VIEWPOINT | Celebrate Lincoln by reembracing Declaration of Independence and its principles
Guest column by David Adler, The Alturas Institute
Celebrations this week of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday should include his advice in an Oct. 16, 1854, speech in Peoria, Ill., at a juncture not dissimilar from the circumstances that torment our nation today.
Polarization and division, violence, voter intimidation and murder, and the spreading racism, exacerbated by enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which permitted the extension of slavery, set the stage for Lincoln to emerge from retirement in politics to condemn the new law and declare slavery immoral. He characterized it as “monstrous injustice” that betrayed the foundational principles of the United States. Lincoln’s “Peoria Speech,” marked his historic ascension as a national leader and, ultimately, as a giant whose voice speaks to us across the ages.
