COMMENTARY: Reflecting on ‘better angels’

Dec. 1, 2022  |  By Kathi Tarrant 

President Abraham Lincoln popularized the phrase “better angels” for Americans in his first Inaugural Address as an effort to disguise the polarization of public conversation. In the end, it was Lincoln who used the phrase so beautifully on March 4, 1861, on the eve of the Civil War:

“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Like a lawyer speaking to a jury, Lincoln suggests that separation would make the nation’s current problems worse, not better. A few years later, Vermonters found themselves standing between “us” and our “better angels” when the Council of Censors – caretakers of the state constitution – was abolished in 1870.

By 1913, our state constitution was set aside and replaced by corrupt public officials. The document was to become a private commercial corporate charter. In short, our lawful state of Vermont was overthrown. 

A mention: the Federal Reserve was also established that same year.

Along with several other states through emergency legislative sessions in 1933-1935, Vermont entered into the collective bankruptcy of the private “commercial corporation” known as the STATE OF VERMONT, and has been in a state of continued bankruptcy ever since. Henceforth, the document offered on the de facto State of Vermont government website is NOT our lawful constitution. 

In practical terms, Lincoln’s speech was a failure in nearly every aspect, because it failed to provide positive evidence that “better angels” were either individual people or supernatural beings. Instead, as William Shakespeare would attest, “two spirits” that are both from me “would corrupt my saint to be a devil.”  

For Lincoln, the “better angels of our nature” are those civic and patriotic qualities, shaped by shared memory, that permit us, even in times of national fracturing, to “swell the chorus of the Union.” In recollecting our shared history with his inaugural speech, Lincoln desired both north and south to “profess to be content in the Union, if all constitutional rights can be maintained.” 

So, given the Vermont Constitution is a shim-sham show, the recent vote re: Article 22 could be a Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.

Waterbury resident, musician and teacher Kathi Tarrant was a candidate for the Washington-Chittenden Vermont House district in the Nov. 8 election.