| July 4, 1861: Address to Congress Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled – the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains – its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets; that there can no be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace; teaching men that what they cannot take by an election neither can they take by a war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war. |
It’s as pertinent today as it was then.
Republicans used to claim Lincoln as theirs but they have forfeited that claim. They have absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Today they are the party of whining, entitled, arrested development and intellectual rot and if they were around in 1861 they would all have been on the other side.
And now they have let the violent genie out of the bottle again.