Last week Americans remembered the beginning of the Civil War
and the assassination of President Lincoln … the first
assassination of an American president. The Civil War began 150
years ago in 1861, and Lincoln was shot four years later. It
seems to me the Civil War was nearly unavoidable, given the
Founding Fathers’ inability or motivation to address the issue
of slavery in the nation’s beginning. Civilized nations could
not understand our willingness to define one human being as
another’s “property”. There’s been discussion of “states’
rights” as the true reason for that great conflict, but it was a
matter of states’ rights to declare themselves “slave states” or
“free states”. The bleeding began here in Kansas several years
before the start of the war, as the debate over slavery
escalated to killings. 150 years later our nation has resolved
the issue of people as “property” and guaranteed freedom for
all. But race is still a big part of our society, and we never
seem to conclude our discussion of it. Our