Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Address And The Fight For Law

A young lawyer in 1838 stood before the Young Men’s Lyceum and asked a chilling question: what happens to a republic when people start believing the law binds everyone but themselves? We welcome Dr. Aaron Kushner to explore Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Address, a speech that moves from vivid accounts of mob violence—lynchings, vigilantism, a printing press hurled into a river—to a timeless plan for civic renewal rooted in everyday habits.

We trace Lincoln’s core claim that freedom rests on stable, impartial law. Not on passion, not on personalities. With the founding generation gone and revolutionary fire cooling, Lincoln feared a vacuum that mobs would happily fill. His answer was bold and practical: cultivate a “political religion” of reverence for the laws, taught by parents, reinforced in schools and churches, affirmed in legislatures, and upheld in courts. We connect this prescription to modern life, from online pile-ons to casual corner-cutting, showing how private exceptions can erode public trust.

Along the way, we dig into Lincoln’s legal mind and measured humility, pushing past the mythmaking to see a sharp observer working through first principles. We examine his stark warning that America is unlikely to be conquered from abroad; if it fails, it will be by suicide—by citizens losing faith in democratic processes when passion promises faster results. For educators, we share concrete ways to bring selected passages into middle and high school classrooms, using case studies that make due process and civic restraint feel urgent and real.

If you care about constitutional maintenance, civic virtue, and how culture sustains institutions, this conversation offers tools and language you can use today. Listen, share with a fellow citizen, and leave a review to tell us: what private habit best protects public peace?

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Transcript

Setting Up The Lyceum Address

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Welcome back to Civics in the Year. We have our good friend Dr. Aaron Kushner back with us. And today we're talking about Lincoln's Lyceum address. And I'm excited to talk about this because Dr. Kushner and I had the amazing opportunity to do Civics Summit with the Arizona Cardinals this past January. And we got to hang out with a wonderful group of teachers. And this was the document that we use. And after this, I was like, well, now you're going to be on the podcast, Dr. Kushner, because I've heard of the Lyceum address, but I never really dug into it. So, Dr. Kushner, welcome back. First question: What is the Lyceum address and what is going on at this time in American history that we need to know before we dig into the document?

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Well, thanks for having me back. I like this podcast. It's a lot of fun. The Lyceum address is a young Abraham Lincoln. He delivers this speech at a civics venue. The Young Men's Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois is effectively an open forum for engaged citizens, a lot of lawyers, like Lincoln was, to come and talk about matters of public importance. What's going on in the country? They would come and they would practice their rhetoric, they would practice their debate, and they would hone their skills there. It's 1838. I don't know if this podcast will air before or after the Indian removal one, but it is at the same time as members of the Cherokee Nation are being forced.

SPEAKER_00 2:28

This will be after. So listeners, listeners, if you have not listened to that one, that is the episode that came out our March 4th, episode 165, with Dr. Fishner highly suggests. So these two things are happening at the same time.

What Lincoln Means By Mob Rule

Rule Of Law As American Bedrock

SPEAKER_01 2:44

That's right. Thank you. So we have a concern. And Lincoln's concern in this speech, again, young man, lawyer, Lincoln, before he's big deal politician, is wrestling with the problem of mob rule. And he sees mob rule, and we'll define it in a second, everywhere. And he defines mob rule as a willingness to ignore or overlook or think the law doesn't apply to me from any citizen in any position in the country. So what that means is well, locals thinking they are above the law or can ignore the law. It means government officials, as we see, Lincoln does not refer to Indian removal, but this is the kind of thing that we think of. Well, ignoring treaty law, this is a kind of mob rule. Because what a mob does fundamentally, according to Lincoln, is think itself above or better than the law. And so what Lincoln is concerned with is how to perpetuate American institutions. That's the title of his speech. It's the perpetuation of our political institutions. And what are our American political institutions? But the stability given to us by the stable rule of law. When we think of a right to liberty, we think of in America the right to a stable set of boundaries to guide our actions, which means we are free from tyranny. We're free from the tyranny of a king who might change the law on their whim. We're free from the tyranny of government agents who might choose to enforce or implement laws that aren't really there or ignore the law in their enforcement. We're free from our neighbors attacking us because they don't like something that we've done. And we're also free from attempting to decide for ourselves to do whatever we want, right? Because fundamentally, if the rule you follow can change at any given moment, or on a whim, or because of uh some emotion or passion, that's not freedom. And so Lincoln argues that our political system is founded on a stable rule of law, and that's what makes us unique. But in the 1830s, and the founding generation is dead, they're all gone. The last of the founders died a few years prior. James Madison dies in the 1830s, and he's one of the last ones left. So Lincoln's pointing out across the country there are lynchings. Black men are being lynched. There are gamblers who did break the law in the South who get lynched for it by a mob. And the mob said, Well, we don't want gamblers. It's illegal. So we're gonna take the law into our own hands. Lincoln says, No. There's a printing press that is printing things that certain Southerners, fans of a peculiar institution, don't like. This printing press is destroyed and thrown into a river. There's violence perpetrated across the board. And Lincoln sees these things and thinks, well, where what happened? How did this go wrong? How is it that people aren't following the law anymore? What happened? And so the Lyceum address is Lincoln's attempt to go back through American history. It's not that old at the time. Yeah. So it's pretty clear. It's still reasonably fresh in people's, at least if not their memories, their parents' memories. Well, the nation, Lincoln says, was founded really in a very passionate way. I mean, this is a revolution. This is effectively a civil war. A plug to the the Schettel conference at the end of February, America 250, the American Revolution as civil war. Well, these are brother against brother, sister against sister fighting the British.

unknown 7:14

Right?

Passion Of The Founding Fades

SPEAKER_01 7:14

So this is a very passionate, very heated moment in that conflict bonded people, and it bonded people who would not normally get along under normal situations, nor normal circumstances. And Lincoln's cognizant of this, and he knows that happened. And that the founding generation, while they were alive, were sort of able to, in a way, inspire different kinds of people who disagreed very strongly about things, but because they would think, oh yeah, Madison's the guy who wrote the Constitution. Like I know him, or he's he's over there, right? That that gives you a different kind of attachment to your government. If the people who made it were there, and if your own parents perhaps fought in the war, maybe you lost a relative in the war. This really attaches you to your country, but that's all gone by the 18, late 1830s. So Lincoln's thinking, well, how how can we how can we fight the mob? How can we attach people to government when the living attachments are dead, when no one's actually experienced it, when people don't feel that they have input into the system that was created by people who are long dead? Well, how do we fix this? Sound familiar? Yeah, this is something that recurs over and over in African history. We're we have this problem at all times, right? Now as well, and no exception. Lincoln argues that a civil religion is necessary to perpetuating our institutions. And what he means by this is something interesting. Uh he effectively argues against one of the prevailing wisdoms of the day. So in Jacksonian democracy, one of the big political ideas that begins to develop and become adopted, sort of in part of American culture, is this more radical sense of individualism. You see that, well, as more people are getting the vote, more people are able to defend and articulate their particular interests, their wants, their desires, the jobs they want to do, the things they want to get done. You see a real disconnect between private and public life start to take shape. There's all kinds of debates in Congress and fights between Congress, between religious groups, between the president Jackson, between Ben Buren, all these folks. There's a huge fight over mail on Sunday, for example, in terms of trying to honor the Sabbath. Well, the federal government shouldn't have workers working on Sunday. This is abuse of workers, right? So there's a lot of that. It doesn't honor the Sabbath. And the federal government said, well, we can do whatever we want. Right. Anyway, the point being that there's this sense of what I do in private has no bearing on what I do in the public realm. And Lincoln sees this as dangerous. This is a dangerous thing. Because you can see the wheels turning in Lincoln's head at this age. Well, this is this is what the slaveholders say. I can do whatever I want in my private domain. Of course I can hold another person in bondage. It doesn't affect anything else. What I do in private doesn't affect anyone. And Lincoln makes the case in the Lycee Madras, this is fundamentally not true. And it's important for liberty if Americans understand that that's not true. Because if in your private life, Lincoln points out, you think to yourself, I am above the law, and you genuinely think on a daily basis that these laws don't apply to me. These laws are for other people. We can boil it down to a very simple explanation. If I think that the stop signs and the red lights are for other people, I'm in a hurry. I get to go through them. I need to, I'm a careful driver. They're not for me. It can be as simple as that. It's the attitude that says, I am different and special, and the law doesn't apply that leads ultimately to mob violence of the heart. And this is sort of Lincoln's understanding of what this means. Lincoln gives his famous now prescription. So what do we do? He argues, and I'll I'll read this quote Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap. Let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, in colleges, let it be written in primers, spelling books, and almanacs, let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And in short, let it become the political religion of the nation. What Lincoln means by this is that the idea that impartial law ought to guide our activities is something that we should embrace in public and in private, and most especially in private, so that we, in a way that is respectful of our own liberty and the liberty of others, are able to perpetuate our political institutions.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Is that kind of the argument that he's making here?

SPEAKER_01 12:59

I think that's absolutely right. He has a great line in there that no invading army could ever make track upon the Blue Ridge or take a drink from the Ohio. As someone who was born in Ohio, you do not want to take a drink from the Ohio. But his point remains that no one will ever be able to conquer physically the United States. No invading army would ever be able to do this. And there are a lot of, I don't think that's a controversial statement even today. It would be very difficult to imagine a physically invading occupying army actually doing this because we're so big and because of the water, because of all these things. No, Lincoln says our nation, because of its unique situation, if it must die, it must die by suicide, is his line. And it will destroy itself because of the failing, basically, democratic faith of the American people, is his argument.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

Which is interesting because then he goes on to be president during one of the most fracturous times in American history. So how does his speech kind of show that this young Lincoln is already really thinking constitutionally?

Private Life, Public Consequences

SPEAKER_01 14:14

Yeah. He has such a keen legal mind. He really is just one of the great geniuses. I'm I'm convinced of this, that Lincoln has thought about these things deeply and meaningfully because he's able in a way that others aren't to see and observe what goes around what goes on around him physically and extrapolate to the whole. He's able to see both. And this isn't a unique observation of me. I think this was Shelby Foote. It's from the Ken Burns documentary of the Civil War, where I believe it was Shelby Foote, who says that Lincoln had the unique ability to look at himself from 35,000 feet, look down on himself, and really under criticize and understand his own thinking. There are some historians and a lot of great scholars who will read the Lyceum address and sort of with Lincoln-colored glasses think, well, he he knows he's great and he knows all these other things and will sort of look forward and read backward at the same time. I don't necessarily believe that. I think he's just a very intelligent, insightful person who's working through these ideas and making these connections. Again, self-educated, self-taught. And I, you know, he's brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

It's interesting that you say that people think or people say that like Lincoln thought he was great. But when I think of Abraham Lincoln, I think that he was incredibly humble and incredibly, you know, worried. It's it's the he is the first picture of a president, you know, before he starts being president. And then, you know, before he's assassinated, you can see how the presidency aged him because he was this thinker and he really grappled with these ideas. And again, you introduced me to this speech. And I love it because it too talks about civic virtue, right? This this question is about civic virtue, restraint, and self-government. And I think it's an incredible piece to really, you know, when people talk about like, oh, we don't need civics, we need name whatever other subject you want. I believe that they're all important. But this really is talking about constitutional maintenance. Uh, in 1830, the constitution is again, we're not that old.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

Not that old. We need to maintain it. And that speaks to the nature of democracy and how he understood it, certainly. But I think it's fair to say how a lot of the folks at the founding understood it as well. It will need constant maintenance. James Madison, especially. I believe you've had a number of people on here talking about James Madison. And I haven't listened to every episode, but I'm sure a lot of them maybe have mentioned this. Madison is constantly talking about the need for public virtue and the need for the citizens to actually care. In the Federalist papers, Hamilton and Madison's writings point consistently to yeah, the Congress has been given a certain number of enumerated powers. It's limited government. Really, it's on the people to watchdog it and really to pay attention. They're assuming a lot of public virtue. And here Lincoln is witnessing maybe the dying of public virtue. And as you say, he will go on to witness even further dying of public virtue with an actual civil war.

Lincoln’s Political Religion

SPEAKER_00 17:48

It's just cool to see some of his quotes in the Lyceum and then look at, and again, we're really doing a deep dive into Lincoln in this podcast, not in this episode specifically, but you know, in episodes coming up because there are so many things that kind of happen pre-Civil War, during the Civil War, and you know, prior to his assassination. And he, I will say, is one of my favorite orders as a president because the things he says I really feel still resonate today. And not that any other president doesn't have that. He just happens to be the one that I enjoy the most. So, Dr. Fisher, again, thank you so much. I really, teachers, educators, homeschoolers, if you are listening to this, I really think that the Lyceum address is something that is easily put into your curriculum. I'm, you know, as we're talking about this, and again, this is, I have the benefit of already, already listening to Dr. Fisher at our Arizona Cardinals event. But I would do this with my seventh and eighth graders because the language is very, he's very verbose. He uses, you know, lots of words. However, pulling out some of these quotes and talking about them could be really meaningful and helpful, especially when you're talking about civics. So, Dr. Kushner, you are the bomb. Thank you so much. Thank you.