There are some ironies in the statement. There were American battlefields aplenty coming in a few years, and "universal enfranchisement" in 1837 obviously meant something different to Sullivan than it means to me.

Still, there is a lot of really good and inspiring stuff in there. Might be interesting to compare it to Bush's speech on a similar theme.

I have a certain nostalgia for an America that thought nothing was beyond reach of a free people. I look at marvels like the Golden Gate Bridge sometimes, and ponder that fact that we would not be allowed by the environmentalists to build such a thing now.

Nowadays sometimes it seems that we are taught that the role of America is to crawl in front of every child-killing, woman-beating thugocracy in apology for our virtues, and that our nation and its freedoms are the source of everything bad on the planet.