Abraham Lincoln Warned Us About Donald Trump
By Philip Gourevitch
March 15, 2016
Donald Trump personifies what Abraham Lincoln described as the mobocratic spirit. He fuels it and is fuelled by it...
Donald Trump personifies what Abraham Lincoln described as the “mobocratic spirit.” He fuels it and is fuelled by it, though it is by no means clear that he can control it.Photograph by John Sommers II / Getty
Watching the rise of Donald Trump brings to mind the story of Francis J. McIntosh’s demise.
McIntosh was a Mississippi River boatman who disembarked, one morning in the spring of 1836, at the port of St. Louis. He had a rendezvous planned with a chambermaid there, but he didn’t make it far before he got into a scuffle with a couple of constables, who had been in hot pursuit of another sailor, who was wanted for brawling. McIntosh was arrested for interfering with law enforcement, hauled before a justice of the peace, then marched off to jail. Along the way, he asked how long he’d be held there, and was told: at least five years. At that, McIntosh drew a knife, stabbed one policeman to death, badly wounded another, and bolted. Word spread, and a mob gathered. McIntosh was tracked down to an outhouse where he was hiding, and hustled back to jail.
Meanwhile, a much larger mob collected on the street, where, as Elijah P. Lovejoy, the editor of the St. Louis Observer, wrote a few days later, the body of the murdered policeman “lay weltering in his blood.” The mob soon moved on to storm the jail and tore McIntosh from his cell; it brought him to the edge of town, chained him to a tree, and built a fire at his feet. Until then, Lovejoy wrote, hardly a word had been spoken by the mob or McIntosh, but when the flames were lit he pleaded to be shot instead, then gave up and sang hymns as he was slowly roasted to death. His charred remains were then hung from a branch for all to see, and “a rabble of boys” who had taken in the whole spectacle took turns throwing stones at McIntosh’s head to see who could break it.
When a grand jury was convened to consider whether the members of the mob had committed any crimes, the presiding judge changed the subject and railed against McIntosh—a free mulatto—as proof of the perils of the anti-s***ery movement. The judge’s name was Luke Lawless, and he insinuated that McIntosh had acted as a sort of terrorist, under the influence of the newspaperman Lovejoy, who was a steadfast abolitionist. To Judge Lawless, “the free negro” was “the enemy,” and he made sure that nobody was charged for McIntosh’s lynching.
For most of Missouri’s press, that was as it should be. But to Lovejoy, it was as if the Constitution itself—and the order it was supposed to impose—had been torched along with McIntosh. Lovejoy had no problem calling the dead boatman a “blood-thirsty wretch” who deserved a death penalty in a court of law. The issue, in his view, was the broader slide into mob rule happening throughout America, and he wrote, “When the question lies between justice regularly administered or the wild vengeance of a mob then there is but one side on which the patriot and Christian can rally.” So Lovejoy mounted a campaign against “mobology,” and before long a mob ran him out of town. He then set up shop a little ways upriver, in Alton, Illinois, where he lasted about a year before a mob came to destroy his printing press, and he was shot dead trying to stop it.
McIntosh and Lovejoy live on in memory today chiefly because, a few months later, in a speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer named Abraham Lincoln invoked them as American martyrs. Hardly anyone in the country had heard of Lincoln before, but his speech at the Lyceum started to change that. His topic for the occasion, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” could hardly have sounded less promising, but to Lincoln it raised a fundamental question: What was the greatest threat to the Republic?
He did not fear a foreign attack: “Shall we expect some t***satlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.”
No, Lincoln said, the only danger that America really needed to fear would come from within: “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.”
Lincoln was not speaking hypothetically. He saw precisely such “ill-omen” in the growing disregard for the law in favor of lynch-mob vigilantism: “Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former, nor the burning suns of the latter . . . neither are they confined to the s***e-holding, or the non-s***e-holding States.”
Lincoln said that he did not want to dwell on the horrors, but then he laid the horrors on pretty thick. For example, he said, in Mississippi, the mobs began by h*****g gamblers—even though gambling was allowed by law— then “negroes, suspected of conspiring to raise an i**********n,” then “white men, supposed to be leagued with the negroes,” and then random strangers visiting from other states, until “dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.”
As for McIntosh, Lincoln said, his story was “perhaps the most highly tragic,” considering the speed at which he went from being “a freeman, attending to his own business, and at peace with the world,” to being lynched. Lincoln argued, as Lovejoy had, that the fact that McIntosh would surely have been sentenced to death anyway only made his lynching more offensive. To Lincoln, the offense was lawlessness, and he argued that both those who indulged in lawlessness and those who fell prey to it would eventually come to regard “Government as their deadliest bane . . . and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.” It was this feeling of “alienation” rather than “attachment” to public institutions that Lincoln feared most in the “mobocratic spirit.”
However far we may be today from the scenes of violence that Lincoln described, it’s easy to see the danger he was talking about gathering force across contemporary America. Donald Trump personifies the mobocratic spirit; he fuels it and is fuelled by it, though it is doubtful that he can control it. All the elements are there: the incessant, escalating lust for violence; the instinct for mobilizing a mob to take the law into its own hands; the claim that whole groups are the enemy; the belief that those who are not with the mob forfeit all protection from the mob and invite attack; the attribution of hostile conspiracies to peaceful independent actors; the contempt for evidence, as if accurate information and honest adjudication of competing claims were dirty tricks contrived to disadvantage the mob; the vilification of the press as hooligans who deserve to be beaten, if not k**led; an all-encompassing animosity toward the government and its institutions; in short, an ever-intensifying lawlessness.
This ugliness and violence and destructiveness is all that inflates Trump. His support reflects deep strains of preëxisting disenfranchisement, alienation, and division, but, although Trump gives echo to these passions and has an uncanny genius for harnessing them as his engine, he proposes no coherent remedy, only swagger: there will be blood. His success thus far reflects a world-upside-down sort of triumph, in which every word and deed that should destroy his candidacy only seem to fortify it. In this respect, Trump is the true representative of a party that has, for far too long, preferred to indulge all the dangers that Lincoln warned of and done nothing to protect itself, much less the nation, against them. That the Republicans were once the Party of Lincoln makes the danger that Trump’s party now constitutes not only alarming but tragic. And nobody foresaw the tragedy more clearly than Lincoln himself in his speech to the Lyceum, seventeen years before the Grand Old Party of the Republic was founded.
Haunted by the spectre of Francis McIntosh, Lincoln described the coming of a figure startlingly like Trump as all but inevitable: someone whose singular ambition and genius for power so “thirsts and burns for distinction” that he will pursue it at any cost. It would be foolish, he warned, not to expect such a person to arise. And when that happens, Lincoln said, there is only one solution: “it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.” Is that asking too much?
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