By Michael Tyler, EJS Poet-in-Residence
I spent the week leading up to the semiquincentennial of our country’s independence, reading several essays, editorials, and social media posts about what our nation has become and who we are as a people. Most articles struck me as political postmortems and social autopsies, reflecting the current mood of the nation. But there were also cultural compositions about the traits that are recognizably and sensorially American — the cuisine, fashion, literature, crafts, and arts that define and embody what is red, white, and blue true about us in the domestic mind and the international perception.
Amongst my readings were lists ranking America’s most quintessential songs. Tunes like A Change Is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke, Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy by The Andrews Sisters, Natural Woman by Aretha Franklin, Over the Rainbow by Judy Garland, and What’s Goin’ On by Marvin Gaye made many lists. More patriotic choices like America the Beautiful by Ray Charles, Born in the USA by Bruce Springsteen, Fanfare for the Common Man by Aaron Copland, and The Star Spangled Banner by Whitney Houston were more uniformly cited. One song appeared on every list and was often ranked in first or second place: This Land Is Your Land by Arlo Guthrie. It is lauded for the geographical tour of the nation described in its lyrics, as well for being an apolitical anthem with no historical shadows cast on its patriotic sentiment, by the nation’s origin story.
This prompted me to think about what songs I would select for such a list. Three came to mind immediately. They are more poignant and sobering than what might feel celebratory and commemorative of the occasion: American Tune by Kurt Elling, Seriously by Leslie Odom, and Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday.
My selections are linked to a ritual I began in 2017, prior to the first Fourth of July celebrated during a Trump presidency. It was then that I began annually reading the July 5, 1852 address by Frederick Douglass titled, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” After my most recent reading of it, a thought occurred to me, one I have never speculated before and now at times wish I never had. More accurately, it is a question: Who really won the Civil War?
I thought of this because Douglass made his address nine years before the start of the war. I juxtaposed that historical fact against the reality of how uncivil our politics has become. Before the war, citizens wondered if the union would survive. Today, as we recognize 250 years of existence, many wonder if our democracy will.
The question of who won the war, on its face, might seem to be the absurd musing of a person with too much idle time. For generations, history books and historians have indisputably noted that the Union army prevailed against the Confederate army in April 1865. President Abraham Lincoln, General Ulysses S. Grant, and the Northern states defeated Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee, and the Southern states to preserve the continuity of the nation. So, why the question? For the first time after reading the Douglass address, I thought about the Pyrrhic scale that weighs the difference between winning the battle but losing the war. For me, the imbalance I saw in the scale was more than vacillating semantics.
The Civil War began in 1861 over the issue of slavery. Whether one considers this from the perspective of the expansion of bondage into the Western territories, or states having the prevailing right of absolute authority over their laws, or the atrocious inhumanity of subjugation serving as the economic engine of the nation, the contentious issue that caused neighboring states to turn arms against each other remains, essentially, slavery.
Though the Civil War was fought over slavery, it was never fought on behalf of the slaves. In fact, in 1862, Lincoln wrote the following in a letter to Horace Greely, the abolitionist and editor of the New York Tribune:
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”
Furthermore, Lincoln and many of his fellow Republicans, Thaddeus Stevens aside, didn’t believe that Black slaves were humans who were equal to White Americans. The President and his fellow party members were not truly, in their souls, humanitarian and egalitarian. Though they shared a moral abhorrence of slavery, their greater mutual concern was the existential crisis of the nation. Lincoln and the Republicans had an intense fear that a divided nation would be more vulnerable to a European menace and an eventual foreign takeover. They saw it as a blood in the soil imperative to do everything to preserve the American experiment of democracy, for the sake of ensuring the country’s autonomy.
Lincoln’s indifference to slavery, as expressed to Greely, was underscored in the aftermath of the war. The vast majority of Confederate citizens, military personnel and political leaders were never punished or jailed by his Administration for the act of seditious insurrection, nor for the numerous war crimes and atrocities committed during the war. And though estimates are that former slave owners endured a loss $3-$4 billion dollars by 1865 valuation — $70-$100 billion in today’s dollars, for the loss of their “human property”, after the passage of the 13th Amendment, comparative estimates are that 410 billion unpaid work hours were extracted from slaves between 1619 and 1865, which represents a stolen wealth that estimates at $14-$19 trillion in today’s valuation. That’s just a starting point of consideration for reparations.
Why am I writing about this at all? What does it have to do with the 250th commemoration of this nation’s independence? And how is it germane to my question about who really won the Civil War? Back to Frederick Douglass:
“I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independency only reveals the immeasurable difference between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. The Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
Despite the fact that Douglass uttered those words contextualized by the reality that slavery stridently demarcated the disparity of his time, his words, their sentiment and meaning, are still felt by many citizens today. What he said later in his speech, that which bore the title of the address, further punctuated his overture with timeless relevance:
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”
When I read that passage days ago, I reworded the opening question to ask, “What, to an American, is our Fourth of July?” Answering that, it was clear to me that the words Douglass spoke in his address 174 years ago still have forensic merit long after the Civil War has ended and the Reconstruction era has failed; well beyond the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcom X and Martin Luther King; extending past the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first African American president, the deaths of Emmet Till and George Floyd, the emergence of a fascist regime and the resurgence of White Supremacy.
That forensic merit is rooted in what it evaluates, what I see as the uneven balance of the Pyrrhic scale I mentioned earlier. It was the antecedent patriots who fought and won the battle of the American Revolution, for the right to self-rule against the imperial claim of a foreign power. They were the prototype Americans who adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776 at the Continental Congress. Moreover, it was the armies of the North who fought and won the battle of the Civil War, for the preservation of our federation of states. These were battles for autonomy and continuity. These battles have resolved what they were fought for, but a greater threat still looms as the greatest enemy to our sovereignty and our unity.
The war we are still battling, the one still claiming lives and killing the idealism embedded in the principles of our charters is the blight of hate, in all of its manifesting -isms of bigotry, phobia, discrimination, marginalization, and oppression. Facing this reality, I have to view the Declaration of Independence for what it is not and was never intended to be — a document for universal equality, unbiased justice, unconditional application of inalienable rights, and the unfettered pursuit of life, liberty and happiness for every American citizen. Consequently, the Fourth of July can’t be seen by me as a day that reflects that “all men (women, LGBTQIA, immigrants, and non-Christian adherents) are created equal.” That is the defining phrase of the Declaration of Independence.
The war to manifest it is a holiday still to come. This is a great truth we must reconcile as we consider the state of the nation on the occasion of this anniversary. And as we ponder what the Fourth of July means, I implore that we become more collective, courageous and committed to fighting that war to perfect our Union. I still believe that anything wrong about America can be corrected by everything right about Americans. We can’t just laud our battles if we are to ever truthfully sing, “This land was made for you and me.”
The word count of the essay is 1776, acknowledging the event it is written about.