Decades Before The Civil War, Lincoln Saw An Approaching Storm. Every American Should Read His Warning
Beyond their brutality, the young lawyer feared these mobs for the lawlessness they embodied -- and the idle familiarity with which his fellow Americans seemed to accept these incidents.
February 12, 2021 By Christopher Bedford
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.â€
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.â€
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.
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https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/12/decades-before-the-civil-war-lincoln-saw-an-approaching-storm-every-american-should-read-his-warning/
