It’s been a great year for Abraham Lincoln. The 16th President of the United States is omnipresent in the zeitgeist of our 2020 crisis. Maybe that’s because he knew how to weather them?
Abraham Lincoln believed the Revolutionary principles of liberty and equal rights made the United States invincible against any invader. His words ring as true today as when Lincoln first spoke them at the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois in 1838.
The US has faced seemingly insurmountable challenges in the four years since Donald Trump assumed the presidency but despite even the most dire of predictions, the Republic stands.
It’s not the first time the Republic has hung on a knife’s edge. Back in 1838, Abraham Lincoln argued that the way out of the chaos of his day was to double down on the Republic’s ideals: liberty and equal rights.
“All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the Earth could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio,” the young state representative told the Young Men’s Lyceum.
The US, he predicted, could even prevail “against the gates of hell”.
It took a very painful civil war, but Lincoln, and the United States, ultimately prevailed.
“[Our funding fathers bequeathed us] a political edifice of liberty and equal rights. ’tis ours only, to transmit these…to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know.”
Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Address, Springfield, Illinois January 1838
Nice job.