STARRS Podcast
STARRS Podcasts includes the series STARRS & Stripes which interviews military veterans, talks about their careers and military service, and their concerns about what is happening in today's military. See our website, starrs.us, for more information.
STARRS Podcast
Timothy Sandefur on Frederick Douglass and the American Dream
Timothy Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute gave a talk at STARRS Rally for Our Republic in September 2024 in Arizona. Rally emcee Ray Semko, the D*I*C*E Man introduced Timothy.
Description:
Frederick Douglass—the escaped slave who became an internationally famous spokesman for liberty and one of America’s most celebrated intellectuals—declared in the 1850s that the U.S. Constitution was “a glorious liberty document,” and that those who denounced it as enshrining white supremacy and slavery were wrong. What led Douglass to break even with anti-slavery allies to defend the Constitution? And does his vision of the American Dream survive today?
Douglass, a beacon of hope amid the shadows of America's racial past, is reframed by Timothy Sandefur, an impassioned advocate for free speech. He challenges prevailing narratives by portraying Douglass not just as a former slave but as a profound believer in the promise of American equality. He compares Douglass's optimism with the more critical perspectives of contemporary figures like Ta-Nehisi Coates, exploring how their differing views influence today's discourse on racial justice and national identity.
Sandefur covers the stark contrast between Douglass's belief in the Constitution as a vessel for unity and Coates's view of the American dream as a façade. Through an exploration of historical and modern perspectives, he discusses how these narratives shape our understanding of race and equality today. His talk emphasizes the importance of hope and perseverance, drawing inspiration from Douglass's unwavering faith in the nation's founding ideals as pathways to progress.
Finally, Timothy reflects on the enduring battle for unity in America, guided by Douglass's teachings on dignity and the relentless pursuit of freedom. He highlights the need for loyalty and self-respect in realizing constitutional ideals for all. Timothy puts forth a call for unity, reminding us of the shared history that binds Americans together and the better angels that can guide us toward a more unified future.
_______________________________________
For more information about STARRS, go to our website: https://starrs.us which monitors and exposes the CRT/DEI/Woke agenda in the Dept. of Defense and advocates a return to Merit, Equality and Integrity in the military.
Join our Mailing List for our weekly newsletter on this issue.
Follow STARRS:
X (Twitter) | Facebook | LinkedIn | Rumble | Truth | Gettr | Gab
Support the Mission: Make a tax-deductible donation
Our next speaker is Timothy Sandeifer. Now, do not hold this against him, but he's a lawyer, and you know what a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean are? Do you know what they are? No, no, a good start. You knew that, you just didn't want to say it. And I only say that with love, because this guy is a lawyer, but he's doing it for good things Advocate for free speech. He has written more books than I have read, so he's prolific in his writing. He's doing the country a service by advocating. If anybody advocates for free speech, that's a major victory for us. Okay, and he does so many other things. But why should I tell you when Timothy Sandefur can, timothy, if you would please, thank you, sir.
Timothy Sandefur:Well, thank you very much for having me. I've been asked to talk about one of my great heroes, Ffrederick Douglass. I wrote a book about Douglass and I brought some copies with me and I put them out on the table out there and, rather than charge you for them, I thought I'd just give them away. I didn't bring enough for everybody, I don't think so everybody rush out during the break and grab one, and if you like what you read and you're interested in the kind of work that I and my colleagues do at the Goldwater Institute, I'd ask that you consider dropping us a few dollars. We work based on the. We survive off the money that's donated to us by people who agree with the work that we do, unlike, for example, public sector unions which operate from money stolen out of the paychecks, against their will, of public employees. But, in any event, that's a topic for another day. I wanted to talk to you about Douglass and what he teaches us about the world today. Douglass is a fascinating figure and he's one of the giants of American history, but the reason that he's of interest to this audience is because he stands as such a refutation to many of the claims that have been made in recent years about the nature of the United States. It's become very fashionable in the past decade or so to regard America as a fundamentally racist nation, a country steeped in white supremacy, in which black Americans and members of other minority groups are systematically repressed and exploited. The New York Times 1619 project claims that the Constitution of the United States was written to protect slavery, and popular writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates claimed that white supremacy and racial hatred lie at the heart of American political life. And yet in Douglass we find a black man, a fugitive from slavery, who rejected such ideas and who insisted, not out of mindless patriotism or sloganeering, that the United States is out of mindless patriotism or sloganeering, that the United States is fundamentally about equality, not racism, and that black Americans should cherish their American citizenship. It is impossible to regard Douglass as naive or as a fool. So how can we reconcile his view of the American political order with the claims of the critical race theorists? Well, the answer, obviously, is that we can't. And to appreciate why we should start with his famous life story.
Timothy Sandefur:Douglass was born to an enslaved mother and a father he never met in 1818. He grew up on a plantation in Maryland and in the Baltimore home of some relatives of his owner. He learned to read by fooling white children in the neighborhood into teaching him, and then began secretly reading anti-slavery pamphlets. Eventually, when he became a teenager, he grew so angry about being enslaved that his owner decided to teach him a lesson and sent him to live with a man named Edward Covey, who was a famous slave breaker. He ran a torture facility that was designed to destroy people's independence and render them into abject servants. So Covey beat Douglass every week for any reason or no reason. He hid in the bushes to attack him out of nowhere, all to instill in him this sense of hopeless terror and to try and destroy Douglas's capacity to dream of a better life. And at first it worked. But then, on one hot August day, douglas decided that he would not surrender. He fainted from heat stroke on that day and Covey beat him for it with a wooden club, and Douglas begged his owner to intervene, but he refused. So Douglas resolved to fight back. The next time Covey attacked him, he grabbed the man around the throat and held on. They struggled for hours until Covey stumbled off, mumbling, and he never beat Douglas again.
Timothy Sandefur:Douglas learned from this incident a crucial principle, he who would be free must himself strike the blow. Striking that blow rather than surrendering, believing in himself enough to stand up. That was the crucial lesson, and Douglass refused to accept the hopeless, helpless, dreamless life of a brute Quote. Next to the dignity of being a free man is the dignity of striving to be free. I detest the slaveholder and almost equally detest a contented slave. They are both enemies to freedom. One of the saddest facts connected with organized and settled oppression is that it deadens the sensibility of its victims. It acts upon the oppressed like certain deadly poisons upon animal life which lull to sleep before dissolving the body in death. Now, you all know that story or, if you don't, you can read it in my book or preferably in Douglas's own books. But I tell it now because I want to talk about the lessons Douglas teaches us about idealism and cynicism, about pride and surrender, about the American dream and about that deadly poison that lulls to sleep, a helpless, hopeless, dreamless sleep.
Timothy Sandefur:Let me begin with a part of Douglass' life that's often neglected his place in the history of anti-slavery political thought. We often think of abolitionism as a single movement, but in fact the enemies of slavery were a diverse bunch and their internal disagreements shaped an important chapter in Douglass' life. When he escaped from slavery in 1838, he moved to Massachusetts where he joined up with one wing of the abolitionist movement, a wing led by William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison was a brave and uncompromising man, a feminist, a pacifist and an anarchist. He and his friends had essentially founded abolitionism in 1831, when they reacted against what was then the only existing school of anti-slavery thought, known as colonialism.
Timothy Sandefur:Colonialism held that slavery should be ended gradually and former slaves or their children should be sent to colonies in Africa or Central America. And this was considered a respectable form of anti-slavery thinking among whites, but it was anathema to Garrison. Gradual emancipation meant leaving the slaves in chains for life, and sending freed slaves to Africa was irrational and unjust. Most enslaved Americans had never even been there. Most of their parents and Americans had never even been there. Most of their parents and grandparents had never even been there.
Timothy Sandefur:Garrison rejected colonization and insisted on abolitionism, which meant the immediate, uncompensated freeing of the slaves, with no colonization. But he went further. Garrison also thought that the United States Constitution was an evil document because it protected slavery. He called it a deal with the devil and burned the Constitution. During his July 4th speeches he adopted the motto no union with slaveholders, by which he meant that northern states should secede from the union in order to have nothing more to do with slavery. Because he was a pacifist, he did not call for slave uprisings, but instead for persuading masters to free their slaves, and he argued that abolitionists should refuse to participate in politics. They should not vote or run for office, because that only lent credibility to a political system that was morally corrupt. Nothing short of the total overthrow of the government would do Now.
Timothy Sandefur:When Douglass joined Garrison's group at the age of 21, he followed the party line. The Constitution was a pro-slavery document. American politics was hopelessly corrupt. Abolitionists should remain outside the political system, but he eventually came to question that theory. In the 1840s, after he visited Europe, he moved to Rochester, new York, and there he began consorting with a different branch of the abolitionist movement, the New York wing that was led by a philanthropist named Jarrett Smith. Smith differed dramatically from Garrison. He thought the Constitution was not a pro-slavery document but was, in its principles, anti-slavery, or at least that it gave the federal government power to restrict or abolish slavery if elected officials were willing to do so. Smith believed in political participation and sponsored the Liberty Party, america's first anti-slavery political party.
Timothy Sandefur:Within a few years, douglass became persuaded that the Constitution is anti-slavery Fundamentally. The words slave and slavery do not appear in it. He observed Even the oblique references to slavery found in the Constitution the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause and so forth could be interpreted in ways that avoided protecting slavery, and other provisions of the Constitution most notably the privileges and immunities clause of Article 4, positively contradicted slavery. In fact, douglass argued that slaves were actually American citizens. Certainly nothing in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence said otherwise. Black Americans had been part of the all men whom the Declaration says are all are created equal. They were among the people of the United States referred to in the Constitution's preamble. Nothing in the Constitution deprived them of that status. So to reduce them to slavery without due process of law was unconstitutional.
Timothy Sandefur:Now, obviously, the pro-slavery lawyers argued the reverse. The Constitution was only meant for white Americans. Its references to slavery amounted to permanent guarantees. The Declaration's statement that all men are created equal was not intended to refer to non-whites. It really meant all white men are created equal, and so forth. In their eyes, the idea of black people being citizens was absurd.
Timothy Sandefur:Now, what's remarkable about this is that the Garrisonian abolitionists shared this pro-slavery view. They agreed that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document. That's why they called it evil. The Constitution, said one Garrisonian, is and always has been a sham, an imposter, an instrument of oppression unsurpassed in the criminal history of the world. When the Supreme Court decided in the Dred Scott case that black Americans could never be citizens and that the Constitution aimed to protect slavery forever, douglas pointed out that the judges were just saying what the Garrisonians believed. What really united the Garrisonians with their pro-slavery enemies was their shared view that the Founding Fathers could never really have meant what their words said and that it was unrealistic to imagine that they ever expected the country to be anything other than a land for whites only. They thought Douglass's pro-constitution abolition theory was utopian, pie-in-the-sky, wishful thinking, unrealistic, merely a dream.
Timothy Sandefur:Douglass asserted that dream wholeheartedly, both as a theoretical and a practical matter. He pored over the history of the Constitution and concluded that Americans had quote allowed themselves to be ruinously imposed upon by those who said it was pro-slavery. In fact, it contained neither warrant, license nor sanction for slavery. Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, he said, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. America's founders had despised slavery and hoped that it would die from economic weakness or that their children would sicken of it. But by the 1830s, southerners were trying to rewrite history to justify what was never intended a permanent slave nation. Now, as a matter of history, douglass was right, but there was a practical dimension to this too.
Timothy Sandefur:Consider the immense progress made between 1855 and 1875 through political engagement, progress that would never have been made if the nation had followed Garrison's anti-constitution rule. Only political activism by people like Doug Douglas and Jarrett Smith and many others, whose names you've probably never heard, made any progress toward ending slavery, and their greatest triumph was the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which vindicated pro-Constitution abolitionism forever. That story teaches us a vital lesson about America today, a lesson about viewing our Constitution not just as a legal document but also as an aspirational commitment, because that is what the Constitution is not a morally neutral machine for making legislation. It's a promise, as all law is, promises grounded on moral propositions, and therefore it is as much about how our nation ought to be as it is about what it is.
Timothy Sandefur:In Douglass' opinion, the Garrisonians' anti-Constitution theory shared a false and even nihilistic premise with the old colonization theory. Both assumed that the American nation is fundamentally committed to white supremacy. Colonizationists could not imagine black men and women sharing the continent with them, and those who viewed the Constitution as pro-slavery could not imagine its protections for freedom applying to all races. So these two doctrines of racial separation were really the same old serpent. That said, the Constitution and the Declaration don't really mean what they say. This land is only for whites. But the colonization theory and the anti-constitution theory would, in Douglass' words, make black Americans despondent and doubtful where they should feel assured and confident, and would force upon them the idea that they are forever doomed to be strangers and sojourners in the land of their birth and that they have no permanent abiding place here.
Timothy Sandefur:Frederick Douglass had more reason than most people to oppose any doctrine of racial separation. He was half white himself and late in life he married a white woman. He believed that white and black Americans share a destiny, a common inheritance in the libertarian principles of the Declaration and the Constitution, regardless of our racial ancestry. Have we not a right here, douglas asked? We have been with you in adversity and, by the help of God, we will be with you in prosperity. We are American citizens. Citizenship meant more than a legal status to Douglas. It meant a conviction of the truth, of the principles of liberty. Black Americans had proven that conviction a thousandfold, had earned their citizenship through toil, suffering, patience and courage and should be proud of it. They should never let it be taken away or, god forbid, be fooled into giving it up. That may be the most important lesson Douglass teaches us today, and it's a lesson about brotherhood and what it means to be an American. That makes it hard to hear in today's environment of contempt and even despair, that despair is merely an echo of the nihilism that Douglass detected in colonization and anti constitutionalism Then and now that despair tells black Americans that this nation and its principles are not for them and never were.
Timothy Sandefur:It has become fashionable in recent years to claim that the United States is fundamentally racist and that the Constitution was written to secure white supremacy and to assert that nothing but a total overhaul of American institutions can hope to remedy its inherent evil. One of the most outspoken advocates of this idea today is Ta-Nehisi Coates, the anti-Frederick Douglas, who, in 2015, in his book Between the World and Me, made the argument that the American dream is a lie. Coates argues that the dream is a mirage designed to fool non-whites into believing that America is something other than a land of oppression. The dream appears in Coates' writing only as perversity, as a target of scorn and contempt, as just another fraud to be smirked at by those of us worldly enough to know that only rubes fall for it. No, not even so jocularly as that. The dream in Coates' writing is a massive white machine that gorges itself on black bodies in order to gather strength to gorge itself once more.
Timothy Sandefur:White supremacy, coates writes, remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country's political life, and the American dream is quote concocted by Americans to justify themselves. Coates' nihilism is truly boundless. There are times when he seems to say the opposite, as when he quotes Abraham Lincoln approvingly, but he goes on to say that quote Americans believe in the reality of race as a defined, indestructible feature of the natural world, and racism inevitably follows from this unalterable condition. Racism lies at the very root of the national consciousness of white Americans. Whiteness, as Coates understands it and which he sees everywhere, whiteness not the color of people's skin or the content of their minds, but the entire evanescent and omnipresent thing of American culture simply is racism. We are captured, brother, he writes, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America.
Timothy Sandefur:That, of course, was not what Frederick Douglass thought. Douglass, who actually was captured more than once, was the greatest of all articulators of the dream, at least until Martin Luther King. He spent two decades in slavery. He had better reason than any American today to call the American dream a lie, but he did not. He declared my mission is to plead the cause of the colored millions of our countrymen and to hasten the day when the principles of liberty and humanity expressed by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States shall be the law and the practice of every section and of all of the people of this great country, without regard to race, sex, color or religion.
Timothy Sandefur:I would not emphasize this so heavily today if it weren't that Coates' nihilism has become such a common feature of public discourse. Many people today see his cynicism as the realistic way to view the United States. A few years ago, the New York Times ran an article flatly declaring quote the American dream is one of the most enduring myths in this country and one of the most prominent falsehoods when it comes to black Americans. Now, of course, cynicism always tries to market itself as realistic, but in most cases, and certainly in this case, it is not. Consider Coates writes, quote America is literally unimaginable without plundered labor, shackled to plundered land, without the organizing principle of whiteness as citizenship. End quote this is untrue in every respect.
Timothy Sandefur:First, it is possible to imagine America without slavery. Many people throughout history did precisely that. They did more than imagine it. They made it a reality or, if you prefer, brought it closer to reality than it was before. They did the imagining. One might assume that every enslaved black American in the two and a half centuries before emancipation imagined it, and after them others imagined an America that was free of racial oppression and acted to make it a reality In the silent parade, in the bus, boycotts, in the freedom summer. We have a name for their act of imagining we call it the dream.
Timothy Sandefur:If Coates chooses not to share that dream, why not? It certainly is not on account of realism. Realism would force him to acknowledge that there is at the heart of America's founding documents, a set of principles that frame an abiding dream, a compelling vision of a better world that has led people in the United States, time and time again, to lay down their lives for a freer, more just country, to free the slaves, to end Jim Crow, to make real a principle of brotherhood by which countless Americans now find it literally unimaginable that there ever was a world in which such things were ever considered possible. What most Americans today find unimaginable is the racism that their own grandfathers took for granted, and what has made that unimaginable is the dream. I would go further.
Timothy Sandefur:Not only is America imaginable without slavery, but slavery has been a feature of nearly every human society in the history of the world. And yet in those societies, what was unimaginable was the principle that all men are created equal. What was unimaginable was the idea that everyone, everywhere, is entitled to liberty. What people in other nations could not imagine was integration, emancipation and liberation. The reality is that America is literally unimaginable without the end of slavery. It is not remarkable that America had slavery, which is an ancient and ubiquitous institution vastly more common in history than, say, monogamy. Literacy, architecture, christianity are passing fads by comparison with slavery. The wonder, rather, is that the end of slavery in this country came as a necessary consequence of her fundamental creed. What is impossible to imagine is America without the principle of equality, the core of the Declaration of Independence, which Douglass called the ring bolt of the chain of our nation's destiny. Without that, america would not be America. She would be like every other country rocks and trees and people connected by ethnicity rather than principle. This is what Lincoln meant when he said that the electric cord that binds us together is not race, but the principles of the Declaration, which make each of us blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the revolutionary fathers. These are the things that we celebrate on Memorial Day, july 4th and Juneteenth, because they are essential. They make the dream, they are what America is unimaginable without. In this connection, I cannot refrain from telling a personal story.
Timothy Sandefur:I was in Washington DC on July 4th 2000. I sat on the Capitol steps to watch Ray Charles sing America the Beautiful. I could barely hear him because the fireworks were so loud and I didn't like that, and the massive people made the evening less fun. But as I walked back to my apartment I saw something that stuck with me forever In an empty lot, an SUV, and in front of it a father, a black man, was lighting off some little fireworks that he had brought with him and inside, pressed against the driver's side window, were two little children, their shining faces overwhelmed with guileless joy. Utterly pure, that is my real memory of that day.
Timothy Sandefur:Now I wonder what were these three Americans celebrating? Were they ignorant of the history of racism in this country? Did they not know about slavery and segregation? Were they fools, walking about in a delusion from which Coates has liberated himself? Or could it be that they know that story well enough and that in their veins runs the blood of enslaved Americans and freedmen, and the brave black soldiers who fought in the Union Army and the Selma marchers and the freedom riders, and the black businessmen and scholars and artists and soldiers and scientists who labor every day knowing that this country is theirs? Could it be that they were celebrating their country? Could it be that they know that what cannot be imagined is America without the dream?
Timothy Sandefur:I suspect that these people, if they were tourists, came to Washington in part to visit the spot on the Lincoln Memorial where a black man gave voice to the dream so profoundly, so truly and so eloquently that when you say the dream to nearly any American today, he thinks not of James Treslow Adams, the author who first used the phrase American dream, but Martin Luther King. I suspect that these people came not to repudiate but to claim the dream, not to concede, as Coates does, that America and slavery are inseparable, which is an idea the foulest racist in the land would applaud with conviction. But instead they came, as they had a right to do, to assert the dream. Now you can call that foolish, but it's not unrealistic, it's not a delusion. To maintain that it is a delusion is to say that this family and millions like them are also deluded. It would also mean that Frederick Douglass was deluded, and that doesn't seem realistic to me.
Timothy Sandefur:Coates' contempt for the dream leads me to ask in all candor what are we as individuals or a nation if we surrender our commitment to principle, which is what we mean when we speak of our dreams? Without dreams, are we not just poor, bare-forked creatures? Aren't we just doomed to repeat the crimes of past ages? Where there is no vision, the people perish. A land without a dream is only dirt. A creature that does not dream is only a conjuries of bones and tissues. A person who can dream and chooses not to has surrendered the one thing that can never be taken away by any jailer. Why does the caged bird sing? Because it dreams of freedom. What comes of a dream deferred? It festers like a sore and then runs. But a dreamless man can either sing nor run. He can only be a body, a thing acted upon by others. A racist may be deluded by thinking he's biologically superior, but a dreamless man is even more deluded because he thinks he's awake.
Timothy Sandefur:I've gone on like this because I think that one of the gravest threats to freedom in our country today is the growth of cynical abandonment, hopelessness, helplessness and dreamlessness. The idea that our constitutional promises of fraud and our progress has been a lie, particularly among minority groups who today feel increasingly isolated, and understandably so. The idea that one has no place in our society and consequently nothing to lose by giving it up can be fatal. Despair is a deadly poison. Indeed, frederick Douglass saw not only that American ideals are fundamentally just, but that those ideas are the only realistic ones. In the long run, nothing is settled. That is not right, he said. And nihilism, far from being rational, is in reality debilitating, paralyzing, or it can invite pointless violence. The person who truly sees no difference between being alive or dead has taken the most dangerous step towards suicide. That's why nihilism so often leads to tyranny, as Douglass himself warned.
Timothy Sandefur:Quote if human nature is totally depraved, if the character of this government will inevitably be the expression of this universal and innate depravity, then we should abandon our republican government, cease to elect men to office and place ourselves squarely under some potentate who governs by divine right. Cynicism about race relations is simply not warranted by the facts. It is not realistic. Black Americans are freer, wealthier, happier, better educated, healthier and safer today than they were 30 years ago. In fact, they're better off in nearly all these categories than whites were 30 years ago. Obviously, racism remains and much work must still be done to undo its awful legacies. But the idea that the American dream is a fraud, or that white supremacy is at the heart of American politics, or that we can protect American culture by excluding those who seek it, dishonors people like Douglass, who fought to vindicate the American dream. These ideas are lies and if they are left unchallenged, they will lull this nation into sleep before dissolving it in death.
Timothy Sandefur:Frederick Douglass refused to believe that Americans were destined to be enemies. He embraced the only valid form of American exceptionalism, that our constitutional principles are what make us and would make any other people exceptional, and he teaches that a nation that is in a sense consecrated to a dream, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, can only thrive by being true to those convictions. It cannot endure as alienated groups who insist that the Declaration doesn't mean what it says or that its principles are just a social construct that are no more valid than any other society's principles. Douglas's whole life was a war against prejudice, cynicism and surrender. No man was ever lost who seriously thought himself worth saving, he said, and the same is equally true of a great nation.
Timothy Sandefur:The goal of the slave breaker Covey was to eradicate Douglas's capacity to believe in a better world, and he would not accept that. The goal of the colonizationists was to destroy the belief that America is a land for all races. He would not accept that the goal of the anti-constitutionalists was to elevate their own moral purity over the hard work of making a better world, and he would not accept that. And the goal of today's sophisticated realistic nihilists, right and left, is to demolish the idea of the American dream, to persuade us that progress has been an illusion, that our constitution is a racist document, that America is in spirit a fraud and in substance a wasteland of walls and hatreds, that its slogans about freedom are lies and Americans are really enemies, but these are all poisons that lull to sleep before they kill, and Douglass rejected them.
Timothy Sandefur:There is no Negro problem, he said. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough honor, enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own constitution. That constitution is under assault again today, and again we must heed Douglass's lesson. We must have enough pride in ourselves to refuse to surrender our convictions to those who call them unrealistic, and we must strive to make those convictions a reality for those still sitting in darkness. Next to the dignity of being a free man is the dignity of striving to be free. Well, how lucky are we then that we have both. Well, I am loathe to close. We Americans are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Although 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 union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. Thank you.