From “Lincoln 365,” by Arnold Kunst:
December 7
One of the lessons
that Lincoln lived by, particularly as the urge to war came to dominate North
and South, was the importance of avoiding a rank appeal to naked emotion, a
very powerful, seductive temptation indeed. And yet only a few years after
Lincoln’s 1865 assassination no less a figure than Lincoln’s former Secretary
of War Edwin Stanton was doing that very thing. During the campaign of 1868
Stanton stumped for the Republican presidential candidate Ulysses Grant.
Stanton, according to the historian David Donald, ‘swept his Pennsylvania
audiences for Grant by reading the Gettysburg Address. Then he said, tearfully,
“You hear the voice of Father Abraham here tonight. Did he die in vain?...Let
us here, every one, with uplifted hand, declare before Almighty God that the
precious gift of this great heritage, consecrated in the blood of our soldiers,
shall never perish from the earth. Now -” and he uplifted his hands – “all
hands to God. I SWEAR IT!” After which his auditors all presumably went out and
voted Republican.’
‘Passion has helped
us, but can do so no more. It will in the future be our enemy. Reason – cold,
calculating, unimpassioned reason – must furnish all the materials for our
future support and defense.’
- Abraham Lincoln
No comments:
Post a Comment