Law-Abiding Citizenship and Non-Violent Protest

This article will be mostly centered on one speech by Abraham Lincoln, the Lyceum Address of 1838, and one by Martin Luther King, the 1967 Riverside Church oration against the Vietnam war, "A Time to Break Silence."To support the argument that follows on the connection between respect for law, citizenship, and the right of dissent, I will call on one further statement by each thinker: King's "Letter from Birmingham City Jail" of 1963 and Lincoln's "House Divided" speech of 1858.Passages of considerable length will be quoted to give an adequate sense of the context for both Lincoln and King-speakers whose choice of local emphasis and individual words showed a consistent sensitivity to the importance of detail and evidence.What else (it might be asked) do they have in common?Both speak as leaders--they are among those, as Lincoln put it elsewhere, who "mold" the sentiments of the people--and they speak as citizens of the nation to fellow citizens.Lincoln, however, in all his public utterances before he became president, held the status of a politician, first as state representative and then as Congressman.He was a well-known Illinois Whig and then a founder of the Republican Party.King was hardly a politician in the same sense.He was a leader of a moral and religious movement pressing for radical social change.To put the point more starkly, Lincoln, by the nature of his public character, spoke from inside the existing political order, even when he spoke for the necessity of dissent and radical reform.For him, obedience to the laws as they stood was a precondition of any change that might be legitimately urged.By contrast, respect for the law, as King saw it, came up against a natural limit when a large injustice proved irremediable by the ordinary legal mechanisms.Yet even in the process of outward disobedience, King accepted the sanction prescribed by law.For all their differences of position and function, both men speak for the centrality of lawabidingness as the social basis of political opposition and dissent.In practice, this will also entail a profession of, and obedience to, common assumptions about responsibility, which the speaker shares with society at large.Acceptance of