Lincoln would have urged public to counter corruption
By Stephen Anderson
Words that Abraham Lincoln used 150 years ago were brought into sharp focus on Feb. 7 during the Peoria County Bar Association’s 100th Lincoln Memorial Banquet.
In the first Lincoln-Douglas debate – on Aug. 21, 1858, in Ottawa – the future president said “public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”
The keynote speaker in Peoria, U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, chose those words to punctuate his plea for a change in public attitude toward government corruption.
People have a responsibility to speak up, he said, to come forward and tell the truth when they become aware of misdeeds of elected and appointed officials, and not expect somebody else to do that.
“Abraham Lincoln would be appalled” that public corruption has been a topic of concern for decades in Illinois, Fitzpatrick said, pointing out that people can’t simply dismiss it as “a law enforcement problem.”
The federal prosecutor was introduced by Judge Michael M. Mihm of U.S. District Court as a man who is both praised and cursed, but dedicated to the trust and committed to public service.
To commemorate the Peoria Bar’s 100th Lincoln Memorial Banquet, “we needed a special person,” Mihm said, “someone like Lincoln.”
Lincoln at Ottawa
By 2 p.m. on Aug. 21, 1858, more than 12,000 people had gathered in Ottawa to hear the first clash of political and spiritual values between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas.
They had know each other since 1834, when Lincoln appeared in Vandalia for his first session as a member of the House of Representatives. The legislature appointed Douglas as a state’s attorney in 1835, and he was elected to the House in 1836.
Lincoln and Douglas had squared off against each other in 28 legal cases, and come out of them nearly equal in verdicts.
They remained friends, and were amicable opponents 150 years ago, when the famous series of seven debates became historic highlights of their campaign for the U.S. Senate. Their focus was slavery.
Although Lincoln was not considered an abolitionist then, he thought that slavery should not be permitted to spread into territories that would become states. Douglas thought such a prohibition would lead to civil war.
In Ottawa, Lincoln held that “there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
He allowed that the races were not equal in many respects, but “in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”
Paraphrasing Henry Clay, “my beau ideal of a statesman,” Lincoln closed with a blast against Douglas for denying that the negro was given any status in the Declaration of Independence.
“Judge Douglas is going back to the era of our Revolution, and to the extent of his ability, muzzling the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return,” Lincoln said. “When he invites any people willing to have slavery, to establish it, he is blowing out the moral lights around us.”
When Douglas said he didn’t care whether slavery was voted up or down, Lincoln said “he is in my judgment penetrating the human soul and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people.”