Here are my thoughts about Lincoln and if he was a good president on the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg address. Growing up close to Gettysburg the things I was taught about old Abe were all wrong so here are some quick facts about him and I think he killed the Spirit of 1776 .Lincolns conduct during the Civil War included the suspension of habeus corpus and the imprisonment without trial of editors, publishers, and legislators. Lincoln was much influenced in thought and rhetorical style by his favorite literary sources: the King James Bible, Aesops Fables, Shakespeares plays, especially Macbeth, and Pilgrims Progress. The Constitution and its Bill of rights, not so much. The Declaration, on the other hand, was something Lincoln held up as the American creed, claiming to have never had a political thought or sentiment that didnt spring forth from that noble document. Yet the Declaration of Independence was essentially a secessionist document, declaring the right of a people to free themselves of the political bands that bind them to another and to establish for themselves an independent government that to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. When the new Constitution was proposed in 1787, some states attached conditions to their ratification of it, including, in the case of New York and Virginia, the right to leave the Union if they saw fit. Poor Jefferson Davis He hoped to have the question of whether states had the right to secede be decided in a court of law rather than on fields of battle. Davis, who became President of the Confederate States of America, was captured and imprisoned for a time after the war, but authorities of the United States never did charge and try him for treason. A new nation was in fact created by the Civil War, but it was a nation at variance with the principles of independence espoused in the Declaration. It was a union, not conceived in liberty but imposed by blood and conquest, rather than a by voluntary association based on shared principles and aspirations. That my friends is the sad part of all this...
Posted on: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 01:48:36 +0000
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