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Correction of errors.

The South fought for the enjoyment of independence in a separate Union, and lost. But God's truths cannot go down in a human fight. Facts are indestructible. The States, the citizens thereof, the Constitution, its words and meanings, the public records, the ratifications of the States that gave to the Constitution all its life and validity-all these are facts that lived through the fighting unchanged. No thoughtful person of eminence ever considered them involved in the ‘Lost Cause,’ or affected by the result of the war. ‘After fighting,’ said Lincoln, ‘you must meet and settle; our Federal amendments measure the change that was made. They did not change the polity.’

Common sense, then, shows that a separate Union was the cause the South lost, and that bringing the States back to the written Constitution, was the cause the North won.

I, therefore, in correcting some errors, deal with the Constitution, its establishment, its history, and its meaning, as facts. The task is to state and describe, not to interpret or construe.

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Abraham Lincoln (1)
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