On this day, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg address to a deeply divided country. It wasn’t a long speech – 278 words, total – but it continues to be one of the most enduring.
Not once does the President use “I” or a teleprompter. He doesn’t come to divide the country based on the color of skin. He comes to unify. He uses the word “we” over and over again to talk about a unified country. Both the idiot who occupies the White House and all elected members of Congress could learn quite a bit from this speech and this man.
Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, and his ideas weren’t popular; liberals didn’t want to end slavery. They were fighting and dying to save their way of life. Republicans were a new party, and didn’t garner much favor in the south. In fact, it was specifically because of the Republican party that liberals created the Ku Klux Klan. Liberalism was then, and continues to be today, the most divisive and un-American ideal that was errantly imported to this great country.
The country has drifted far from where it was in 1863. Liberalism continues to be a disease that spreads hate among the uneducated, and continues to insist on dividing people based on race, creed, color, religion, and sexual preference. Once liberalism and all of it’s vitriol is removed from the landscape, we can have peace, unity, harmony, and a nation based on the belief that all men are, truly, created equal.
On this day in 1864 President Lincoln signed a bill drafted by both houses of the 38th Congress of the United States officially creating the Yosemite Grant. While Yellowstone ultimately became the first National Park, this was the first instance of park land being set aside for preservation and public use by the federal government. The grant was the result of citizens like Galen Clark and Senator John Conness advocating heavily for protection of the area. John Muir later led a successful movement to establish a larger national park encompassing not just the Yosemite Valley, but surrounding mountains and forests as well.