Encounters
''mobocratic'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜encounter｜ENC｜20260904134559-14-•
Downcast or not, Lincoln gathered himself in time to help shape important legislation. He championed the state bank with special vehemence. On January 11, 1837, he defended that institution against an attack by Democrat Usher F. Linder. Sarcastically acknowledging that Linder was his superior in “the faculty of entangling a subject, so that neither himself, nor any other man, can find head or tail to it,” Lincoln dismissed his opponent’s arguments as “silly” and harshly declared that if Linder were unaware of Illinois’s usury statute, “he is too ignorant to be placed at the head of the committee which his resolution proposes.” If, on the other hand, he were aware of that usury law (which he did not mention in his flings against the bank), Linder was “too uncandid to merit the respect or confidence of any one.” Lincoln went on to denounce “capitalists” who “generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people,” and politicians, “a set of men who … are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men.” (Lincoln immediately added that “I say this with the greater freedom because, being a politician myself, none can regard it as personal.”) He further denounced “that lawless and mobocratic spirit, whether in relation to the bank or any thing else, which is already abroad in the land; and is spreading with rapid and fearful impetuosity, to the ultimate overthrow of every institution, or even moral principle, in which persons and property have hitherto found security.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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