LETTER To The PRESIDENT of The UNITED STATES
Legacy, Lincoln, and Constitutional Completion
Mr. President,
History does not remember presidents by their popularity, but by whether they finished the moral work entrusted to them.
Abraham Lincoln began that work when he transformed a constitutional crisis into a moral reckoning.
He declared that the Union could not endure half-slave and half-free, and he paid for that declaration with his life before the work could be completed.
You have stated that you seek to be greater than Lincoln—not in rhetoric, but in completion.
That completion now rests in the faithful enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment.
These were not immigration instruments. They were war measures—crafted to secure the freedom, citizenship, and constitutional inheritance of a specific people: the formerly enslaved American Africans and their descendants.
For six decades, an administrative custom has twisted that inheritance into a presumed citizenship for illegal aliens, steadily eroding the standing of those for whom the Amendment was written. This is not merely an economic crisis. It is a constitutional and moral one.
Seven hundred and fifty thousand Union soldiers—including thirty-eight thousand American Africans—did not perish to create a substitute nation within the nation. Nor did they fight so that federal law could be displaced by local custom.
The Emancipation Proclamation still speaks. It orders every succeeding President and military commander to recognize and maintain the freedom of the liberated—and to refrain from repressing their lawful efforts toward actual freedom.
By restoring the original meaning of birthright citizenship, enforcing federal law over sanctuary defiance, and protecting the inheritance of America’s first federalized citizens, you do more than secure borders.
You secure the Union.
Respectfully,
Ted Hayes
Citizen of the Union
Advocate for Constitutional Completion