The original Republican platform was adopted June 18, 1856, being the first political party in history to have the abolition of slavery in its official party platform: "This Convention of Delegates ... are opposed to ... the extension of Slavery into Free Territory ... We deny the authority of Congress ... to give legal existence to slavery ... It is both the right and the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy, and Slavery."
" ... that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government OF the PEOPLE, BY the PEOPLE, FOR the PEOPLE, shall not perish from the earth."
The same day, September 13, 1862, Union Private Barton W. Mitchell was drinking coffee and inadvertently noticed three cigars on the ground wrapped with a piece of paper. The paper was a copy of Lee's Special Orders No. 191 addressed to Confederate General D.H. Hill revealing his plan to divide the Confederate Army.
The President of the United Nations' General Assembly, 13th Session, was Lebanese diplomat Charles Habib Malik, who helped Eleanor Roosevelt and others write the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Malik stated in 1958: "Whatever these honored men think, the irrefutable truth is that the soul of America is at its best and highest, Christian."
