"The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history... But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of everyday! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – 'that government of the people, by the people, for the people,' should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves."
Friday, October 30, 2009
Never really thought about it that way, be he's actually quite right.
H. L. Mencken - Wikiquote:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
What a bunch of hogwash. Sure, you could make that argument if you're only looking at it from the collective white man's perspective. If you look at it from the individual's perspective, the Union soldiers were fighting for every man's right to govern himself.
ReplyDelete-Sandy
But Lincoln, by not freeing the slaves in the North, only the South, clearly made the pertinent issue not slavery, but the maintenance of the union. So the Union wasn't fighting for the "right for every man to govern" themselves...
ReplyDeleteAlthough I'll end with Mencken's reply to all critique - "Mencken's widely attributed, pat response to all angry letters:
Dear Sir (or Madame),
You may be right.
Sincerely yours, HL Mencken
You know, if you signed in with Google you could get this automatically, instead of forcing me to email you.