All Men are Created Equal: the American Experiment
J.R. Pole describes how the idea of equality, when applied to the new multi-racial, multi-lingual, multireligious America of vast industry and teeming cities, was destined to conflict with some of the deepest existing preconceptions about the fundamental character of American society.
When, nearly a century ago, the American people fought each other in Civil War, it was equally clear to each side that the victory of the enemy would work the destruction of the old American idea of liberty. Lincoln, in the brief remarks he made at the dedication of the Union cemetery at Gettysburg in 1863, described the United States as a nation “conceived in liberty.”
No one, North or South, would have denied it. But he went on in the same sentence to declare that the American nation was “dedicated to the proposition that men were created equal.” The Civil War saved the Union and freed the slaves; but its results did not reconcile these two fundamental, but not altogether consistent, principles of the American Union.
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