Today we observe the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. We’re also at the start of the presidential political season. Over the course of the next year and a half, we will be presented with contrasting visions of America’s future. To help us evaluate these arguments, it is useful to turn to Lincoln’s January 27, 1838 speech before the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois.
In this portion of the speech, Lincoln reminds young citizens why they should be grateful to find themselves in America and the legacy they are bound to protect. We, too, should take the text of this speech to heart, for it points to the American ideal, the responsibility of preserving these ideals, and a standard from which to judge the present political promises of a better tomorrow:
“In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American People… find ourselves in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them–they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Their’s was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ’tis ours only, to transmit these, the former, unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter, undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation, to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.”
