This week marks the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg address and there is a lesson for us all in its story.
In 1861, the United States of America became embroiled in a war between its states because of a series of Acts of Secession from the union by a group of southern states. It was a political decision driven by two factors. First was a deep distrust of a federal government controlled by a Republican party and president dominated by northern states. Secondly, was a federal government determination to prevent the extension of slavery into the Western Territories. The southern states’ cotton industry was slave-based and, since the abolition of slavery in 1833 by the British, it survived economically on this business model advantage. The federal government was not listening to their needs. Quite the reverse. The south decided to leave the union.
Abraham Lincoln was not an emancipator when he came to office. When he gave his first inaugural address in March 1861, Jefferson Davis had assumed the office of President of the Confederacy two weeks earlier. President Lincoln declared “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Rather his fight was a political one over the survival of the existing states and territories of the Union as a single country. Lincoln considered the Acts of Secession of the 13 Confederate States to be illegal and treasonous. He declared that “no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union.”
But time and circumstance change many things. The Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 was the turning point of the civil war. Militarily it marked General Robert E. Lee’s last attempt to invade the North. Five months later, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, at the commemoration of the National Cemetery in Pennsylvania, permanently changed the political framework for the war and the political philosophy underlying the existence of the United States of America. In this address, Lincoln embraced emancipation by reinterpreting the Declaration of Independence’s words that “all men are created equal.” He now included slaves. Further he declared that the civil war was a battle of survival for democracy itself –one where the continuation of the Union would preserve a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
It is with these thoughts in mind, and in recollection of this month’s pledge of remembrance to our fellow citizens who lie in the far flung Flanders fields of sacrifice, that I have become fed up with the disgraceful behaviour of our representatives on Parliament Hill, in some of our city halls and with the latest form of an American Civil War.
A system of government where our elected representatives’ policy decisions and long range planning horizons are determined by the date of their next election day is unworthy of our support.
Then again, maybe it isn’t the system of government that has gone awry. Maybe it’s the type of folk who are willing run for office.
Alan Murdock is a local pediatrician.
