July 12 · This Day in America
Eighteen months into the Civil War, with the dead piling up at numbers no one had imagined, Abraham Lincoln signs a bill creating the Army Medal of Honor. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts had brought it forward. The law is plain about who it's for: it will be presented, in the name of Congress, to the noncommissioned officers and privates who most distinguish themselves by their gallantry in action. Not the generals. The young country had no aristocracy and wanted none — so the first decoration it created for valor was reserved, deliberately, for the men with no rank to protect them. It would become the highest military honor the United States bestows. From the start, it was meant to look down into the ranks and find the bravest face there.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1817
In the town where the Revolution's first shots were fired, a boy is born who will go to the woods on purpose. Thoreau builds a small house at Walden Pond, lives there two years, and writes a book about wanting to live deliberately. His essay on civil disobedience — refusing to fund an unjust government — will later move Gandhi and King. One quiet man, arguing that conscience outranks the state, kept changing the world long after he left it.
Source: www.walden.org
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854