No one understood Americans' devotion to their democracy or shared it more thoroughly than Lincoln. For the safekeeping of their democracy, Americans "would suffer much for its sake. I know they would endure evils long and patiently, before they would ever think of exchanging it for another." Certainly, he would. "We have the best Government the world ever knew," Lincoln told a newly recruited regiment of New Yorkers 26 years later--a government in which "the people" had the "right to decide the question," whatever the question might be. And it was one that he was happy to share as broadly as possible: when "I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles--the oppression of tyranny . . . rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke, than to add anything that would tend to crush them."

This was not because Lincoln had no eye for Americans' political excesses. But what mitigated the baleful tendency of passion in democracy was law. In one American law treatise and discourse after another in the 50 years after independence, the law was held up as "a moral science of great sublimity," wrote Baltimore jurist David Hoffman in 1817; it was nothing less, said the Irish exile William Sampson, than "the public reason, uttered by the public voice." The vocation of the lawyer, then, was (according to Hoffman) "the conservation of the rights and prosperity of the citizen, and the vigorous maintenance of the legitimate and wholesome powers of government," while the responsibility of "the good citizen" was "to love the laws, and . . . to obey them." Aristocracies were "governments of will"; democracies were "governments of law." So long as Americans allowed themselves to be ruled by reason, they would choose to be ruled by law, and all would eventually be well with their democracy. But if Americans should surrender to "the dictates of passion and venality, rather than of reason and of right," warned Brown University president Francis Wayland, at "that moment . . . will the world's last hope be extinguished, and darkness brood for ages over the whole human race." Even democratic government's most reckless champion, Andrew Jackson, was--at least at first--a lawyer. The man who proposed to save it from Jacksonian passion--Abraham Lincoln--was a lawyer, too.