160 years ago, addressing the most contentious issue of his day, the national dispute over the Peculiar Institution of Slavery, Abraham Lincoln explained the voracious demand of slave-holders and slave-holding States for predominance in the national conversation.
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You must read Lincoln's address at the Cooper Institute, given in February 1860. There, he lays the case that national agitation and discomfiture were the offspring of slavers' unreasonable denials of fact and history.
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Lincoln's address can be read here: http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm …
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From that address come some of the most memorable words of political diagnosis uttered in any language:
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"I am also aware they have not, as yet, in terms, demanded the overthrow of our Free-State Constitutions. Yet those Constitutions declare the wrong of slavery, with more solemn emphasis, than do all other sayings against it; [cont'd]"
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"and when all these other sayings shall have been silenced, the overthrow of these Constitutions will be demanded, and nothing be left to resist the demand. It is nothing to the contrary, that they do not demand the whole of this just now. [cont'd]"
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"Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation. [cont'd]"
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"Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing. [cont'd]"
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"Nor can we justifiably withhold this, on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. [cont'd]"
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"If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality - its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension - its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; [cont'd]"
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"all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. [cont'd]"
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"Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them?"
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A civil war ... half a million dead and nearly a hundred billion in treasure expended ... did not end the dispute. A century later, enactment of federal civil rights statutes did not quell dispute.
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But all along, those who thought slavery morally right and socially elevating pressed for the predominance of their view, just as Lincoln said that they would do.
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And today, fascists of the mind will continue to press for submission of the mind to their views and suppression of the expression of disagreement.
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End of conversation
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