Originally aired on July 05, 1996 - In part 97 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson says that during the upcoming Independence Day celebration, we should remember that both North and South fought for freedom. Each side defined freedom in its own ways. However, to look back now and condemn either side borders on hypocrisy.
#97 – Independence Day Celebrations
In the annual observance of Independence Day, two maxims deserve a bit of contemplation.
One is the fact that freedom has always been the principal American dreams. Settlers came west in the 1660s in search of it; English colonists in the 1770s fought for it; and America since has continually attempted to plant it in every diseased corner of the world.
Secondly, it is natural for each generation to interpret history in the light of its own experiences. Yet as every history graduate student quickly learns, one cannot look at the past through the lenses of the present. Conditions of today bear little resemblance and only guarded relevance to the events of yesteryear. Attempting to place past and present under the same analytical umbrella is intellectually absurd.
George Washington was a traitor in the eyes of the British government but not to his fellow colonists. Robert E. Lee’s 1861 decision to cast his lot with the land of his birth (Virginia) hardly sounds treacherous, but it does to a handful of people. Abraham Lincoln’s supposed usurpation of federal power was treasonable to Southerners and conservatives but necessary in the eyes of Union supporters of the Civil War. Obviously, patriotism to some is not patriotism to others.
An associated point to keep in mind is that the American nation of the 1990s was nonexistent in the 1860s. Yes, the Founding Fathers had created a so-called “United States”; they had given it a constitution, start-up laws, and a capital. What the young republic did not have was an arterial system. The oneness of nationhood was in name, not in fact. The situation was untenable to the point where, beginning in the late 1860, a majority of citizens in 11 of the 34 states saw nothing wrong in electing to make a peaceful departure from an experiment in government that gave every appearance of having failed.
Interesting it is that when North and South drew battle lines a few months later, citizens on both sides sang the same song with the same high emotions:
Our fathers’ God, to thee
Author of liberty
To thee we sing
Long may our land be bright
With freedom’s holy light
Protect us by thy might
Great God, our king.
Therein lies one of the deepest tragedies in American history. In the 1860s, both sides were fighting for the same thing: freedom, with each side defining freedom in its own and differing ways. To look back now and condemn either side borders on hypocrisy and certainly smacks of a smugness born of hind sighted vision. One does not remake the past; one learns from it. Further, those who would forget what lies behind will surely meet it again in what lies ahead.
The country that Mr. Lincoln termed “the last great hope of earth” flourishes now as a result of a terrible civil war that dissolved the final bonds of divisiveness. We are one nation, one people, because generations before us blazed the way and paid dearly for it. To those who came before us, we owe much. Their successes, as well as their failures, are our beacons for the future. That is why, on this holiday in particular, we ought at least to pause long enough to look at the flag and contemplate the stormy but blessed evolution through which the nation has passed.
Abraham Lincoln had little time for emotion in his presidential years. However, the thoughts embodied in a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow could move him to tears because the sentiments were timeless. In 1848 Longfellow wrote:
Thou too sail on, O Ship of State
Sail on, O Union, strong and great
Humanity with all its fears
With all the hopes of future years
Is hanging, breathless, on thy fate.
