Abraham Lincoln’s reputation will endure the tides of time because he was consistently referred to as a man of integrity and intellect. He warned of a destructive force from within.
During a speech in 1838 he asked his listeners:
“Shall we expect some transatlantic 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. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. 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.””he staked his career on the premise that reverence for the law should become the political religion of the nation.”
He warned that whenever the vicious portion of [our] 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 upon 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.
Lincoln warned that a tyrant could overtake the U.S. political system from within. “Is it unreasonable, then, to expect that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time spring up among us? And when such an one does, 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. Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm, yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.”
The antidote, the prophylactic, there was a need to cultivate a “political religion” that emphasizes “reverence for the laws” and puts reliance on “reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason.”
Trump shall not his reputation endure well. He will be a moment of disgrace in a country long proud of its heritage as a union and as one bound together by laws. All the mistakes we have made as a country, under democrats and republicans will pale in comparison to the viciousness and pettiness of this president.Would that you could see ahead to the mistake we call trump and sadly,
” A fool too late bewares when all the peril is past.” Elizabeth I
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