The Lyceum

Lyceums were community associations that sponsored lectures, debates, and discussions, brought to frontier Illinois by Eastern Protestant missionaries and educators. Their promoters hoped to disseminate knowledge and encourage civic responsibility, while townspeople saw attendance as a way to gain middle-class respectability and aspiring local leaders used them to sharpen their speaking and analytic skills. In Lincoln's day, more than 3,000 lyceums existed nationwide. Springfield had two, the Sangamon County Lyceum, founded in 1833, and, a few years later, the Young Mens' Lyceum. Usually meeting on Saturday nights, they featured prominent local men and aspiring ones as speakers on science, culture, health, history, and politics, and participants debated issues such as abolishing the death penalty, the trustworthiness of newspapers, and whether married people were happier than single people. Because women also attended, lyceums also served social and recreational purposes, and young men such as Abraham Lincoln could pursue both professional and social advancement there. From 1838 to 1840, the Young Mens' Lyceum met in the Baptist Church at the southwest corner of Seventh and Adams Street, where Lincoln delivered his famous Lyceum Speech on January 27, 1838. A few weeks before his twenty-ninth birthday, he addressed the question, "Do the signs of the present times indicate the downfall of this Government." Known as "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions," the speech is an important Lincoln text that offers clues to the developing mind of the future president. Written at a time when many Americans feared vigilantism and mobocracy, it called for reverence for the laws to become the political religion of the nation.

Springfield, Illinois · United States