A lesson from Abraham Lincoln

By Charles Lane, The Washington Post

When you think about it, Thanksgiving Day is a paradoxical holiday for a country such as the United States.

Gratitude is nearly the opposite of grievance. Yet, despite the many reasons we may have to feel the former, our political institutions were consciously designed to protect, even encourage, the expression of the latter.

The right to take a day off each November to count our blessings, between mouthfuls of turkey and stuffing, isn’t actually in the Constitution; but our right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances” is.

Of course, this right, exercised peacefully and with civility, is essential to freedom and self-government. When grievances multiply, and when groups begin to define themselves by them, however, division and instability grow. When politicians inflame and exploit mutually exclusive grievances for their own advantage, the system can begin to break down.

It’s frighteningly easy to start down this slippery slope, especially when people lose sight of the big things they all have in common, as the Constitution’s main author recognized long ago.

“So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities,” James Madison wrote in the Federalist No. 10, “that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”

Madison’s meditation is extra-relevant in this season of political discontent; a time when would-be presidents of the most prosperous and secure nation in human history are encouraging voters to think of themselves as victims of a “rigged” system - or demonizing everyone and everything, from the incumbent president, to Congress, to their Muslim neighbors, to the media, to “the billionaire class.”

An even more appropriate reflection for today, though, would come from the writings and speeches of Abraham Lincoln, who proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863.

In the midst of a ghastly and seemingly endless civil war, the 16th president nevertheless urged Americans to express their gratitude to God for “the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies,” and the “harmony [that] has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict.”

The connection between blessing-counting and democratic stability was one that Lincoln had been pondering at least since one of his earliest published speeches, which he gave while a young member of the Illinois legislature to the January 1838 gathering of the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield.

Lincoln spoke at a time of frightening lawlessness on the American frontier, including the recent lynching in Alton, Illinois, of an abolitionist editor, Elijah Lovejoy, by a pro-slavery mob. Lovejoy had condemned the earlier lynching of a black man accused of murder in St. Louis.

Condemning Lovejoy’s murder, Lincoln also alluded to violence seemingly unrelated to race, such as a massacre of white gamblers in Vicksburg, Mississippi. This implicitly reminded apologists for the attack on Lovejoy that no one was safe from the mobs. And it set up his broader point: that the violence was a symptom of waning gratitude for the American Revolution’s establishment of freedom and the rule of law - incomplete though it was.

Now that the revolutionary generation of political leaders had died out, he argued, a new one had arisen that took its ancestors’ achievements for granted