerbated tensions between north and south, particularly on the question of slavery. The Whigs accused him of overriding the rule of law in ways that paralleled the spirit of the mob, promising power to the people. In 1835, 71 people died in 147 recorded riots, over 40 per cent of which were driven by slavery and racial tensions (there were 46 pro-slavery riots and 15 racial riots, the majority of which were against people of colour). The Democrats and Whigs blamed each other. The Southern Times of Colombia, South Carolina wrote that: ‘Mobs, strikes, riots, abolition movements, insurrections, Lynch clubs seem to be the engrossing topics of the day… The whole country… seems ready to take fire on the most trivial occasion.’ It became known as the supremacy of the Mobocracy.

Lawlessness preoccupied Lincoln as a young Whig lawyer:

When men take it in their heads to day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn someone who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is; and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow, may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake. And not only so; the innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty, fall victims to the ravages of mob law; 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.

Two recent events specifically inspired Lincoln’s address. The first was the lynching in April 1836 of Francis J. McIntosh, a free man of colour who worked as a steward on a steamboat and was arrested for trying to liberate a shipmate who had been charged with disorderly conduct. McIntosh was told by his arresting officers that he would serve a hefty sentence, and he responded by stabbing two police officers, killing one. As he fled, a mob chased him and he 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’.

The second was the murder of abolitionist Elijah Parish Lovejoy, whose religious newspaper, the St Louis Observer, had published editorials criticising the Catholic Church and slavery. By October 1835 there were rumours of mob action against the Observer, and in the face of increasing threats from Missouri slaveholders he moved his presses eastwards across the Mississippi to Alton, Illinois. Alton residents, feeling that his anti-slavery position was contributing to their economic crisis, condemned him at a public meeting. In November 1837 mobs fired shots into a warehouse where he had hidden his printing press, and Lovejoy and his men returned fire. He was struck by five bullets and killed. He symbolised the division between north and south: to the north he was a martyr to freedom of expression and a free press.

Lincoln explicitly referred to these two notorious cases, and their possible consequences:

Whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last. By such things, the feelings of the best citizens will become more or less alienated from it; and thus it will be left without friends, or with too few, and those few too weak, to make their friendship effectual. At such a time and under such circumstances, men of sufficient talent and ambition will not be wanting to seize the opportunity, strike the blow, and overturn that fair fabric, which for the last half century, has been the fondest hope, of the lovers of freedom, throughout the world.

For Lincoln, the solution was to return to the first principles of America: the rule of law, and the constitution:

The answer is simple. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honour; let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children’s liberty. Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap – let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.

And if that was impossible? Lincoln had a specific opponent in mind, as well as a general concern. Although party political speeches were not allowed in the Lyceum, Lincoln used his speech to allude to the danger posed by a coming Caesar, a man ‘of ambition and talents’, who would ruthlessly pursue fame and power, overthrowing democratic institutions to achieve his ends. He was thinking of Stephen A. Douglas, the notoriously ambitious political rival of his law partner, John Todd Stewart. But his warning might apply to any case where there are those who are prepared to push the boundaries of the law in order to achieve their ends:

Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs. Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.