The rule of law in America is weakened. Private citizens have decided that their fellow Americans do not deserve the benefits of the justice system, or alternatively, that the justice system is inadequate. As a result, those private citizens have taken it upon themselves to exercise their own notions of justice; they have made themselves judge, jury, and executioner all at once. The year is 1838.
In January of this year, Abraham Lincoln, still a young country lawyer, delivered a speech at the Springfield Lyceum in Illinois, a crowd likely made up of young locals. In it, his mastery of the English language was already on display, and so were some of the themes that would characterize his public life.
Lincoln began with a note of gratitude. Here we sit “in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth.” We find ourselves in a land of good order, beauty, and plenty, and, what is more, “We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.” And yet, there was danger around the corner, and it came not from some foreign power, but from within: “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
What worried Lincoln was what he saw as a loss of respect for the rule of law and for the judgment of the courts. In 1838, he said, one could read in the daily papers about the outrages committed by mobs across the nation. He cited a recent instance in St. Louis, where a free, mixed-race man was chained to a tree and burned alive, and other instances of white gamblers who had been lynched in Vicksburg. If asked, Lincoln said, the killers would have said that they were only punishing criminals, only killing people who society would be better off without.
Lincoln rightly observes, however, that there is an inherent danger in this attitude, for those who take upon themselves the role of judge and executioner are likely to act in an emotional and unreasonable way, and their victims are as likely to be innocent as guilty. This risk grows the more that we begin to think and act like a mob. Mob psychology has little room for the careful reasoning and slow investigation of the courts. It is carried away by passion and seeks only the satisfaction of immolating its victims.
For Lincoln, this was not a small problem, but a portent of societal deterioration on a wider scale. If the good order of the courts was done away with, what came next would be a senseless war of all against all. Violence and revenge would beget violence and revenge.
Of course, in some way, what Lincoln feared really did come to pass. A portion of the country so thoroughly abandoned the project of shared government that it actually went to war with the rest of the nation, and the destruction wrought was—and is still—hard to fathom.
To Lincoln, the response to this deterioration of order, which, at the end of the day, was the deterioration of peace into violence, began with a cultivation of gratitude and memory. In his Springfield speech, he noted that we find ourselves in a country of enormous gifts. “We, when mounting the stage of existence,” he told his listeners, “found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them—they are a legacy bequeathed us…”
For Lincoln, such a refusal to take things for granted teaches us a serious respect for the fragile achievements of order that we enjoy. If we think that a law is wrong, if we see injustice in our country, then we must seek to resolve it, if at all possible, through peaceful means, that is, through means available to us through our political system. The alternative is “mobocracy”—which, in the end, almost always creates greater injustice than it is supposed to address.
What is it that attaches men to their government and causes them to see themselves as a part of a national project? Lincoln thought that, in America’s early days, the shared experience of the founding had been enough. But now, with that experience fading into history, “reason … and sound morality” would need to be our mainstays.
It is understandable why Lincoln would turn to reason in this speech. After all, the actions of lynch mobs and vigilantes are often actions of passion. But, as an older man, Lincoln would assign a greater value to the act of remembering together. In his first inaugural address, he famously called for the “mystic chords of memory” to be touched, so that the “better angels of our nature” could be reawakened. And in Gettysburg, he called the people to remember their origins and ideals: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
A nation is a little bit like a marriage. Things are bound to get bumpy. There are bound to be fallings out. And yet the act of remembering together can also be an act of reconciliation. Remember who we hoped we would be? Remember what it was that made us love each other? These sentiments are at the heart of Lincoln’s constant insistence that we are not enemies, but friends. The fact that we have a country at all today is in part owing to the extraordinary refusal of Lincoln to take an eye for an eye. In his second inaugural, after a war that had brutalized so much, he refused to cast judgment on his enemies. Acknowledging the sin of slavery, and even his own part in it, he still regarded others with mercy. “Let us judge not, that we not be judged.”
How did a nation which snapped in half, which went through years of animosity, cruelty, and bloodshed, make up and come back together? Part of the key is in the final words of that same speech: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Malice toward none and charity toward all. We disintegrate as a people when we begin to put our neighbors into a class undeserving of charity and meriting malice. Can we, with all the weary, realistic nobility of Lincoln, echo this phrase? Do we need to suffer war in order to learn the blessing of a just and lasting peace?
Of course, it took more than just the magnanimity and mercy of Lincoln, the man—it took many who were willing to extend the hand of forgiveness and reconciliation. Among them was another great man of the age, Frederick Douglass, who writes in his autobiography of returning to see his former master in his old age. Douglass, perhaps, had every right to hate the man who had subjugated him—but what good would that have done? It would have only begat more hate. Instead, he made an extraordinary gesture of mercy: He offered forgiveness to his slaveholder, and the old man repented. The two parted in tears, no longer enemies. This did not erase the injustice. But it allowed Douglass to move forward as a force for redemption, not of revenge.
The “new birth of freedom” that occurred in the wake of the Civil War was due in significant part to a refusal to hate. Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant after him, were firm in protecting the newfound freedom of freedmen, but insisted on a magnanimous approach to southerners. The southerner was to be welcomed back in as a prodigal son, not perpetually punished. It was this, I’d argue, that allowed the country to be knit back together and forestalled an ongoing state of retributive conflict. This second founding of America was not perfect and ushered in no utopia. But it preserved and bettered the blessings passed down from the founding generations, now more open than before to men and women of all colors.
Each generation needs to share together the act of remembering, which is an act, not just of learning from mistakes, but also of being grateful for the good things received. Gratitude for the benefits of peace and good order will perhaps encourage us not to violate it so lightly. Right now, we are in an anxious era, but, within it, we can choose not to be forces of disintegration, but instead to “bind up the nation’s wounds.”
I have argued elsewhere that the only, or at least the best, way to do this is face to face. In seeing the face of another, we are held accountable to him or her as fully human. Sharing memory together, we form and strengthen our bonds. Such community must be based not on ideological or party affiliation, but on sharing a common place together.
Online, we are shunted into circles of the likeminded. We radicalize and unbalance each other. We are fed the content that will enrage us and feed our worst impulses. Local communities have the potential to be places of care and moral calling in a way that online pseudo-communities do not.
The problems of online life are not new; they are human problems exacerbated by new media. Hannah Arendt, in her famous study The Origins of Totalitarianism, argued that a precursor to the totalitarian state is social isolation and radicalization by mass media. This occurred in the last century through the radio, papers, and cinema and through rallies and marches. Arendt argued that this needed to be counterbalanced by a healthy culture of local community. If this could occur through the relatively more staid forms of media of the last century, then the need for local community is even sharper today. It is in that context that we get a grip on reality together, including the reality of the past.
And what is it that we remember together? Our founding ideals, yes, like civil and religious liberty and a federated republic, but also our founding virtues of temperance, prudence, fortitude, humility, and justice. This does not mean imagining a false golden age. The founding era had its fair share of vice. But it does mean being earnest in recalling ourselves to what is best in our history and tradition, even while recognizing that we have often fallen short.
This is what Douglass and Lincoln did. They were sharply aware of America’s sins, but they saw that the way to make a more just society was through charity and through a recollection of our best ideals. Binding up the nation’s wounds requires this act of striving together, locally, to be better than we are.
