By: Paul S. Marchand
Independence Day is a paradox. For all of our civic piety and our nostalgic talk about our revolutionary heritage, it’s easy to forget that the Revolution we celebrate began as something rather different than what it became. In the words of novelist Ernest K. Gann, we started out, as it were, looking to purchase a hot air balloon and returned home with a helicopter.
Our Revolution did not begin as a great struggle to bring forth “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Instead, it began as essentially a series of conservative, localist protests against new and unacceptable centralizing tendencies emanating from London and from the Imperial Parliament.
The American rebels of 1775 were not nearly so interested in casting off the shackles of the British Empire as they were in preserving intact existing political dispensations under which they had enjoyed significant degrees of autonomy and home rule, and which they felt were being invaded in every sense of that word by an overreaching Imperial Parliament. Their revolt was about maintaining the lucrative and congenial status quo to which they and their ancestors have become accustomed.
It would take much blood and anguish for the relatively conservative rebels of 1775 to become the nation-builders of 1776, who dared to articulate in the Declaration of Independence some of the most soaring political ideals ever committed to paper or adopted as national founding principles. There is an unbridgeable gulf between polite remonstrances to King and Parliament and the blunt, uncompromising language of the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...”
What a paradox, then, that a group of relatively conservative, well-off, white men of property and influence, should have produced one of the most revolutionary documents in history, not even excepting the Communist Manifesto.
From these words Abraham Lincoln drew inspiration for the opening lines of his immortal address at Gettysburg:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure.”
For it was given to Abraham Lincoln to link, with awesome compassion and insight, the expressed ideals of our national foundation with the great Union-saving purpose of the Civil War, and to articulate, in barely three minutes, not merely the high moral purpose of saving the Union, but also of placing into context the value of the vicarious self-sacrifice offered by the Union boys in blue who laid what Lincoln would later describe in his unforgettable letter to Mrs. Bixby as “so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”
The near-coincidence of the 237th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, and the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, a little more than 100 miles distant, is, candidly, somewhat unfortunate.
Over the last few days, we have seen what can only be described as a somewhat distasteful orgy of re-enactment, reminiscence, and revisionist history about one of the most sanguinary battles ever joined on the North American continent.
The battlefield at Gettysburg has been swarmed by regiments of re-enactors engaged in do-overs of the 20th Maine, Buford’s shadowing of the rebel cavalry, or George Pickett’s idiotic frontal charge into emplaced Union artillery and pre-prepared firing positions. While there may be, as noted japanologist Ivan Morris once put it, a certain “nobility of failure,” it does seem a little feckless to raise George Pickett’s military incompetence to the level of an event worthy of reenactment.
Perhaps more troubling about the reminiscences of Gettysburg in 150 is the extent to which such reminiscence has engendered or reflected something of a fashion for neo-Confederate thinking. In recent years, we have seen the gains of the Civil War steadily chipped away by both the Republican Party and a Supreme Court that, by handing down nakedly partisan decisions, has managed to fritter away much of the worldwide moral authority it once possessed. When an Egyptian or Russian interlocutor can declare with some degree of justice that our high court is just as much the servant of political factions or ideologies as comparable tribunals along the Nile or in the Kremlin, we ought to know that something is wrong.
Certainly, the creeping cancer of neo-Confederatism has metastasized its way through much of the American body politic. The revisionist romanticization of the so-called Lost Cause has certainly given impetus to right-wing efforts to repeal the civil rights advances of the second half of the 20th century. When the Supreme Court of the United States gutted the Voting Rights Act, right-wing legislators in former Confederate states such as North Carolina and Texas rushed to enact restrictive voting laws aimed squarely at African-American voters. Jim Crow, as Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau has so trenchantly noted, is back.
Moreover, in other former Confederate states, such as Virginia, Republican legislators and educators have tried diligently in recent years to try to burnish the tarnished image of the Confederacy, and to sugarcoat the ugly realities of the Peculiar Institution. (“Slavery wasn’t that bad, the Negroes liked being slaves.”)
Against such cancerous, treasonable, neo-Confederatism, patriotic Americans should take a clear, bright-line, hard-line position.
These are not easy words to say for someone raised after the Southern way, and educated in the South. For certainly, there is much to be appreciated about the Southern way of life, about the premium it places on manners, about its sense of itself, about its understanding of its place in time, and about all the other little douceurs that contribute to life below the Mason-Dixon line. As that great Southern storyteller Pat Conroy has observed, there is something “magnificently fey” about the Southern character.
And indeed, much of the Southern character, and much of the South’s sense of itself as a distinct regional society, has depended upon the South’s willing, even desperate, embrace of the myth of the so-called Lost Cause, a myth as powerful below the Mason-Dixon line as the Pilgrim/Plymouth Rock myth is throughout the rest of the country, even if Pilgrim/Plymouth Rock myth is nothing more than a triumphalist Yankee narrative.
But if the Yankee narrative is a triumphal, largely nationwide narrative, there is a reason. When the South willfully took itself out of the Union in order to preserve, protect, and defend the Peculiar Institution of chattel slavery, it forfeited any moral justification it had for its cause. The Confederate cause suffered at its inception from an original sin which doomed it to inevitable defeat, an original sin which consisted in a searing rejection of the most basic American ideal of equality, and equally in a ringing proclamation that all men were in fact not equal, but that some were fated on account of their color to be held in perpetual bondage.
Having nailed their colors to the mast of slavery, the men of affairs who called the Confederacy into existence condemned their enterprise to inevitable failure in a western world that had increasingly adopted a moral consensus that slavery could not be reconciled with the evolving liberal values of western society. And so was that the Civil War the South so incontinently inflicted upon the nation continued until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil was sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash was paid by another drawn with the sword. And indeed "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
By deliberately trying to break the union over the issue of slavery, Southerners also consciously rejected the very evolving 19th-century liberal values that have been so instrumental in forming the values of our own time. Indeed, Southern political thought has often tended to embrace conservatism, and indeed what Pat Conroy referred to as “conservatism of a particularly fevered strain.” Yet, the historical record is full of clear and convincing evidence that bodies politic which deny the possibility that values may evolve, or which deny the place of liberalism in society, inevitably doom themselves to falling behind and being overtaken by bodies politic which are more prepared and more willing to embrace ineluctable change.
A society that cannot acknowledge the first-class citizenship within the commonwealth of women, people of color, queerfolk, and the disabled and the poor, among others, is a society that inevitably find itself at a disadvantage. Yet, when we look at those parts of American society that display the greatest degree of resistance to acknowledging the first-class citizenship of women, people of color, queerfolk, and the disabled and the poor, among others, the South always seems to be at the top of that unhappy list. The states of the old Confederacy seem unwilling or unable to liberate themselves from their allegiance to a dispensation which proclaims absolutely and exclusively the primacy of straight white, wealthy males.
It is as if for nearly 150 years since General Lee went to see General Grant at Appomattox to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia a militant and unreconstructed Confederate tendency has been working behind the scenes to undo the effects and incidents the victory of the Union, and to restore --- if not fully, then very substantially --- the political, sexual, racial, and social dispensations of the antebellum South.
Those are not the dispensations of modern America; these are not the dispensations a majority of the American people find acceptable.
It is one thing for the South to have a view of itself as being a unique regional society within the United States. It is quite another for irreconcilable neo-Confederates to want to undo a century and a half of progress in civil rights. And because my commitment to an America in which “all men are created equal” far exceeds whatever little sympathy I might have for the Southern way of life, I take a hard-line position against essentially neo-Confederate efforts to roll back the civil rights clock.
It’s simply not acceptable to romanticize the so-called Lost Cause on this 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. It’s simply not acceptable to equate gray with blue, or to apotheosize rebel leaders like Jefferson Davis (though I’m still willing to cut Marse Robert Lee some small amount of slack). As patriotic Americans, we have a moral responsibility to take a hard line against such militant neo-Confederate tendencies.
On this Independence Day, on the 150th anniversary of the aftermath of Gettysburg, we should cast our minds forward to November 19, the 150th anniversary of President Lincoln’s address at the dedication of the national cemetery there.
As a corrective to revisionist neo-Confederate thinking, and as a reminder that the nation Lincoln called the “last best hope of earth” is worth defending against all enemies foreign and domestic, the Gettysburg Address merits verbatim repetition:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that
nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate— we can not consecrate —we can not hallow— this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us— that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom —and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
In the end, to the extent that we remember Gettysburg on this 150th anniversary of that great struggle, let us honor the Union dead, and be thankful to a merciful Providence for the success of their efforts.
God save the United States.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices and Cathedral City, California. Among his ancestors are both Billy Yank and Johnny Reb, including the Danes brothers who fought in the Ohio volunteer infantry. In his closet hang both blue and gray suits, but he is still a Union man in every sense of the word. The views expressed herein are his own, and are not intended to constitute legal advice, and should not be so construed.
