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Lincoln’s New Party, Anti-Irish and Anti-Slavery
An excerpt from “Lincoln and the Irish: The Untold Story of How the Irish Helped Abraham Lincoln Save the Union,” by Irish America publisher, Niall O’Dowd. March 1861 inaugural at the Capitol building. The dome above the rotunda was still under construction. Photograph shows participants and crowd
at the first inauguration of President Abraham Lincoln, at the U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C. Lincoln is standing under the wood canopy, at the front,
midway between the left and center posts. His face is in shadow but the white shirt front is visible. (Wik-pedia/Library of Congress. Author unknown.)
Abraham Lincoln told the following story, when beseeched by job-seekers in Washington:
An eccentric old king was so much bothered by bad weather, that he hired a prophet to prophesy the royal weather for him. One day, as the king was dressing for an important engagement, he asked the weather prophet what the weather would be like.
“It will be a bright, clear night,” predicted the prophet.
The king, following the advice of his prophet, put on a light suit and left his umbrella in the palace closet as he started off. On the road he chanced to meet an old farmer riding a jackass, holding an umbrella over his head.
Andrew Sullivan on the War Within Conservatism and Why It Matters to All of Us
Credit.Nicolás Ortega
By Andrew Sullivan
CONSERVATISM
By Edmund Fawcett
From its very origins in resistance to revolutionary movements in the late 18th century, conservatism has had two broad contrasting moods. The first is an attachment to the world as it is, and a resistance to too drastic a change in anything. The second is an attachment to what once was and a radical desire to overturn the present in order to restore the past. Some have attempted to distinguish these two responses by defining conservatism as the more moderate version and reactionism as the more virulent. But Edmund Fawcett, in “Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition,” a truly magisterial survey of the thought and actions of conservatives in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, insists more interestingly that they are both part of conservatism in its different moods.