Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.

Lincoln expressed this sentiment in the fraught secession winter of 1860–1861, as Southern states began leaving the Union after his election. In a message to a public meeting in Springfield, Illinois, he addressed the principle of revolution and self-government—acknowledging that peoples may overthrow a government if they both desire and can accomplish it—while distinguishing that abstract right from any constitutional “right” of secession. The remark reflects Lincoln’s effort to defend majority rule and the continuity of the Union without denying the Revolutionary-era doctrine that governments derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed.

The line concedes a natural (extra-legal) right of revolution: if a population is determined and capable, it may replace an unsatisfactory regime. Lincoln’s phrasing is deliberately conditional—“inclined and having the power”—underscoring that revolution is a matter of political fact and moral claim, not a guaranteed legal entitlement within an existing constitutional order. In the secession crisis, this allowed him to affirm the American founding principle that tyranny may be resisted, while arguing that unilateral secession was not a constitutional remedy and that disputes in a republic should be settled through elections and law rather than disunion.