Independence Day 2008

On certain holidays (Memorial Day, Veterans Day and the 4^th of July) and whenever the need arises, I seek to affirm some of the great principles upon which this great nation was founded.

It is an example of political expediency that this nation based upon the language of the Declaration of Independence (“all men are created equal”) in 1776 continued to endure the disgrace of slavery for generations longer. As the nation grew and the social and economic institutions of the regions of the country became more strained, the resolution of the issue of slavery became unavoidable. The political institutions were not up to the task and the Supreme Court failed in the Dred Scott case.

It fell to a new President from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. whose faith in the union of the American States was to be tested, to preserve the nation at the expense of more than 600,000 American lives in the Civil War.

The final outcome of the war was not yet determined when President Lincoln arrived to deliver his Gettysburg address in November of 1863 at ceremonies to commemorate the battlefield that had been Gettysburg in July of that year. Following a 2 hour oration by a politician who is all but forgotten, President Lincoln rose and spoke for less than three minutes – 10 sentences, 267 words – which will be remembered as long as there is a United States of America.

Lincoln was re-elected in 1864, based largely upon good news in the war of Sherman’s victories in Atlanta. The great Civil War ended with the surrender by General Robert E. Lee to General Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. By April 14, 1865, President Lincoln was dead by an assassin’s bullet.

The Gettysburg Address of President Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863, at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania…

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.