paper retracts "silly remark" comment, 150 years later

[DrLeftover]

November 15, 2013, 9:15 p.m.

NEW YORK — Four score and 70 years ago, a Pennsylvania newspaper chided Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address as "silly remarks."

This week, in time for the speech's 150th anniversary, Harrisburg's Patriot-News apologized for "a judgment so flawed, so tainted by hubris, so lacking in the perspective history would bring, that it cannot remain unaddressed in our archives."

With that, the newspaper's editorial board issued an unusual media mea culpa that has captured national attention despite its tongue-in-cheek approach.

It read in part: "Our predecessors, perhaps under the influence of partisanship, or of strong drink, as was common in the profession at the time, called President Lincoln's words 'silly remarks,' deserving 'a veil of oblivion,' apparently believing it an indifferent and altogether ordinary message, unremarkable in eloquence and uninspiring in its brevity."

"Just think: The speech, the exact words of it, are still looked at, thought about and dissected," said Michele Hamill, a conservator at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where one of five copies of Lincoln's handwritten speech is on display through Nov. 23 in commemoration of its delivery Nov. 19, 1863.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-1116-gettysburg-apology-20131116,0,4987697.story#axzz2kpfFnw5c

 

[Nebulous's iconNebulous]

What do you think about that Doc?

 

[DrLeftover]

At the time, many newspapers were run by "Peace Democrats", also called "Copperheads" who wanted peace at all costs, including the cost of allowing Slavery to exist in the South. To them, Lincoln was the embodiment of everything evil in the world.

They believed that some things just were not worth fighting a war over.

In another thread, you will see the same argument being made by somebody who believes along the same lines.