In the decades leading up to the Civil War one subject on which Europe’s cosseted monarchs and America’s sturdy republicans could find common ground was Napoleon. His legacy quite naturally terrified crowned heads. The specter of Bonapartism likewise alarmed democracy’s champions in the young United States. Monarchists saw Napoleon as a sower of chaos. Americans viewed him as a dictator.
By the time Abraham Lincoln delivered his Lyceum Address in 1838, Napoleon had been in his grave on the remote island of Saint Helena for 17 years. Nevertheless, in Lincoln’s eyes Bonaparte’s ascent from commoner to military chieftain to emperor still loomed as the recrudescence of an ancient curse.
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.
Lincoln was in his late 20s, a novice politician, and a lawyer newly admitted to the bar. His remarks to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, were likely composed with an eye toward impressing his peers and furthering his career. Here was a chance to see his words printed in Springfield’s Whig newspaper, the Sangamo Journal. He titled his address “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.”
By condemning what he termed “this mobocratic spirit,” Lincoln was taking his cue from the headlines. In the summer of 1835 the American Anti-Slavery Society had started mailing hundreds of thousands of pieces of abolitionist literature throughout the country and particularly into the deep South.
The reaction was ferocious. Mobs stormed post offices and confiscated or burned the mails not only in Charleston, South Carolina, but also in Philadelphia. Violence in the North tended to track with the AASS organizing new chapters in the 1830s. The furor culminated in the murder of abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy by a mob in Alton, Illinois, just a few weeks before Lincoln’s speech.
Lincoln worried that “the lawless in spirit” would become “lawless in practice.” “Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane,” he said, “they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.”
In Lincoln’s telling such a spirit afforded would-be despots the opening they crave and require. “At such a time and under such circumstances,” he warned, “men of sufficient talent and ambition will not be wanting to seize the opportunity…[to] overturn that fair fabric, which for the last half century has been the fondest hope of the lovers of freedom throughout the world.” In effect Lincoln’s Lyceum Address was anti-antinomian.
Authority, legitimacy, error
By the 1830s it had long been remarked that the nation’s political disputes were following tumultuous precedents set by the religious and sectarian controversies of an earlier age. The original antinomians had sought to tailor the Reformation to their doctrinal beliefs. The so-called Antinomian Controversy that roiled the Massachusetts Bay Colony at its birth in the 1630s turned on Puritan answers to questions of scripture, grace, and orthodoxy.
Historian Charles Sellers summarized the antinomian impulse thusly: “Direct access to divine grace and revelation, subordinating clerical learning to everyperson’s reborn heart, vindicat[ing] the lowly reborn soul against hierarchy and authorities, magistrates and clergy.” Sellers identified the Jacksonian period as the era when “antinomian rebellion overflowed into politics” in the United States. Even so, Americans remained ever wary of the example set by post-revolutionary France. Paris at the time of the Commune was nothing if not rife with the mobocratic spirit.
Though Lincoln conceded in the Lyceum Address that law and authority will on occasion yield unjust verdicts, his fullest statement on the matter would come two decades later. By the late 1850s he was possibly the most eminent and doubtless the most eloquent Republican in Illinois. When the Supreme Court handed down its Dred Scott decision in 1857, Democrats invoked the sanctity of law and order and branded any criticism from Republicans as equivalent to mob rule. Lincoln dismissed the charge as a false dichotomy. The Supreme Court remained legitimate and indeed authoritative, he said, despite having erred.
Of course the nation was bound by the Court’s decision, Lincoln declared. “But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to overrule this. We offer no resistance to it.”
To every people a prophet in its own tongue
Ralph Waldo Emerson was six years older than Lincoln. If Napoleon was an antinomian for a secular age, Emerson was perhaps his country’s most renowned convert to secularism.
As a young Unitarian minister at Boston’s Second Church, Emerson found he wasn’t cut out for the job. In 1829 he paid a house call to a dying parishioner who was a Revolutionary War veteran. Spotting medicine bottles at the elderly man’s bedside, the 26-year-old minister opened his spiritual reflections with remarks on glassmaking. “Young man,” the old soldier replied, “if you don’t know your business you better go home.”
Leaving the ministry, Emerson read widely, published extensively, and lectured throughout New England, the United States, and abroad. The Lyceum circuit made Emerson’s name. In publishing Representative Men in 1850, he was presenting lectures he had continually revised after appearing on stages across the nation.
Emerson saw Napoleon as a representative man, one who heralded a new world order of material wealth. Bonaparte subordinated “all intellectual and spiritual forces into means to a material success,” he said. “To be the rich man is the end. ‘God has granted,’ says the Koran, ‘to every people a prophet in its own tongue.’…Bonaparte was qualified and sent.”
Antinomians and power
Notably, Emerson’s interest in Napoleon centered on the emperor’s career as a ruler. Already by the mid-1800s libraries brimmed with accounts of Napoleon’s military exploits and tactical genius. While granting that Bonaparte was an audacious master of the battlefield, Emerson studied what ensued when the martial legend was confined to a desk. The Ancien Régime had been swept aside. Good riddance, said republicans in Europe and America. Then what?
Authority was overturned, the masses welcomed a champion, and a Bonapartism unbound by either custom or law was defined by whatever Bonaparte said it was. By Emerson’s lights Napoleon filled this vacuum by indulging his own wishes while identifying himself as the tribune of the people.
The people felt that no longer the throne was occupied, and the land sucked of its nourishment, by a small class of legitimates, secluded from all community with the children of the soil, and holding the ideas and superstitions of a long-forgotten state of society. Instead of that vampyre, a man of themselves held, in the Tuileries, knowledge and ideas like their own, opening, of course, to them and their children all places of power and trust. The day of sleepy, selfish policy, ever narrowing the means and opportunities of young men, was ended, and a day of expansion and demand was come.
“He is no saint…and he is no hero, in the high sense,” Emerson said. “The man in the street finds in him the qualities and powers of other men in the street.”
Part of Napoleon’s luster coming out of the turbulent 1790s was his manifest disdain for all the correct enemies. Bonaparte vilified not only the disgraced and dethroned Bourbons — those “hereditary asses” — but also the revolutionaries who stormed the barricades. “Fontanes, in 1804, expressed Napoleon’s own sense,” according to Emerson. “The advocates of liberty and of progress are ‘ideologists;’ — a word of contempt often in his mouth….‘Lafayette is an ideologist.’”
A self-styled herald of modernity who prized action above all else, Napoleon had little time for ethics. “It is an advantage, within certain limits,” Emerson noted, “to have renounced the dominion of the sentiments of piety, gratitude, and generosity.’”
Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous sentiments. The highest-placed individual in the most cultivated age and population of the world, — he has not the merit of common truth and honesty….He is a boundless liar….Like all Frenchmen he has a passion for stage effect. Every action that breathes of generosity is poisoned by this calculation….“There are two levers for moving men, — interest and fear.”…He was throughly unscrupulous. He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown, and poison as his interest dictated.
Emerson characteristically discerned a hopeful moral in the example of an emperor who was banished first to Elba and then to Saint Helena. “Men found his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other men.”
While Emerson plainly wanted to draw a nomothetic lesson — “Every experiment by multitudes or by individuals that has a sensual or selfish aim will fail” — his conclusion was perhaps too tidy. Possibly such antinomian tides instead correspond to the historical equivalent of a moon whose phases defy our charting.