Lincoln: “repulse them, or they will subjugate us”
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” Faulkner wrote in 1951. “Old times there are not forgotten,” wrote Daniel Decatur Emmett in “Dixie” a century earlier in 1859. “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” wrote somebody, but not likely Mark Twain.
We’ll come back to harbingers of re-appearing tyranny in a minute. Republicans in Missouri want to bring back “old time” dueling:
Sen. Nick Schroer (R-St. Charles County) is listed on the proposal, notes Fox 2 St. Louis:
Schroer’s office confirmed with FOX 2 that he was linked to the proposal, though he considers it a “draft rule change” that was distributed to members of the Senate “but not offered” and “never filed.”
According to the language of the paper proposal, senators could agree to engage in a duel if “a senator’s honor is impugned by another senator to the point that it is beyond repair and in order for the offended senator to gain satisfaction.”
The proposal also stated that an “offended senator shall send a written challenge to the offending senator” and those involved would agree to a “choice of weapons.” It also called for duels to take place “at the hour of high noon.”
I’ve written plenty about the rump faction of American royalists who while sporting flag lapel pins and waving pocket constitutions never really accepted the principles of the Declaration or aspirations for a more perfect union. They do not simply want to bring back dueling and feuds. They want to bring back feudalism.
The America Revolution was a defeat for feudalism. But it was only wounded and not written out of existence by the U.S. Constitution. The ages-long history of monarchy would not go quietly, nor the monarchists. Decades into the American experiment, they would attempt to unmake it. The Civil War was another defeat for feudalism. But once again, the Rumpists were only wounded. They rewrote their history and subverted the Civil War amendments for a hundred years. And now? They are back again. With a retribution.
Heather Cox Richardson demonstrates that aphorism about the present rhyming with the past:
On January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln rose before the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, to make a speech. Just 28 years old, Lincoln had begun to practice law and had political ambitions. But he was worried that his generation might not preserve the republic that the founders had handed to it for transmission to yet another generation. He took as his topic for that January evening, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.”
Lincoln saw trouble coming, but not from a foreign power, as other countries feared. The destruction of the United States, he warned, could come only from within. “If destruction be our lot,” he said, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
The trouble Lincoln perceived stemmed from the growing lawlessness in the country as men ignored the rule of law and acted on their passions, imposing their will on their neighbors through violence. He pointed specifically to two recent events: the 1836 lynching of free Black man Francis McIntosh in St. Louis, Missouri, and the 1837 murder of white abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy by a proslavery mob in Alton, Illinois.
But the problem of lawlessness was not limited to individual instances, he said. A public practice of ignoring the law eventually broke down all the guardrails designed to protect individuals, while lawbreakers, going unpunished, became convinced they were entitled to act without restraint. “Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane,” Lincoln said, “they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.”
The only way to guard against such destruction, LIncoln said, was to protect the rule of law on which the country was founded. “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 honor…. Let reverence for the laws…become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”
Lincoln was quick to clarify that he was not saying all laws were good. Indeed, he said, bad laws should be challenged and repealed. But the underlying structure of the rule of law, based in the Constitution, could not be abandoned without losing democracy.
Lincoln didn’t stop there. He warned that the very success of the American republic threatened its continuation. “[M]en of ambition and talents” could no longer make their name by building the nation—that glory had already been won. Their ambition could not be served simply by preserving what those before them had created, so they would achieve distinction through destruction.
For such a man, Lincoln said, “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.” With no dangerous foreign power to turn people’s passions against, people would turn from the project of “establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty” and would instead turn against each other.
Lincoln reminded his audience that the torch of American democracy had been passed to them. The Founders had used their passions to create a system of laws, but the time for passion had passed, lest it tear the nation apart. The next generation must support democracy through “sober reason,” he said. He called for Americans to exercise “general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.”
“Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock of its basis; and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution, ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’”
What became known as the Lyceum Address is one of the earliest speeches of Lincoln’s to have been preserved, and at the time it established him as a rising politician and political thinker. But his recognition, in a time of religious fervor and moral crusades, that the law must prevail over individual passions reverberates far beyond the specific crises of the 1830s.
As Digby commented, the (T)rumpists “now believe that the law is what Trump says it is.” Trump has lived that belief his entire life. The snake oil salesman has convinced a significant faction of fellow citizens that they would be better off living under his dictatorship. Because freedom.
In his Letter to Henry L. Pierce and others (April 1859, two years in advance of the first shots on Fort Sumter), Lincoln wrote of the threat represented by the rejection by Democrats of his day of the principles of liberty and equality championed (imperfectly) by Thomas Jefferson:
The [Democrats] of to-day hold the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another man’s right of property. Republicans, on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar; but in cases of conflict, the man before the dollar.
I remember once being much amused at seeing two partially intoxicated men engage in a fight with their great-coats on, which fight, after a long, and rather harmless contest, ended in each having fought himself out of his own coat, and into that of the other. If the two leading parties of this day are really identical with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have perfomed the same feat as the two drunken men.
Completing a transition that began under FDR, those positions reversed again in the 1960s. Now it is the Democrats “for both the man and the dollar; but in cases of conflict, the man before the dollar.” It is now Lincoln’s party that puts property ahead of others’ rights.
“the miners, and sappers–of returning despotism”
Lincoln continued:
But soberly, it is now no child’s play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation.
One would start with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but, nevertheless, he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms. The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society.
And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success.
Gaze again upon the Republican “miners, and sappers–of returning despotism” celebrating their violations of law in the clip above.
The violators of Jeffersonian principles agitate openly against them, Lincoln wrote in 1859:
One dashingly calls them “glittering generalities”; another bluntly calls them “self evident lies”; and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to “superior races.”
These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect–the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads, plotting against the people. They are the van-guard–the miners, and sappers–of returning despotism.
We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.
This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
All honor to Jefferson–to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
History rhymes. Those harbingers will rewrite history again, as they did during Reconstruction, to make themselves, the enemies of liberty, its guarantors.
We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.