So I have been asked what I thought of the Inauguration and by some who have not liked my answers when asked political questions before. So remember you asked.
Abraham Lincoln’s Law partner William Herndon used to supply Lincoln with books an phamplets that he read voraciously. Herndon said, “I brought with me additional sermons and lectures of Theodore Parker, who was warm in his commendation of Lincoln. One of these was a lecture on ‘The Effect of Slavery on the American People’ … which I gave to Lincoln, who read and returned it. He liked especially the following expression, which he marked with a pencil, and which he in substance afterwards used in his Gettysburg Address: ‘Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.”
Lincoln would modify that expression in the Gettysburg Address. He would say, “that these dead shall not have died in vain– that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”.
Remember you asked – my thoughts on the inauguration was that it was a celebration of government, by the government, for the government. We the people need not and indeed were not there because it was too dangerous for us or we were too dangerous for “them”.
