Today is Monday, February 19, 2019. Today, here in the United States, we celebrate President's Day. The current president has called the press the enemy of the people. The current president has suggested that Saturday Night Live should "looked into" because he did not like the way he was portrayed on the show this past weekend. The current president declared a national emergency because Congress refused to let him use taxpayer money to build an unnecessary wall. Forty percent of those living in the United States are celebrating the current president today. I am not one of those people.
Today I am celebrating President Abraham Lincoln who presided over not just a national emergency, but a threat to the very idea that a democratic-republic, a country without a monarchy or dictator or emperor, could actually survive. President Lincoln ended his First Inaugural Address with the words "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
President Lincoln ended his Second Annual Message to Congress with the words "Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just . . ."
President Lincoln ended the Gettysburg Address with the words "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."
President Lincoln ended his Second Inaugural Address with the words "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
Those words either spoken or written by the Sixteenth President of the United States are familiar to many people. What is perhaps less familiar are these words which President Lincoln, addressing those citizens in the States which had seceded from the Union, also said in his First Inaugural Address "You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect, and defend it.'"
Abraham Lincoln believed that to "preserve, protect, and defend" the Constitution of the United States also meant to "preserve, protect, and defend" the Union, the United States, to not allow the country to be torn apart and the Union dissolved. President Lincoln understood that this new experiment in self-government was worth preserving not just for the moment, but for future generations and not just for the United States but for the world.
Today, February 19, 2019, as we in the United States celebrate Presidents Day and I celebrate Abraham Lincoln, I also celebrate the steps we have taken and progress we have made, slow though it may be, to becoming that "more perfect Union."
