Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Seventh Grader's Winning DAR Essay Entitle 'Father Abraham'

AMBER ALYSSA PICKETT

SEVENTH GRADE

Father Abraham

I would be a good listener if I could only hear the United States Capitol tell some of the important events that happened there in the nineteenth century. If I could climb the three hundred and sixty-five steps to the entry while viewing the magnificent dome atop the five hundred and forty rooms, I would then like to ascend to the second floor, which holds the chambers of the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as many congressional leadership offices.

In the center of this floor is the rotunda, a circular ceremonial space that also serves as a gallery of painting and sculptures depicting significant people and events in the nation's history. The Rotunda is about ten feet in diameter and rises 180 feet to the canopy.

Moving on to the third floor would give access to galleries from which visitors to the Capitol are allowed to watch the proceeding of the House and Senate when Congress is in session.

I would walk over to one of the 658 windows and look westward across the Capitol Reflecting Pool to the Washington Monument, which is approximately one and a half miles away. Then my eyes could capture a splendid view of the Lincoln Memorial a little more than two miles away.

As I fix my gaze on this monument established in memory of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), one of the truly great men of all time, it seems I could hear the walls of the Capitol resounding some of his words of wisdom that have been handed down from generation to generation. I think I would hear a gentle, but positive voice say as he did so long ago, "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We ... will be remember in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the last generation."

I think one of the major events occurring during the time that Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States was the Civil War.

It began at four o'clock in the morning on April 12, 1861, in Charleston, South Carolina.

There was a sudden flash, a red glow, and a roar of a bursting bomb. This attack, which started the Civil War, was at Fort Sumter and did not come from the sea, as they had often expected enemy fire, but from the land. Even more strange, the guns that were fired did not belong to foreign enemies, but to Americans. This was a war of Americans, who had, less than five months before, set up an independent nation, the Confederate States of America.

Abraham Lincoln had only been President for a month when he gave the orders to hold, occupy, and possess all Federal property in Confederate territory. The South was prepared to fight for independence and the North was determined to preserve the Union. The result was a country divided and a war that lasted four years, and cost hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars. It destroyed one of the two American ways of life forever and brought great changes to the other.

The Civil War ended as it had begun, in a kind of mystery. No one could say exactly why it had come about in the first place; no one could quite say what it meant now that it was finished.

Of all men, Abe Lincoln probably came the closest to understanding the meaning of the war, yet he confessed that something happened that could not be put into words.

I hear the Capitol walls whispering the words that he spoke after the Civil War. He asked for "malice toward none" and "charity for all." He implored the people "to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan  to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace..."

As I continue to gaze from my lofty height to the Lincoln Memorial I am saddened when I think of another major event of the same century, the untimely death of President Lincoln by assassination.It happened while he was attending a play called Our American Cousin at the Ford Theatre in Washington, D.C. It was just after ten o'clock on the night of April 14, 1865, just a little over a month after his second inauguration.

A shot rang out in the crowded theatre. John Wilkes Booth, one of the best-known actors of that day, had shot the President in the head from behind the presidential box.

President Lincoln was carried, unconscious, to a neighboring house, where he died at 7:22 o'clock the next morning.

After his death, even his enemies praised his kindly spirit and selflessness. Millions of people called him Father Abraham.' They grieved as they would have grieved at the loss of a father.

The music strains  telling me the celebration is beginning for our Capitol's 200th birthday.