The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [20]
The Lyceum speech has provided fodder for all sorts of psychological speculations. Was he (or, as has been suggested, Stephen A. Douglas, his rival even then) the future tyrant who would refashion the political system created by the founders and in so doing surpass them in historical importance? Was his description of a battle between reason and passion a reflection of his own mood swings?61 Certainly, in describing American democracy as a still-unfinished experiment in “liberty and equal rights” and identifying the core question facing the country as “the capability of a people to govern themselves” in the face of lawlessness, Lincoln anticipated themes of his later writings, including the first inaugural and Gettysburg Address. His presentation of the choice facing a future tyrant as “emancipating slaves or enslaving free men” suggested that even this early in his career, Lincoln recognized slavery as the crucial question the founders had failed to resolve and the greatest threat to the survival of the republic.
Condemnations of lawlessness were far from unusual in public orations of the 1830s.62 What distinguished the Lyceum speech was that Lincoln indirectly but clearly placed the blame on slavery. Lincoln emphasized that no part of the country could claim exemption from mobs: “They spring up among the pleasure hunting masters of southern slaves, and the order loving citizens” of the North (a revealing contrast in a speech arguing that unruly passions constituted the greatest danger to American liberty). Yet speaking only three months after Elijah P. Lovejoy died in Alton at the hands of a mob, Lincoln condemned the “vicious portion of the population” who, among other things, “throw printing presses into rivers [and] shoot editors.” No one in the audience could misunderstand the reference to the tragedy seventy miles west of Springfield; some, perhaps, realized that those Lincoln condemned as “vicious” included a number of Alton’s most prominent citizens.
Lincoln directly addressed two acts of mob violence in the Lyceum speech, both of which took place in slave states. One was the case of the “mulatto man…McIntosh” (identified, unlike Lovejoy, by name), whose lynching in St. Louis in 1836 had led the abolitionist editor to move his newspaper to Alton. Lincoln described McIntosh’s ordeal—he was “chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman”—with details he may have learned from the extensive coverage in Lovejoy’s newspaper. Lincoln also dwelled on the lynching in Mississippi of “negroes, suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection” along with whites allegedly in league with them. “Dead men,” he concluded in a stark, evocative image, “were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees…in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss.” Given the pervasiveness of mob violence in the 1830s, Lincoln did not have to choose black victims to illustrate his point. His subtext was that slavery created a social environment that encouraged lawlessness.63
A few moments later, Lincoln explicitly turned to mob violence in relation to abolitionism:
There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law. In any case that arises, as for instance, the promulgation of abolitionism, one of two positions is necessarily true; that is, the thing is right within itself, and therefore deserves the protection of all law and all good citizens; or, it is wrong, and therefore proper to be prohibited by legal enactments; and in neither case, is the