Lincoln on the Rise of the Ambitious and The Silent Artillery of Time @ AMERICAN DIGEST

Lincoln on the Rise of the Ambitious and The Silent Artillery of Time @ AMERICAN DIGEST

Lincoln on the Rise of the Ambitious and The Silent Artillery of Time

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock
I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against
it. -- Matthew 16:18



In the great journal of things happening under the
sun, we, the American people, find our account running under date of the
nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the
peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth as regards
extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We
find ourselves under the government of a system of political
institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and
religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells
us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal
inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the
acquirement or establishment of them; they are a legacy bequeathed us by
a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed, race
of ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to
possess themselves, and through themselves us, of this goodly land, and
to uprear upon its hills and its valleys a political edifice of liberty
and equal rights; 'tis ours only to transmit these—the former unprofaned
by the foot of an invader, the latter undecayed by the lapse of time
and untorn by usurpation—to the latest generation that fate shall permit
the world to know. This task gratitude to our fathers, justice to
ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all
imperatively require us faithfully to perform.

How then shall we perform it? At what point shall we expect the approach
of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? 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.



....I know the American people are much attached to their government;
I know they would suffer much for its sake; I know they would endure
evils long and patiently before they would ever think of exchanging it
for another,—yet, notwithstanding all this, if the laws be continually
despised and disregarded, if their rights to be secure in their persons
and property are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob, the
alienation of their affections from the government is the natural
consequence; and to that, sooner or later, it must come.



.... There are now, and will hereafter be, many causes, dangerous in
their tendency, which have not existed heretofore, and which are not too
insignificant to merit attention. That our government should have been
maintained in its original form, from its establishment until now, is
not much to be wondered at.



It had many props to support it through that period, which now are
decayed and crumbled away. Through that period it was felt by all to be
an undecided experiment; now it is understood to be a successful one.
Then, all that sought celebrity and fame and distinction expected to
find them in the success of that experiment. Their all was staked upon
it; their destiny was inseparably linked with it. Their ambition aspired
to display before an admiring world a practical demonstration of the
truth of a proposition which had hitherto been considered at best no
better than problematical—namely, the capability of a people to govern
themselves. If they succeeded they were to be immortalized; their names
were to be transferred to counties, and cities, and rivers, and
mountains; and to be revered and sung, toasted through all time.



If they failed, they were to be called knaves, and fools, and
fanatics for a fleeting hour; then to sink and be forgotten. They
succeeded. The experiment is successful, and thousands have won their
deathless names in making it so. But the game is caught; and I believe
it is true that with the catching end the pleasures of the chase. This
field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated. But
new reapers will arise, and they too will seek a field. It is to deny
what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of
ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And when
they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling
passion as others have done before them.



The question then is, Can that gratification be found in supporting
and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most
certainly it cannot. Many great and good men, sufficiently qualified for
any task they should undertake, may ever be found whose ambition would
aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a
presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion or the
tribe of the eagle. What! think you these places would satisfy an
Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a
beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no
distinction in adding story to story upon the monuments of fame erected
to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve
under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor,
however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and if
possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves
or enslaving freemen.



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.



.... At the close of that struggle, nearly every adult male had been a
participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was that of those
scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son, or a brother, a
living history was to be found in every family—a history bearing the
indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled,
in the scars of wounds received, in the midst of the very scenes
related—a history, too, that could be read and understood alike by all,
the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned.



But those histories are gone. They can be read no more forever. They
were a fortress of strength; but what invading foeman could never do,
the silent artillery of time has done—the leveling of its walls. They
are gone. They were a forest of giant oaks; but the all-restless
hurricane has swept over them, and left only here and there a lonely
trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage, unshading and
unshaded, to murmur in a few more gentle breezes, and to combat with its
mutilated limbs a few more ruder storms, then to sink and be no more.



They were pillars of the temple of liberty; and now that they have
crumbled away that temple must fall unless we, their descendants, supply
their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober
reason. Passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in future
be our enemy. Reason—cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason—must
furnish all the materials for our future support and defense. Let those
materials be molded into general intelligence, sound morality, and, in
particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws; and that we
improved to the last, that we remained free to the last, that we revered
his name to the last, that during his long sleep we permitted no
hostile foot to pass over or desecrate his resting place, shall be that
which to learn the last trump shall awaken our Washington.



Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock of its
basis; and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution,
"the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."
-- Abraham Lincoln The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions - An
Address Delivered Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Ill.
January 27, 1837