LINCOLN: “...the better angels of our nature.”
He said in his first inaugural address, "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. ... We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
ALL wars are civil infractions, breaches in our brotherhood of arms, a betrayal of our genes, our culture, our ancestors and our children. A betrayal of our "better angels". The chorus of our Union, once begun, excludes no voice.
UNION. Always the better place. Right up to the point of being excluded. When that happens, when UNION is betrayed from within, and made impossible, then INDEPENDENCE is the logic of Union reforming itself into its possibility once again.
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