A timorous Thanksgiving
This battered republic has survived yet another circuit of Sol. That, despite its best efforts to self-destruct through bad faith, bad policy, and unreasoning fear.
Heather Cox Richardson acknowledges the seven mass shootings in so many days and the over five dozen dead and wounded in what feels like a cold civil war. Indeed, this Thanksgiving holiday grew out of the hostilities that triggered war between the states. That fact gets lost in the gauzy story of Pilgrims and Wampanoags sharing a harvest celebration in 1621:
In 1841 a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slaveholding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.
And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.
Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.
In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion.
The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.
New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”
The next year Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15 he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.
The royalist strain is as persistent in American culture and politics as the paranoid style. Loyalists made up about 20 percent of the population during the Revolution. That figure reflects a similar proportion of those sentiments extant today.
For more than two and a half centuries, these United States have struggled and shed blood to live up to the Declaration and to our nation’s mission statement. The Civil War and the years since make plain that even from the beginning of the republic many of its people signed onto that mission in bad faith. For in their hearts they believed, as Richardson writes, that “some men were better than others” and “that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it.”
“Whenever somebody says it’s time to move on, let’s heal and move on, that’s always a mistake.” — historian Steven Ross
To secure those “blessings” to themselves, many of our countrymen work even now to subvert the Constitution — under cover of law, if possible, in spite of the law if they can get away with it, and by force of arms if all else fails. All while waving the Stars and Stripes and flags of insurrection side by side without irony. Confederates were more forthright about their loyalties.
Richardson concludes:
In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front to create a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.
Here we are, in that struggle still, facing neighbors who for all their red, white and bluster want none of it except as theater they can applaud, stand up, and walk away from.
Rachel Maddow’s Ultra podcast is a chilling reminder that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. That listening to solemn urging to move on and not look back is a grave mistake. Listen. “We don’t have a full understanding of what we’re living through now, if we don’t understand the parallel moments from the past,” historian Nancy Beck Young tells Maddow in the podcast’s final episode.
The U.S. moved on from Reconstruction. Freed black people in the South paid for it with 100 years of Jim Crow. The U.S. moved on from fascist sedition during the Second World War among armed citizens and members of Congress. We are reliving those moments 75 years later because America moved on.
Give thanks today that we made it this far. Once again, what happens next is in our hands.