The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FONT By William E. Bohn Civilization and the Law GREATNESS is learned from the great. One thing that is wrong with all of our teaching and preaching and writing and broadcasting is that...
...Elijah Lovejoy was murdered at Alton, Illinois, and the presses on which he had printed anti-slavery articles were thrown into the Mississippi River...
...This is the sacred season of our national year, what with the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln falling within a space of 10 days of each other...
...Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular the laws of the country: and never to tolerate their violation by others...
...Lincoln's oratory is marked by a strict and artistic restraint...
...As the patriots of '76 died to support the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and laws let every American pledge his life, his property and his sacred honor...
...One thing that is wrong with all of our teaching and preaching and writing and broadcasting is that we make so little use of our heroes...
...And...
...And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation...
...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...
...Though he never attended a school where anyone pretended to teach him to speak or to write, he became a supreme artist in verbal expression...
...And it proves, in addition, that more than a century ago sharp-eyed and conscientious liberals faced precisely the same human tendencies which now clutter our view, and that they had at their disposal no cures save those which are now available to us...
...Illinois in 1338, he inevitably joined the Young Men's Lyceum, an ideal environment in which to try out his talent for public speech...
...Young Lincoln made his speech on January 27, 1838...
...It was a time of mob violence—even as this...
...From the beginning of his law practice up to the supreme eloquence of his First and Second Inaugurals...
...They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana...
...No corrective pencil trimmed these lines down to their sober meaning: "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...
...One reason that this Lyceum speech fascinates me is that it shows that this great man's eloquence did not descend upon him as a gift from heaven...
...let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls and enforced in courts of justice...
...Young Lincoln proceeds: "Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times...
...Washington's Farewell Address and the words that Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg are a part of our scriptures...
...This highly colored exercise in composition proves that the great Abraham Lincoln had to learn to write and speak by painful practice even as do smaller men...
...indeed, that period in the 1830s was not entirely unlike our own time...
...When the 29-year-old, six-foot-four rail-splitter moved to Springfield...
...they are not the creature of climate—neither are they confined to the slaveholding or nowslaveholding states...
...let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father and to tear the charter of his own and his children's liberty...
...One interesting point about this oration is that it contains ideas much like those which we hear uttered all about us in our day...
...let it be written in primers, spelling-books and in almanacs...
...This eager young man making his first trial run as a public speaker has chosen as his subject, "The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions...
...There were still old fellows about who could recall the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the Constitution...
...The answer," says our young philosopher, "is simple...
...On November 7, 1837, a little more than two months earlier...
...His words are always simple and chosen with the utmost discretion...
...they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former, nor the burning suns of the latter...
...Whatever, then, their cause may be, it is common to the whole country...
...and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues and colors and conditions sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars...
...Alike they spring up among the pleasure-huntig masters of Southern slaves and the order-loving citizens of the land of steady habits...
...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...
...The question put back there in that frontier town in 1838 was: How shall we fortify ourselves against this lawlessness...
...This should be a time of celebration...
...He began, even as any of the rest of us, in awkwardness and boyish exuberance...
...One of Lincoln s least known compositions has fascinated me since I first chanced upon it...
...The race problem was hot and constantly growing hotter— even as now...
Vol. 43 • February 1960 • No. 8
