Abraham Lincoln (as portrayed by Kevin Wood), America’s President during the Civil War, will march in Elmhurst’s 101st Annual Memorial Day Parade through downtown Elmhurst on Monday, May 27, at 9:30 a.m. and then speak at the Post-Parade Military Ceremony at the Veterans’ Memorial in Wilder Park at 11 a.m.
One of our nation’s most beloved and esteemed historical figures, President Lincoln led our nation through its darkest days—when brother fought against brother—and the fabric of our “more perfect Union” was nearly torn asunder.
President Lincoln rose from the obscurity of growing up in the western frontier in Kentucky and Indiana to become a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, and then an American statesman who would become the 16th President of the United States from March of 1861 until his April 1865 assassination by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre while attending the play Our American Cousin.
From the 1862 Emancipation Proclamation to abolish slavery to his quintessential Gettysburg Address in 1863, President Lincoln cherished the ideals for which our republic stands: liberty and freedom, democracy, equality and opportunity.
Using only 272 words scribbled down while on a train ride to commemorate a battlefield cemetery following a significant Union victory, his three-minute Gettysburg Address defied President Lincoln’s prognostication that “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.”
President Lincoln stated that our great nation was born in 1776 when “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” assuring the future of democracy in the world.
His letter to Mrs. Bixby, who lost five sons on the Union side during the Civil War, includes the following: “I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.”