Presidential Inauguration

The library will be hosting a large screen viewing via internet connection of the Presidential Inauguration and Inaugural Address, open to any interested member of the public, in the community room at the north end of the library on Tuesday January 20th.

For any who might wish to have a broader historical perspective on the event, the American Presidency Project offers a complete collection of all presidential inauguration addresses in print and, where available video or audio formats. (The earliest video available is that for the John F. Kennedy inauguration. The earliest audio is for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inauguration.)

For details on Tuesday’s inauguration see CNN’s report or the official Presidential Inauguration website.

John Quincy Adams on the Civil War

In the aftermath of the Missouri Compromise, four full decades before South Carolina seceded from the Union and initiated the great conflagration of the American Civil War, John Quincy Adams penned these prescient words in his diary on November 29, 1820:

“If slavery be the destined sword of the hand of the destroying angel which is to sever the ties of this Union, the same sword will cut in sunder the bonds of slavery itself. A dissolution of the Union for the cause of slavery would be followed by a servile war in the slave-holding States, combined with a war between the two severed portions of the Union. It seems to me that its result might be the extirpation of slavery from this whole continent; and, calamitous and desolating as this course of events in its progress must be, so glorious would be its final issue, that, as God shall judge me, I dare not say that it is not to be desired.”

What remarkable perspicacity – and how very far we have come.