Abraham Lincoln On Preserving Our Freedom

Floor Speech

Abraham Lincoln On Preserving Our Freedom

Ms. FOXX. Madam Speaker, in the ongoing debate over health care reform, the topic of freedom is often overlooked, but it ought not be. The Democrats' health care bill is a massive expansion of government that will alter the lives and livelihoods of every person in America. For many, that means higher taxes; and for even more, it will mean an unprecedented intrusion of Federal Government bureaucrats into the way we receive health care. This is a fundamental erosion of our freedom.

The great freedom fighter, Abraham Lincoln, gave a speech in Springfield, Illinois, in 1838 where he touched on the idea of the loss of freedom. He was very explicit. He explained that our country could one day suffer a loss of freedom, not by an outside attack but from within. I will quote what Lincoln said and then give it in its larger context:
``At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer: If it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.''

The larger context of those words is as follows:

``In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account running, under date of the 19th century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the Earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them. They are a legacy bequeathed us by a once hardy, brave and patriotic but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Theirs was the task, and nobly they performed it, to possess themselves and, through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; 'tis ours only to transmit these--the former, unprofaned--by the foot of an invader; the latter, undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation, to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.

``How then shall we perform it? At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the Earth, our own excepted, in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

``At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer: If it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.''

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