Today is the
primary election in Wisconsin. I can’t – and I won’t – talk politics here or
tell you who you should or shouldn’t vote for. Instead let’s look at a
different presidential election.
It began on
August 21, 1858, in Washington Park in Ottawa, Illinois, when Stephen Douglas
of the Democratic party debated a little known Republican lawyer named Abraham
Lincoln for a Senate seat. The most heated topics of the day were slavery and
state’s rights. Lincoln, as we all know, believed that slavery was wrong and
that as a united nation, all states needed to stand together to abolish it.
Douglas, on the other hand, believed that each state should be allowed to
decide if slavery was right for them. 
Lincoln lost
the Senate seat to Douglas, but two years later he would win the presidential
election. The Civil War broke out immediately afterward and we all know how it
ended. Slavery was brought to an end.
No man has a
right to own any other man. That was the basic premise on which this country
was founded and it was upheld at the cost of many American lives, on both sides
of the issue.
How would
our country’s history have been different if it hadn’t been for Lincoln? If the
northern states hadn’t prevailed in bringing an end to slavery? Are the issues
any different in 2016? Aren’t our freedoms just as important now as they were
in the 1800s?
Just food
for thought. Now get out and vote.
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