The Limits of Dissent

It is hardly necessary to say that civil disorder is one of the massive problems of American life today. But the tide of violence now threatening us is not something new. In 1838 Abraham Lincoln warned against “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passion, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.” The overthrow of our free institutions, Lincoln believed, would never come from foreign aggression, but it might come from internal causes: from the “lawless in spirit” on the one hand who, having “ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane . . . make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations”; and, on the other hand, from the loss of confidence in the government by those who are “good men . . . who love tranquillity, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits . . . [but who] seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered . . . become tired of, and disgusted with, a government that offers them no protection. . . .”

No sophistication is needed to apply the foregoing to some of the main political currents in this election year. Nor is much knowledge of history needed to be aware that the principal cause of lawlessness in the United States has always been the tension generated by the demands of equality in the presence of racial difference. Lincoln’s Lyceum speech of 1838 was a response to the violence then sweeping the country because of abolitionist agitation, and the reaction to it, both in the North and the South. And Lincoln’s judgment that the lawless agitation of this question, both by the abolitionists and the defenders of slavery, might rend the country asunder, was a clear prophecy of the Civil War. We are today in the midst of a social revolution perhaps as great as that beginning in the days of Lincoln’s youth. The disruption of American life by the American Negro’s transition from slavery to legal freedom may prove to be no greater than that caused by his transition from legal freedom to political and social equality. Whether this transition can be accomplished with less destructiveness than that Lincoln vainly prophesied against remains to be seen.

HV

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Harry V. Jaffa

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It is hardly necessary to say that civil disorder is one of the massive problems of American life today. But the tide of violence now threatening us is not something new. In 1838 Abraham Lincoln warned against “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passion, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.” The overthrow of our free institutions, Lincoln believed, would never come from foreign aggression, but it might come from internal causes: from the “lawless in spirit” on the one hand who, having “ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane . . . make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations”; and, on the other hand, from the loss of confidence in the government by those who are “good men . . . who love tranquillity, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits . . . [but who] seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered . . . become tired of, and disgusted with, a government that offers them no protection. . . .”

No sophistication is needed to apply the foregoing to some of the main political currents in this election year. Nor is much knowledge of history needed to be aware that the principal cause of lawlessness in the United States has always been the tension generated by the demands of equality in the presence of racial difference. Lincoln’s Lyceum speech of 1838 was a response to the violence then sweeping the country because of abolitionist agitation, and the reaction to it, both in the North and the South. And Lincoln’s judgment that the lawless agitation of this question, both by the abolitionists and the defenders of slavery, might rend the country asunder, was a clear prophecy of the Civil War. We are today in the midst of a social revolution perhaps as great as that beginning in the days of Lincoln’s youth. The disruption of American life by the American Negro’s transition from slavery to legal freedom may prove to be no greater than that caused by his transition from legal freedom to political and social equality. Whether this transition can be accomplished with less destructiveness than that Lincoln vainly prophesied against remains to be seen.