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| President Abraham Lincoln |
When clicking on the fox news web site I came upon this article which had a small picture of the founding fathers of America. But when you go to the actual article it only shows a picture of Lincoln and not the Founding Fathers. Is the fox news network afraid to show the photo because the founding fathers were a bunch of old white guys and they do not want offend anyone? Fair and Balanced or once again political correctness gone crazy?
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| Founding Fathers |
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| Founding Fathers |
And now here is the article:
It is remarkable that Abraham Lincoln never delivered a Fourth of July speech.
The closest he came was on July 10, 1858, in Chicago
during one of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, when Lincoln spoke of
the Founders as “iron men.” He remarked how, every July 4, Americans
celebrate those “iron men” and their extraordinary achievement, because
we are “historically connected” with it.
Lincoln meant this literally. He was speaking to
those who were old enough to remember the Founders from their youth and
those descendants of the Revolutionary generation.
But then Lincoln spoke about another set of
Americans, the ones whose families came here after the great Revolution
was over. In a word, immigrants. Of these, Lincoln said:
“If they look back through this history and trace
their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none.
They cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make
themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through
that old Declaration of Independence, they find that those old men say
that, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal,’ and then they feel that the moral sentiment taught in that day
evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all
moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as
though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men
who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.”
And so we are. None of us fought at Bunker Hill or
Lexington or Concord. None of us endured famine, cold, or the impact of a
musket ball. None of us signed our names to a document that made us
traitors, fit to be hung.
Yet, despite all that, we are still Americans, and
the Fourth is still our celebration, because we hold dear the “moral
sentiment” for which those iron men fought and died — “That all men are
created equal.”
Lincoln would fight and die for it, too.
Lincoln reassures us that this alone is enough to
form that “historical connection” with men who in all other things bear
no relation to us. Or, as he puts it: “That is the electric cord in that
Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men
together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of
freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”
As this speech was delivered in response to Stephen
Douglas, a congressman from Illinois, Lincoln connects the “electric
cord” in the Declaration with the question of slavery.
“If one man says [the Declaration] does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?”
In a few short paragraphs, Lincoln eviscerates
Douglas’ contention that the ideals of the Declaration were reserved for
only the true descendants of the American Revolution. It is remarkable
that there was a time when Lincoln’s idea, now so central to our
American mindset, was not dominant.
And yet we find our present culture riven by a
hypersensitive strain of identity politics. We are told, even by some
who belong to Lincoln’s party, that we should provide this group of
Americans with one kind of government handout and that group with
another.
We are told that we must “speak to” a certain group
of Americans in a certain way or else lose their vote. We are told that
skin color or sex determines whether a group is more or less deserving
of government perks. If one disagrees, one is shouted down as a racist,
bigot, or chauvinist.
Yet Lincoln would disagree. The Founders would
disagree as well. And so must all whose connection with that great and
glorious generation of “iron men” consists of embracing an ideal that
was meant to be taken literally; namely, that all men are created equal.
But it is not enough to believe this. We must do more
than reread those words this Fourth of July in between the barbeques
and fireworks. We must do what the Founders did, and what Lincoln did in
his own time, and fight against the insidious notion that those words
mean other than what they say.
Lincoln believed the Founders asked this of him and his generation. It is what the Founders ask of us still.
