Abraham Lincoln’s renowned opening to his Gettysburg Address, “Four score and seven years ago,” mused about our nation’s beginnings while pondering its mortality. The phrase references Psalm 90’s contrast between God’s everlasting nature and the lifespan of man, which the passage describes as “three score years and ten.”
Lincoln’s use of similar language in his opening at Gettysburg draws attention to a meditation of his that is especially worth revisiting today — that of the lifespan of a nation.
While in the thick of the bloodiest conflict ever witnessed by our nation, Lincoln wondered if his country could endure amid a clash of deadly passions. With our nation currently plunged into the turmoil of vicious internal conflict, we would be wise to revisit Lincoln’s sober and judicious reflection on our nation’s mortality.
Weeks of outraged protest over the killing of George Floyd and the racial prejudice that caused his death has more recently given way to the vandalism and literal toppling of statues throughout the country. This is a full condemnation of our nation’s history — not just of the Confederate figures Lincoln fought, but of George Washington, of Ulysses S. Grant, of unionists, abolitionists, and even of Lincoln himself.
Unfortunately, it is this very history, which the enraged mob endeavors to erase, that we ought to turn to as a compass to guide us through this violent storm of passion. Our nation is not unfamiliar with vehement internal divide over racial issues, and we can look to its history to ensure our current crisis does not, as Lincoln once feared, threaten the lifespan of our nation.
Decades before the Battle of Gettysburg, a young, earnest Illinois Congressman Abraham Lincoln wrestled with the prospect of such a threat in an address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. In the same city that has now played a prominent host to protests in recent weeks, Lincoln pondered the looming danger of the nation’s declining attachment to its founding principles, accompanied by heated internal division.
Lincoln was addressing this difficult problem not more than two years after James Madison, the last living signer of the Constitution, had died. It was a milestone — the generation most invested in the American experiment and the ideas behind its founding was gone.
Today, we are even further distanced from this generation than Lincoln was, and we now witness the attempted eradication of their memory by what Lincoln rightly identifies as the greatest threat to our nation: the ambitious mob.
“Towering genius disdains a beaten path,” Lincoln declared. This echoes the vague call for “change.” Men of ambition are not satisfied with the preservation of things already created. There is far less glory in simply maintaining than in creating.
Thus, ambition fosters disdain for what has been established — for laws good and bad. Lincoln warned in the Lyceum Address, “Whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches [and] ravage and rob provision stores … depend on it, the government cannot last.”
Today’s mobocratic spirit is a modern manifestation of this very threat. It has no regard for the rule of law, and it reflects this in its destructive behavior. The mob has “set boldly to the task of pulling down,” as Lincoln phrased it. The passion that drove the founders toward a benign and constructive end now drives the totalitarian mob to destroy their legacy.
The mob’s purely destructive tendencies are evident in its blind attacks on monuments to some of the greatest champions of racial equality and liberty. This attack against national heroes just because of their association with America reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of our history.
The revered abolitionist Frederick Douglass said that to attribute the crime of racial injustice and the legality of slavery to the Fathers of this Republic is “a slander upon their memory.” Douglass’s assessment is validated in the writings of Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton, writing under the pseudonym Philo Camillus. Even James Madison, who lived seemingly as a fairly unreflective slave-owner, clearly felt conflicted and held slavery in disdain, even if he and many of the other founders believed themselves too invested in it to take the steps they should have to end it.
As long as it was generally presumed that slavery was incongruent with American principles and would gradually vanish, our nation had peace. The Civil War came about only after powerful Southerners came to view this peaceful evolution as a threat, prompting a push to expand slavery westward.
Almost every civilization in human history has had slavery. Most ended it peacefully. Ours is the rare nation that tore itself apart to end it.
Progressives characterizing American social and political order as hateful and prejudiced are arguing against our history as they incite the totalitarian mob’s destruction. In fact, pride in our nation’s history and patriotism are the greatest ally to the enemies of racism in the United States, whether they know it or not.
Douglass called our Constitution a “glorious liberty document.” Our Founding Fathers may not have shared our contemporary views on racial equality, but their legacy continues to uphold it. Again and again, in courtrooms and in speeches and in legislatures, we appeal to their Declaration of Independence and the Constitution they drafted and the historical principles behind its ratification to fix the broken parts of our system that perpetuate racial inequality.
This makes our nation’s mortality all the more significant. America’s lifespan is the lifespan of the greatest bulwark of liberty in the world. How do we protect it against the ambitious mob’s purge of history?
Lincoln described the founders as “the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason. [Passion] will in future be our enemy. Reason … must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense. Let those materials be moulded into … in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.”
Lincoln’s call to adhere to the rule of law is fundamentally an appeal to patriotism. How can we hope to turn Americans to a sober obedience of our law if they have no love for our political order and its principles of justice and liberty?
Let us become the new pillars of the temple of liberty. Let us be the champions and expounders of reason, rule of law, and love for our nation — a nation which, Lincoln declared, conduces “more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.”
Caleb Lambrecht is a senior at Hillsdale College studying politics.
