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Lincoln’s affirmation of the state’s right to prohibit the dissemination of “wrong” opinion may well surprise the modern reader. But it was hardly unusual at the time. Several southern states had enacted laws banning abolitionist agitation. A number of northern politicians, including New York’s governor, William L. Marcy, had proposed legislation to criminalize speech that might incite insurrection in other states (a measure clearly aimed at the abolitionists). To be sure, the very attempts to suppress abolitionism had made many northerners sensitive to the crucial importance of the right to dissent. Nonetheless, it would take many years before a jurisprudence defending this right superceded the venerable common law tradition that government enjoyed the power to punish speech and writing with a “bad tendency.” (Until the twentieth century, the First Amendment applied only to the federal government and had no bearing on state laws that limited free speech.) Lincoln’s comment certainly distinguished him from the abolitionists and their supporters. But his main point was not the legitimacy of laws suppressing opinion but the illegitimacy of mob actions against the abolitionists. At a time when most politicians condemned abolitionism as the greatest threat to the republic (an argument that President Martin Van Buren had made in his inaugural address less than a year before the Lyceum speech), Lincoln insisted that assaults on abolitionist meetings and presses endangered the liberty of all Americans.64

Four years passed after the Lyceum speech before Lincoln again addressed the issues of slavery and abolition. This came in his 1842 speech to the Springfield Washington Temperance Society, an organization of reformed drinkers dedicated to promoting temperance. As in other states, drink was a divisive issue in Illinois politics. Whigs, especially New England migrants in the northern part of the state, tended to support laws restricting the sale of alcohol or banning it altogether. Democrats, especially in southern Illinois, viewed drink as a personal matter, outside the purview of the government. Beyond temperance lay the broader issue of evangelical reform (including abolitionism) and its relationship to the state. Did one part of the public have the right to use the law to impose its moral standards on society at large?

In the frontier society of Lincoln’s youth, liquor was ubiquitous. As he noted in the speech, “To have a rolling or raising, a hunkering or hoedown, anywhere without it, was positively insufferable.” To middle-class professionals such as Lincoln had become, however, sobriety was a mark of self-control and excessive drinking an example of unrestrained passion. Lincoln, who personally abstained from imbibing liquor, made a number of temperance speeches during the 1840s. But as the Washingtonian speech revealed, his approach differed significantly from that of other advocates of the cause.65

Rather than a warning against the evil of alcohol, most of the Washingtonian address consisted of Lincoln’s critique of prior efforts to combat it. Speaking in a Presbyterian church, he proclaimed that the “old reformers”—the “preachers, lawyers, and hired agents” who had promoted temperance—had conveyed no “sympathy or feeling” for the very persons they hoped to persuade. They spoke the language of “anathema and denunciation,” indicting drinkers as “the authors of all the vice and misery and crime in the land.” They urged the “good and virtuous” to ostracize these sinners. So “repugnant to humanity, so uncharitable, so cold-blooded and feelingless” was their language that it alienated the very persons it sought to enlist. By contrast, Lincoln praised the Washingtonians, as former drinkers themselves, for understanding how to approach the objects of their campaign with sympathy and understanding.66

Lincoln’s strong language about the self-righteousness of previous temperance advocates has been taken, with plausibility, as a more general critique of the