A Reason for Gratitude

Today is Veteran's Day.

A quote I found in a book I just finished reading seems more than appropriate. The quote itself is from Robert Moton who was the president of the Tuskegee Institute and a son of slaves. He was a speaker in May 1922 when the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated. Andrew Ferguson quotes from his speech at the dedication at the end of his book, Land of Lincoln.

Ferguson reports that Moton said that the greatest of Lincoln's achievements was not that he "saved the Union" but that it was a particular kind of Union he saved, one dedicated to a proposition. Moton said:

When the last veteran has stacked his arms, when only the memory of high courage and deep devotion remains, at such time the united voice of grateful posterity will say: The claim of greatness for Abraham Lincoln lies in this, that amid doubt and distrust, against the counsel of chosen advisers, in the hour of the Nation's greatest peril, he put his trust in God and spoke the word that gave freedom to a race and vindicated the honor of a Nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Today, one week after the election of Barack Obama as our 44th President, that proposition rings forth in newer and greater ways that I am sure Lincoln could ever have imagined. It is not just Lincoln or even the Union soldiers of the Civil War that have helped make that a reality. It is all veterans.

Ferguson had this to say in his next to last paragraph.

If Lincoln had failed, the country would have ceased to exist. The founders would have lost their bet that ordinary people could govern themselves, and the principle they were betting on- that all men were created equal- would have slipped into darkness, and no one can say when it might have been revived.

Thank God the darkness has been pushed back even further.