What did Past Presidents Say, #2.

 

    Imagine the challenge Abraham Lincoln faced.  He was elected in November of 1860. but before he could take office seven Southern States had seceded from the Union.  In March, after he was inaugurated, four more left the Union. Preparing what to say at his 1st Inaugural Address was something no other elected president had faced.  

He began by reminding Americans that "...the Constitution of the Union of these States is perpetual..."  Think about that.  To be perpetual is to be everlasting, continuing forever, valid for all time.  Yet, seven states had seceded, and more were expected to do so.  

Having chosen to begin by reminding the nation that the Constitution of the Union of these States is perpetual, he continued.  "It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination.  ...the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it by some action not provided for in the instrument itself."  

He continued, "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.  The Government will not assail you.  You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.  You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect, and defend it.'"

Concluding, Lincoln said, "I am loath to close.  We are not enemies, but friends.  We must not be enemies.  Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.  The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

If there are words more capable of touching hearts and causing reflection, I cannot imagine what those words would be.  Yet, we know that Lincoln's words were not enough to stop the Civil War.  We must hope that if such a time were ever to come again, that Lincoln's words, together with the wisdom to be learned from history, could stop an assault on our Constitution, a betrayal of the perpetual promise of America.  

President Lincoln was a victim of that war, as surely as were the soldiers who fought in the battles of the Civil War.  He gave everything he had to give, including his life.  

    Generations later another president was still fighting for the full rights for Black Americans, and his name was Lyndon B. Johnson.  In March of 1965, President Johnson spoke these words:  "This is one nation.  What happens in Selma or in Cincinnati is a matter of legitimate concern to every American.  But let each of us look within our own hearts and our own communities, and let each of us put our shoulder to the wheel to root out injustice wherever it exists."

    Neither of these two men fully succeeded in accomplishing what they wanted to do, but they tried, and they believed in us to preserve and protect our union, to make sure that in our generation we respected that our union is perpetual.