It’s a Free Country. For How Much Longer?

[David Lockmiller]

On April 3, 2024 the New York Times published a book review of the three books written by Parker Henry, a graduate student in philosophy at Stanford University. He has previously written for the New Yorker. The title of the three-book review is: “It’s a Free Country. For How Much Longer?”

The author of one of those books being reviewed is the historian Allen C. Guelzo and the book is titled OUR ANCIENT FAITH: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment.

The book reviewer wrote as follows:

In 1861, Guelzo writes, when rioters in Baltimore attempted to stop Union militia members from traveling to Washington, Lincoln authorized “his generals to arrest and imprison suspected saboteurs without trials or charges.”

As critics accused Lincoln of leading an unconstitutional dictatorship, he wondered whether free republics had a “fatal weakness”: “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” Lincoln erred on the side of governmental strength . . . .

I do not believe that this is a correct conclusion by the book reviewer.

The quotation is part of President Lincoln’s Message to a Special Session [of Congress], July 4, 1861:

[T]he assault upon, and reduction of, Fort Sumter was, in no sense, a matter of self-defence on the part of the assailants. They well knew that the garrison in the Fort could, by no possibility, commit aggression upon them. …In this act, discarding all else, they have forced upon the country, the distinct issue: “Immediate dissolution, or blood.”

And this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people – can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes. It presents the question, whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration, according to organic law, in any case, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily, without any pretense, break up their Government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask: “Is there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness?” “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” So viewing the issue, no choice was left but to call out the war power of the Government; and so to resist force, employed for its destruction, by force, for its preservation.

Ironic, almost four years later, President Lincoln returned to this same question of democratic government on the night that his reelection was confirmed:

On November 10, 1864, in response to a serenade from his supporters, President Lincoln began his short speech with this observation:

"It has long been a grave question whether any government, not too strong for the liberties of its people, can be strong enough to maintain its own existence, in great emergencies."