I have this long-term relationship with Abraham Lincoln. The reason is that he and I share the same birthday: Feb. 12. My father told me that Lincoln was one of the greatest presidents America has ever had. Still true to this day. So, the saga of Honest Abe permeated my younger years. I learned that Lincoln’s rise from an impoverished and challenging childhood was the result of a strong body, a resourceful and vigorous mind, and deep desire to learn.

With the state of the nation being what it is as I approach my 88th birthday on the 12th of this month, I was quite taken by historian and author Heather Cox Richardson’s recall of a speech Lincoln made in Springfield, Illinois 186 years ago.

“On Jan. 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln rose before the Young Men’s Lyceum to make his speech. Just 28 years old, Lincoln had begun to practice law and had political ambitions. But he was worried that his generation might not preserve the republic that the founders had handed to it for transmission to yet another generation. He took as his topic for that January evening, ‘The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.’”

Lincoln had the capacity to see around the corner of political ambition. In what became known as the Lyceum Address, one of the earliest speeches by Lincoln to have been preserved, he established himself as a rising politician and political thinker.

Richardson writes that “Lincoln saw trouble coming, but not from a foreign power, as other countries feared. The destruction of the United States, he warned, could come only from within. ‘If destruction be our lot,’ he said, ‘we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.’”

Further, she writes, “The trouble Lincoln perceived stemmed from the growing lawlessness in the country as men ignored the rule of law and acted on their passions, imposing their will on their neighbors through violence. … But the problem of lawlessness was not limited to individual instances.”

She quotes Lincoln’s statement that “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.”

Lincoln perceived this potential threat to democracy 175 years before the rise of Donald Trump. And MAGA.

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Lincoln believed that continuing to ignore the law would eventually break down all the guardrails designed to protect individuals, while the lawbreakers, going unpunished, became convinced they were entitled to act without restraint. Are we not witnessing this today? Those who do see it and don’t believe the lawbreakers should be punished — that’s one description of a Trump supporter.

Lincoln’s belief that the only way to guard against such destruction was to protect the rule of law on which the country was founded. Richardson quotes Lincoln’s statement, “As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of 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 ... Let reverence for the laws … become the political religion of the nation; 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.”

For a man who would destroy democracy, Richardson writes that Lincoln said, “‘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.’ With no dangerous foreign power to turn people’s passions against, people would turn from the project of ‘establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty’ and would instead turn against each other.”

As Richardson writes, “Lincoln then reminded his audience that the torch of American democracy had been passed to them. The Founders had used their passions to create a system of laws, but the time for passion had passed, lest it tear the nation apart. The next generation must support democracy through ‘sober reason,’ he said. He called for Americans to exercise ’general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.’”

Lincoln’s recognition, “in a time of religious fervor and moral crusades, that the law must prevail over individual passions reverberates loudly today, far beyond the specific crises of the 1830s.”

Happy Birthday, Abe!

“Connecting the Dots” is published every other Saturday in the Recorder. John Bos is also a contributing columnist for “Green Energy Times” Visiting the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum should be on everyone’s list! You can read Lincoln’s complete Lyceum speech at www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm. Comments and questions are welcome at john01370@gmail.com.