In her address to the University of Chicago's Class of 2026, Alison L. LaCroix, the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law, drew from the life of President Abraham Lincoln to suggest ways of helping steer a democracy whose future no one can yet see.
LaCroix, an expert on the interbellum period, the decades between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, was the University's faculty speaker this year. She opened her address with a story from before Lincoln became the man of history, as a 28-year-old lawyer just beginning his career—not unlike the new UChicago graduates.
She recounted how Lincoln had been invited to address a club in Springfield, Illinois, tied to the era's “lyceum movement”—public gatherings to debate politics, science and the arts. The lyceum, LaCroix said, was "a microcosm of the lively, organic civic culture of 19th-century America, or indeed of the University of Chicago."
In his 1838 speech, Lincoln credited the country’s founders with the “fundamental blessings” of the nation's institutions, then named two threats. The first was mob rule, or the “mobocratic spirit,” which left citizens “tired of, and disgusted with, a government that offers them no protection.” The second threat was the potential rise of a tyrant, following people’s loss of attachment to government.
Lincoln’s remedy, LaCroix said, was to bind citizens to the republic through a “political religion” of the rule of law. To this, he looked to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, upheld in the courts.
“He did not know what was coming,” she said of Lincoln, who had no inkling of the pivotal role he would play in the nation’s future, “but what he could do was offer his listeners a set of ideas that would embolden them to feel not alienated from civic life, but attached to it.”
After delivering her address, LaCroix went to the Law School Convocation Ceremony at Rockefeller Chapel, where she was one of two faculty members who hooded the graduating students.
This story is based on the. reporting of UChicago News. Follow this link for their coverage of the University's 2026 Convocation Ceremony.
