From Lincoln’s False America To Trump’s Vile America
Remembering The Gettysburg Address

163 years ago today our ancestors enslaved dreamt of a day in which they would gain a measure of human dignity and freedom in the United States of America. Racism abounded in this country from the north to the south. White plantation owners sought to keep our ancestors in chains. Our ancestors were considered no more valuable than the mule pulling the plow or the cows providing the white man’s morning milk. Even the white abolitionists who sought the end of the systematic suppression of those chains felt our ancestors were not equal in status to any white man. Lincoln himself revealed that in his mind our ancestors were inferior in every way to whites.

The nation was in the midst of a great battle, pitting white brother against white brother battling to keep the system of slavery flourishing or fighting to end that system of slavery. Those in the northern states were fighting not to free our ancestors but were fighting to end the system of free labor that gave the southern slaveholding plantation owners, mill owners, and manufacturing owners unfair economic advantages that enabled them to build incredible amounts of wealth. Even the President of the Union, Abraham Lincoln sought the total removal of every black soul from America as a solution to this problem. Lincoln also was willing to support slavery's continuation if that solution can cease the war between the Confederacy and the Union forces. The caveat was that slavery maintains it’s geographic position and not extend westward.

Union States' had in it's plans a model to implement Manifest Destiny over the western territories. So when Lincoln spoke on that Thursday, November 19, 1863, briefly to give a dedicatory speech at Gettysburg. He, Lincoln was considering if he would even win reelection for the Presidency in less than a year. The fact that the Union held a sizable military advantage over the Confederacy in no ways assured the Union a victory on the battlefields. The white citizens of the northern states were tired of this war, the huge human sacrifice and they were looking for either a total victory or a compromise to end the hostilities. Understand this the very first was false because our nation's founders never truly believed that our black ancestors were their equals.

President Lincoln gave his most famous oratory. However, it was all a lie to crop up enthusiasm for a war that tired a white nation.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here, have, thus far, so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

It is that address that The Blackman Who Reads Aloud remembers today. Why are we as a nation still are fighting the sins of inequality and injustice? How did the party of Lincoln become the party of Trump? How did the party of the 15th Amendment become the party now equated to black voting rights cessation in 2021? How did the party that gave the bully pulpit to Abraham Lincoln become the party who now gave that bully pulpit to a race agitator like Donald Trump? How could the party that consecrated the grounds of Gettysburg become the party of a leader who ignored American veterans of their day of celebration? How, because as much as the United States has moved towards human equality for other races in this nation. Many of the same hateful attitudinal feelings of racial animists that existed in 1863 still exist in 2021. So that is how the Party of Lincoln became Trump’s Party and a great deal of Trump supporters long for the days of Confederate power.

Shouldn't we have learned from our forefathers that we were supposed to be the country that would become the people of the people nation? Well, our country's forefathers applied that value to whites alone. This nation has struggled to right the wrongs of the most unjust system of slavery? Yet the stain of racism and hate still mars this country’s underbelly. If are to gain our rightful place in this nation, our nation, we must fight and continue to fight until America doesn't see the color of a man's skin but only the content of that man's character.
That's when America will be America to me.