It is a grim and sometimes distasteful course over which the reader has been led, one that inspires compassion for the victims of violence and, to say the least, a certain wry curiosity about the perpetrators. The primary point of such an expedition into the past will be lost if these episodes are looked at for their sensational quality or as material for the muckraker. Violence has been used repeatedly in our past, often quite purposefully, and a full reckoning with the fact is a necessary ingredient in any realistic national self-image. In pursuit of their goals substantial groups of Americans—more often than not well situated in the social order—have from time to time preferred direct action to law, and violence to peaceful accommodation. Our recent concern with the problem may have reached unprecedented levels of intensity, but such concern is hardly new. A general anxiety about American lawlessness and a particular dismay over the level of industrial violence was a common theme of the age of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The violence of the Reconstruction era was the despair of many men who thought of slavery as a relic of barbarism and who had hoped that reunion and the abolition of slavery would set the United States on the path to a more admirable civilization. The startling outburst of anti-Irish, anti-Negro, and anti-abolitionist rioting in the 1830’s, which alarmed many men, brought Abraham Lincoln to his first important political speech and his first significant utterance on the character and fate of the United States. In a speech delivered to the young men of Springfield in January 1838, Lincoln, then twenty-eight, took as his theme the prevalence of violence and lawlessness in the country and its threat to the survival of free institutions. His address was a heartfelt cry for law and order.
The United States, Lincoln pointed out, faced no serious dangers from abroad. Any danger that one could anticipate to its institutions “must spring up amongst us.… If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” Even at that time, Lincoln went on, he could see an ill omen: “The increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.… Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times.”
Whatever the cause of such outrages, Lincoln pointed out that they were common to the entire country. The rising mob spirit, the tendency toward vigilantism, the contempt for law, the readiness to hang members of both races, were, he thought, the primary danger to America. “By the operation of this mobocratic spirit, which all must admit, is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed—I mean the attachment of the People. Whenever this effect shall be produced among us; whenever the vicious portion of [the] population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last. By such things, the feelings of the best citizens will become more or less alienated from it; and thus it will be left without friends, or with too few, and those few too weak, to make their friendship effectual. At such a time and under such circumstances, men of sufficient talent and ambition will not be wanting to seize the opportunity, strike the blow, and overturn that fair fabric, which for the last half century, has been the fondest hope of the lovers of freedom throughout the world.”
Lincoln’s only prescription for checking violence was to urge all Americans to “swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.” He hoped that by constant indoctrination in homes, schools, colleges, churches, and legislative halls and courts of justice, reverence for the laws might be made “the political religion of the nation.” In an interesting passage he pointed out that the country had been established on the strength of a unifying passion, hatred of the British nation, but that the scenes of the Revolution, though unforgotten, were losing their emotional force and their unifying effect. These had been “the pillars of the temple of liberty.” What would replace them? Passion, he argued, was now useless as a sustaining force, and had in fact become an enemy rather than a friend. Only reason, “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” would furnish the materials for the future support and defense of the country, and reason must mould a national morality in which reverence for the Constitution and the laws would be a central tenet. But establishing reverence through reason had its own difficulties; and to preach cold reason to the Americans of the 1830’s was to preach asceticism to the Sybarites. Lawlessness and violence continued at a high pitch in the 1840’s and 1850’s, and they were followed by the disaster of the 1860’s.
Lincoln was wrong in expecting that a group of ambitious usurpers would take advantage of men’s alienation from free government to overthrow it and establish a tyranny. The American people—perhaps it is a hopeful sign—had even less capacity for establishing tyranny than they had for keeping order. But Lincoln seems to have been right in seeing the exceptional disorder around him as the symptom of a dangerously rising inability to work consistently through pacific means, and to abide dissent, discussion, and compromise.
It would be far too much to say that the violence Lincoln saw rising in the 1830’s was a primary “cause” of the disaster of the Civil War. It was rather a symptom of the same basic pathology in American life that hastened the war itself—the pathology of a nation growing at a speed that defied control, governed by an ineffective leadership, impatient with authority, bedeviled by its internal heterogeneity, and above all cursed by an ancient and gloomy wrong that many of its people had even come to cherish as a right. Lincoln at an early age read the surface agitations correctly as signs of a profoundly dangerous condition; but he then had a faith, which he would one day outgrow, in the power of exhortation and indoctrination in and of itself. His cure—urging that men should be taught everywhere from the nursery to the churches and legislative halls to be lawful and orderly—was not much different from urging that they be taught everywhere to be moral and good. Such exhortations can, of course, have some effect, but only in a social setting that gives them coherence and plausibility, and by the late 1830’s governmental authority in the United States was losing rather than gaining in its ability to provide such a setting. Leaders in business and government were increasing in their willfulness and their vast carelessness, the nation was splitting into two separate political cultures, and the few institutions that might have held it together and enabled it to resolve its problems in peaceful ways were beginning to snap. Twenty years after Lincoln’s speech, the last of these institutions, the two national parties, were in one case dead and in the other hopelessly split. It became Lincoln’s fate in the 1860’s to preside over the climactic failure of the American political system. In the end he could only arrive at the melancholy and prophetic fatalism expressed in his second inaugural address, in which he concluded that “the Almighty has His own purposes,” and that the war had been ordained for Americans as a terrible but just way of ridding them of the “offence” of slavery. A fatalism of this kind was perhaps natural to one who had experienced such a catastrophe at the storm center and had suffered from it to his very marrow. But it is hardly suitable to those who sense a potential catastrophe that they can still hope to avert. The metapolitics of divine judgment are the last resort of those who have failed; the appeal to human judgment must be the first resort of those who expect to succeed. In the search for grounds of judgment there is reason to think that the historical study of violence and its consequences has something important and chastening to tell us. For historians the records are voluminous enough.
RICHARD HOFSTADTER