Thread about the Lincoln “quote” deployed last night by Lara Trump. Which was, of course, not an actual quote. But the real quote comes from a speech where Lincoln condemned and warned of the consequences of anti-Black mob violence. 1/

The line she referred to, and got wrong, comes from the Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Ill., in January 1838. 2/

There, Lincoln said “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.” 3/

He went on to say that the “ill-omen” he saw as a threat was “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions…” 4/

“in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.” But then, of the mob violence he saw as “common to the whole country,” he picked two “outrages” to demonstrate the point. 5/

One came from Vicksburg, Miss., in July 1835, where a mob of white men lynched five men accused of being professional gamblers, which was part of a wave of violence rooted in fears of a slave insurrection. 6/

As Lincoln put it, once white Mississippians executed gamblers, “next, negroes, suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection, were caught up and hanged in all parts of the State…” 7/

“Then, white men, supposed to be leagued with the negroes; and finally, strangers, from neighboring States, going thither on business, were, in many instances subjected to the same fate. Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes…” 8/

"from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers; till, 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.” 9/

Ultimately, several other white men and dozens of enslaved people were murdered by white mobs in Mississippi in the summer of 1835. 10/

Lincoln turned from there to a “horror-striking scene” in St. Louis, from the spring of 1836, when Francis McIntosh, a free black steamboat worker, was arrested for refusing to help police chase down another man who had been in a fight. 11/

After being taunted by the police that he would spend five years in jail and maybe even hanged for his “crime,” McIntosh escaped, stabbing and killing a police officer as he ran. 12/

He was soon apprehended and put back in jail, at which point a white mob broke into the jail, tied McIntosh to a tree, and lit him on fire. 13/

No one was ever indicted for the lynching, and when a grand jury was convened to investigate, the judge (whose name, believe it or not, was Lawless) told it that McIntosh was the problem, and his death his own fault. 14/

McIntosh’s actions, Judge Lawless said, fit a pattern of crimes committed “by individuals of negro blood against their white brethren.” 15/

For Lincoln, the lynchings in Mississippi and Missouri, perpetrated by white mobs mostly against black people, represented grave threats to the republic and the rule of law. 16/

What begins with lynching gamblers and murderers without consequence, Lincoln cautioned, could only end with indiscriminate license for mobs who would soon take to lynching whoever they chose. 17/

And matters would not end there. Ultimately, Lincoln believed, when vigilantism was allowed to go on unchecked, when “the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice . . . they thus become, absolutely unrestrained.” 18/

Eventually, democratic governance itself would fall victim to the mob. “Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much, as its total annihilation.” 19/

Lincoln had little sympathy for the destruction of property carried out by mobs either. But it was anti-Black vigilantism that he saw as the wedge that would lead the destruction of America. 20/

When vigilantes were left to act “with impunity, depend on it, this Government cannot last.” And once democracy seemed that weak, corrupt men would pounce. 21/

“Men of sufficient talent and ambition will not be wanting to seize the opportunity, strike the blow, and overturn that fair fabric, which for the last half century, has been the fondest hope, of the lovers of freedom, throughout the world.” 22/22