There was a young man in 1838, an aspiring politician almost too shy to admit his ambition to himself or others, who gave a talk to a Midwestern youth group. It was a speech about public policy, but it showed a delicate appreciation of psychology, of how people feel about what’s happening around them.

America’s Founders—“the patriots of ’76,” he called them—were now all gone, James Madison having died 19 months before.

In their absence Americans felt lost. Those men stood for this country, they modeled what it was in their behavior. Admiration for them had united the country. Now, without them, people felt on their own. First principles were being forgotten, mob rule was rising. In Mississippi, they were hanging gamblers even though gambling was legal. “Next, negroes, suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection, were caught up and hanged in all parts of the State; then, white men supposed to be leagued with the negroes; and, finally, strangers from neighboring States, going thither on business.”

It was madness, and it threatened the republic. If people come to understand “their rights to be secure in their persons and property” were now at the mercy of “the caprice of the mob,” their affiliation with the American government will be destroyed.