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Defending the Electoral College and the Constitution since 2009
Next year is our nation’s 250th birthday. But why? The Revolution did not begin, nor end, in July of 1776. The war started more than a year earlier; the fighting would not end until 1781; the peace treaty took two more years. So why is next year “America 250”?
The best answer was given 162 years ago today, in brief remarks at the dedication of a cemetery.
Four months earlier, the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, had experienced a cataclysmic battle between Union and Confederate armies. The dead on each side numbered in the thousands, the injured in the tens of thousands. On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln made brief remarks at the dedication of Gettysburg National Cemetery.
What Lincoln said has helped to define America, and it explains why—and what—we will celebrate next year.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” This is the beginning of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and it makes a powerful claim.
Lincoln points to the Declaration of Independence and its claims about what government is for based on what human beings are. In short, the Declaration says that human beings have certain basic, equal rights, and that these come before government—both in time and priority. Before there was any government, human beings had rights, and defending these rights is the legitimate purpose of government.
No other nation was created based on such a claim. The British author G.K. Chesterton wrote a century ago that America is “the only nation in the world founded on a creed.” And no other nation has done so much to advance the cause of human freedom.
Lincoln predicted that people “will little note, nor long remember, what we say here.” Yet the Gettysburg Address has become one of the most famous speeches in world history. And it reminds us that America 250 is not really about a war, or politics, or the mere fact of American independence. America 250 is about the Declaration of Independence—America’s founding creed.