Russ Roberts: and his accession to the presidency. He is 28 years old. What is happening in the country that worries him? What worries him and what is at the heart of his speech?
Diane Schaub: Yeah. So what he’s noticing is an increase in anarchy, an increase in outbreaks of mob action and mob rule. So that’s the diagnosis he gives of the current hazard.
Later in his speech he will also talk about future dangers, but the first half of the speech is about the current danger, namely these outbursts of mob violence. These are cases of vigilante actions where citizens think: “I want justice to be done more quickly than the law allows me.”
And so there were examples of citizens taking the law into their own hands: they hanged gamblers, blacks suspected of insurrection, whites suspected of being in cahoots with the enslaved population.
And Lincoln says that these epidemics of mob dictatorships are happening all over the country. He adds that it is not specific to one region.
But then what’s interesting is he says it’s not specific to slave areas or non-slave areas.
So even though he seems to say that slavery is not the cause of epidemics, yet all the examples he gives, and the fact that he introduces this important sectoral division depending on whether you live in a slave state or not, suggests to me that he really believes that slavery is the driving cause of these epidemics.
Russ Roberts: Right now, America is relatively young. It is less than 50 years old. How important is this to Lincoln? How important is the age of the country and its development up to today to Lincoln?
Diane Schaub: Yes. It’s clear that he’s thinking about what it means to be a post-founding generation. So the beginning of the speech is about the founders, what they accomplished. They gave us two things. They gave us this “fertile soil,” and they gave us a political edifice of freedom and rights.
And what he’s saying is that we, that is, his generation, are the happy heirs of these two good things. And, in this initial presentation, he seems to suggest that the founders have done the hard work. And, as heirs, all we have to do is to transmit these things to the next generation.
So, he said, you know: they were the courageous, robust and patriotic generation, and that belongs to us. only to pass them on. As if it were a easy things to do.
So, his initial The presentation is: Let’s keep this thing running. Right? Our task is the maintenance task.
And then, as the talk unfolds, it becomes clear that the maintenance task may actually be the most difficult task.
And so, at the end of the talk, he will come back to the Foundation and explain how the passions of the few and the many cooperated at the time of the Foundation to make the Foundation possible.
So he said that for some, their ambition could be satisfied through this great experiment, and their individual ambition was somehow coincidentally linked with this great cause of the founding of self-government.
And for many, he said, they could hate the British, and that united them. And dangerous passions like hatred and vengeance played a salutary role in the founding era.
In a way, I think his argument is that the founding of Europe was facilitated by a kind of scaffolding of passions. But what happens in the future for the post-founding generations is that these passions can no longer play the same salutary role.
So there is a risk that the passions of some people will go in another direction. Isn’t that right? If you can’t become famous as a founder, well, you can become famous as someone who destroys, you know, an Alexander, a Caesar, a Napoleon.
And for many, these passions are part of human nature. They will continue to exist: hatred, vengeance, jealousy, envy. But now they will be directed against their fellow Americans.
And so his claim at the end is that the task, really, for future generations – for post-founding generations – is to place the project of self-governance on a new basis, not a basis of passion, but a basis of reason.
And that’s a very, very high demand that Lincoln places on American citizens.
So I think he’s calling for a kind of – I don’t know – a refinement, a spiritualization of the project of self-government, and really showing that self-government in the collective depends on the existence of autonomous individuals; and this means the primacy of reason on passion in the human soul.
