Live from the Log Cabin: Via [Sidney Blumenthal], Honest Abe had some choice words for today's Republicans who claim that "religious liberty" means "the right of bosses to make their customers and their employees follow their religion":
Sidney Blumenthal: "Throughout the war, Copperheads, the Northern Peace Democrats, and Confederates...
...flung the word “liberty” at him as the tyrannical ruler of an authoritarian government. Lincoln rebutted them in a series of speeches in 1863 and 1864 whose most memorable was the Gettysburg Address. He finally defined “liberty” directly in a speech on April 18, 1864, amidst his reelection campaign. This was the fully developed Lincoln in control of his powers cutting to the heart of the matter:
The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor....
The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty. Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty...
