deepundergroundpoetry.com
LINCOLN WAS RIGHT
After walking along Tuggle Road for a couple of miles,
I needed a place
to sit, to relieve the burning soles of my feet.
I found a ground hugging red sports car to lean on while eating some food.
A light skinned woman, daughter of the pastor who lived there, chastised my impertinence.
I took her words as prophetic of female hegemony
sure to come upon the world and galaxy.
Yes, it did my heart some good to see and hear - to witness - her display.
Then I offered her a riddle:
In the Gettysburg Address Lincoln said that the Union armies must win,
otherwise democracy might "perish from the earth."
But if the South had won,
the North still would have retained their democracy.
And the South would have kept theirs, also.
So where does Lincoln get off, claiming democracy might "perish from the earth"??
Any thinking person can see that the democracy
Lincoln was envisioning had not yet come to the earth
- interracial democracy !!
And if the Confederacy had won,
it might NEVER have arrived !!
Only the Union victory allowed our multiracial democracy to take form - to blossom.
Lincoln was right !! The world desperately desperately NEEDED the North to win.
And a loving, merciful God granted our prayers !!
Good triumphed over evil.
And so in 2065 we will celebrate 200 years since the glorious Northern victory !!
But it was the South's victory also, especially so !!
For it freed the South from the burden of the curse of slavery !!
I needed a place
to sit, to relieve the burning soles of my feet.
I found a ground hugging red sports car to lean on while eating some food.
A light skinned woman, daughter of the pastor who lived there, chastised my impertinence.
I took her words as prophetic of female hegemony
sure to come upon the world and galaxy.
Yes, it did my heart some good to see and hear - to witness - her display.
Then I offered her a riddle:
In the Gettysburg Address Lincoln said that the Union armies must win,
otherwise democracy might "perish from the earth."
But if the South had won,
the North still would have retained their democracy.
And the South would have kept theirs, also.
So where does Lincoln get off, claiming democracy might "perish from the earth"??
Any thinking person can see that the democracy
Lincoln was envisioning had not yet come to the earth
- interracial democracy !!
And if the Confederacy had won,
it might NEVER have arrived !!
Only the Union victory allowed our multiracial democracy to take form - to blossom.
Lincoln was right !! The world desperately desperately NEEDED the North to win.
And a loving, merciful God granted our prayers !!
Good triumphed over evil.
And so in 2065 we will celebrate 200 years since the glorious Northern victory !!
But it was the South's victory also, especially so !!
For it freed the South from the burden of the curse of slavery !!
Published 12th Sep 2023
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Most of us in UK believed it righteous to back the North, even at the expense of us sustaining a trade recession during that time known as the Lancashire Cotton Famine when the ceasing of cotton imports from the South caused widespread unemployment among the textile industry in NW England.
4th Nov 2023 8:42pm
Solomon thanx. I hadn't realized that the blockade of the South by the Union navy had resulted in an economic depression in England. The lack of cotton from the American South meant workers in Britain were not needed, and so weren't paid. And when the war was over the South wanted to revive trade with Britain. But by that time Britain was getting cotton from Egypt etc. So the South suffered even after the fighting was over !! Thanx for telling me about the Lancaster famine !!
My ancestors on my paternal grandmother's side settled from Ulster in Lancashire in the 19th century and the same grandfather could remember the depression of the 1930s so I grew up with an awareness of that side of England though I have never lived in it (my family having since moved south nearer the Wales border).
