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A Republic, If You Can Keep It

On April 14th, 1865, in the Mary Surratt Boarding House in Washington, D.C., less than 15 miles from Ford’s Theatre, John Wilkes Booth met behind closed doors with Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt. Soon to leave his residency in the White House for Ford’s Theatre was the first Republican President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was serving his second term as the nation’s president, but behind closed doors, Booth and his conspirators had decided that they knew better than the electorate, and set plans in place to override the nation’s decision.

The behavior shown by those corrupt individuals in 1865 would become commonplace in Washington D.C. As those men assassinated Lincoln, many closed-door meetings would follow, with corrupt men plotting the assassination of America, against her very own will. It is said when walking out of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin famously responded to an individual inquiring to the form of our newly constructed government with “A Republic, if you can keep it!” From that time, the hearts of men have continuously done their best to destroy the lifeblood of America for their own, personal gain.

Unfortunately, we find those same meetings, meant to ignore the will of the people, happening in our hometown, within Lincoln’s party. Metcalfe County isn’t Washington D.C. The evil of men that finds a home in D.C. will not do so here. No one man should determine a candidate in Lincoln’s party, nor ten men convened in a closed-door meeting unannounced to the electorate. Just men escaping tyranny wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights….that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the CONSENT of the governed.” Lincoln’s party and its officials should hold themselves to that standard, or see the people alter or abolish it, to institute a new party.

TJ Morgan

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