"With malice toward none." "With charity for all." "To bind up the nation's wounds." "A just and lasting peace." Dangerous concepts, we suppose, because 152 years later, the haters cannot let go of things that President Lincoln literally gave his life for. Lincoln really did have the Marine Band play "Dixie" at the victory ball. Here is what he said on that occasion: “I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I have ever heard. Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it. It is good to show the rebels that with us they will be free to hear it again.”
The progressives are irate over the fact that America has for 152 years respected the memory of Americans who once bore arms against America, or supported slavery, or profited from it. Well, slavery ended 152 years ago. Six generations, or seven, or eight, have come and gone since those days, and each of those generations has one way or another come to terms with America’s past. They had no problem with going to schools named after men who owned slaves, or traveling on streets or visiting military bases named for Confederate generals, nor being in cities that had statues commemorating them; they had no issue with the Confederate flag flying over monuments or in cemeteries. For a long time, the Democratic Party had annual “Jefferson-Jackson” dinners to celebrate fathers of their party. Most of those events, if not all, have been cancelled or wiped out in the past year because of the sudden realization that those men owned slaves. Now, after eight years of Obama progressivism, the social justice warriors bristle with indignation and bitterness and are affronted by what those other seven or eight generations treated with respect or at least tolerated. That’s why the US Army’s recent response is so surprising. The Army refused to cave in to the demands from four Democratic members of Congress from New York, who wanted the Army to change the names of General Lee Avenue and Stonewall Jackson Way in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, New York. The Army said a change would be “contrary to the spirit of reconciliation.” Would that everyone had given that response during the last few years.
What can we say about people who are so angry and indignant, insulted and outraged over references to historical figures who died in the nineteenth century? We say this: They clearly are not spiritual descendants of Abraham Lincoln.