By Terry Manning
As we near celebrating America’s 250th anniversary, it takes little effort to find people who will say the country is divided “more than ever” or “worse than I’ve ever seen.”
The latter may be true for some, but the former is highly debatable considering we literally had a civil war that threatened to interrupt the greatest experiment with democracy the world has known. (I know, that’s hyperbolic too, but I feel better about the odds of it withstanding scrutiny).
I asked myself, “Did they even celebrate the Fourth during the Civil War?” What I found was encouraging.
Politico published an essay in 2021 by historian Edward Widmer on the first celebration after the beginning of the war. He writes of Washington, D.C.:
“Then, as now, many Americans measured the success of Independence Day by how much noise they could make, a tradition that had grown robust in the nation’s capital,” a city wary of being invaded by marauders from which it would struggle to defend itself.
He contrasts Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. Davis was not much of a public speaker and saw little reason to challenge himself to deliver any kind of holiday oratory to the Confederate states. Lincoln, on the other hand, understood that the right message in the right moment might help ease some of the tensions between the warring factions.
Widmer wrote of Lincoln’s address to a special session of Congress:
“[He] worked for weeks on a carefully written message that restated the country’s highest truths, the way a Fourth of July oration should. He argued that the war was ‘essentially a people’s contest,’ and reminded Americans that democracy required a fundamental trust in others to work. If ‘discontented individuals’ attacked the government every time they lost an election, with false ‘sophisms,’ and other ways of ‘drugging the public mind,’ it would put an end to democracy everywhere.”
Lincoln directly addressed the rationale of state’s rights that was given for the war:
“This relative matter of national power and State rights, as a principle, is no other than the principle of generality and locality. Whatever concerns the whole should be confided to the whole — to the General Government — while whatever concerns only the State should be left exclusively to the State. This is all there is of original principle about it.”
The new president’s message was literally applauded by lawmakers who had come with low expectations of their new president. Newspapers of the day state that spirits were raised across the city.
More than a century and a half later, I am still amazed at Lincoln’s prescience. I don’t need Heather Cox Richardson to connect the dots between Lincoln’s warning of the dangers to democracy when people turn from the ballot box to ammo box when they lose to our current lives post-January 6th.
And the balance between the rights of states and the authority of the government is still being tested by those trying to bend states to their un-American, anti-democratic efforts to make America into a Christofascist nation.
But I digress.
The purpose of my looking into the circumstances of marking the Fourth of July in a time of divisiveness remains to encourage. The right message in the right moment still can be an opportunity to rally our patriotic spirits.
I fear our current president lacks the ability to do that, but a predecessor shared some inspiring words recently.
At the opening of his presidential center, President Barack Obama said, “It is worth remembering just how radical the whole idea of self-government really was back in 1776. To that point, human history was a tale of conquest and caste and rigid hierarchies, a world where the strong dominated the weak, where power and wealth and status flowed through lineage and the many were ruled by the few.”
He added, “In forming our union, the founders fell terribly short of the Declaration [of Independence]’s promise, leaving slavery intact, allowing states to restrict the franchise to white men who owned property, but in drafting a constitution and a bill of rights, they did have the foresight, the genius to provide us with a framework that allows each generation to make our union more perfect.”
And that is what I am going to focus on this weekend. The things that we have in common. The ongoing struggle to be — and do — better.
Terry E. Manning is a Clemson graduate and worked for 20 years as a journalist. He can be reached at teemanning@gmail.com.