RE 150 year anniversary of Gettysburg Address: Such a long tradition of using the word "freedom" where it doesn't belong....I mean it sounds great but its just a load of baloney fed to little schoolchildren isn't it? How else other than "freedom" could we explain the hundreds of thousands of our dead?... the southern states wanted their freedom (of course we disagree with their position on slavery but, again, another inconvenient myth: that the Civil War was about freeing the slaves) and Lincoln said no and went into a brutal war to force them to stay in the union against their will.. I mean tell it to the South that the Civil War was about "government of the people, by the people, for the people..."! The idea that the States could not leave the Union once they joined it, to me, seems absolutely nonsensical..and then Lincoln couches that as "freedom"? I can imagine telling the representatives to the Constitutional Convention, northern or southern, that once their states ratified the constitution they would not be able to ever leave no matter what!.. they would have laughed all the way back home! Hats off though to Old Abe for being so determined and keeping the Union together at such a high cost... we can celebrate but to think it was about freedom or slaves is just a bit much...
