The Atlantic
Runaway partisanship endangers the United States more than foreign enemies do.
February 18, 2021
Adam Maida
In one of his first public speeches, in early 1838, Abraham Lincoln warned that the biggest threat to the United States came from within. “If destruction be our lot,” said the future president, then 28, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
Citing the killings of a mixed-race boatman and an abolitionist newspaper editor by pro-slavery crowds, Lincoln described a country in which widening political division had turned into violence, declaring: