Monday Morning Music Ministry

6-31-13 / 4th of July, 2013

The Fourth of July is as close as the United States has to a secular holy day. Considering that actual holy days rapidly are becoming secularized, July 4th deserves our attention, more than mere celebrations. The days around July 4th are when the rebellious representatives of the American colonies put their names (“and fortunes, and sacred honor”) to a revolutionary declaration that continues to stir hearts around the world. The days around July 4th are when the ragtag Rough Riders, on the heights above Santiago, Cuba, fought through withering gunfire on open ground and captured Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill, effectively sealing the land operations of the enemy in the Spanish-American War.

And the days preceding July 4th – three long, bloody, momentous days – are when the Army of Virginia’s invasion of the North was repulsed in the streets, wooded hills, and fields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. There, and in faraway Vicksburg, Mississippi, which surrendered to the US Army’s forces of Gen. Grant on the 4th itself, the outcome of the Civil War largely was sealed. Hundreds of thousands of deaths still lay ahead, but the dreamers and the fearful in the North and South alike generally apprehended the outcome.

The coincidence of significant national events around July 4th is just that, a coincidence. But modern holidays are observed too often as artificial consolidations for vacationers and retailers. The Declaration of Independence, the impromptu heroism and success represented by the Spanish-American War, and the salvation of the Union – and the hundreds of noble impulses and human dramas that hover, as benign angels, over Gettysburg’s fields – are well worthy of our contemplation today.

“Revisionist” history has become a cottage industry of late. Napoleon defined history as “lies agreed upon” by succeeding generations. To challenge conventional wisdom is seldom a bad thing, even when Revisionists have points of view to advance. But the exercise – that is, a society’s discussions and considerations of new viewpoints – is beneficial only so far as solid facts underlay. People are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.

So it becomes a disgrace when bad history, or, worse, “no” history replaces the proper sense of heritage in a culture. We read polls today that large percentages of American youth do not know why the colonies sought independence; who major presidents were; why important wars were fought. I am afraid (in the context of a pop-culture society, which we are) that more teenagers know Lincoln as a vampire slayer than as the central character of another movie, “Lincoln.”

Recent events persuade me that we might be engaged in another civil war, or its opening stages. And it is hard to answer, or resist, or overcome, when you have no sense of self, in a civic context. How can we know who we are and where we are when we don’t know how we arrived here?

But among the things we do know – or should know – is that a nation was founded on a set of noble ideals, dedicated over and over again to God, and was established in various places and by people of different backgrounds with a common, burning devotion to liberty. Or, to be precise, an UNcommon devotion… unique in human history. Among the anomalies the founders knew would have to be solved, never assuming it would be easy, was the institution of slavery. When the time came, men – and their wives and children – took a collective breath and prosecuted a grinding, nightmarish, burdensome conflict. A somewhat bloodier reflection, Lincoln was wont to wonder, of slavery itself: perhaps national penance for its sin.

Past the fratricide and carnage, a century and a half later, we still are astonished by the bravery and nobility and sacrifice and endurance and faith of those soldiers.

Theodore Roosevelt said, when he visited Gettysburg: “As long as this Republic endures or its history is known, so long shall the memory of the Battle of Gettysburg likewise endure and be known; and as long as the English tongue is understood, so long shall Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech thrill the hearts of mankind.”

Every American should know this by heart:

“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.

“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.”

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Julia Ward Howe, a poetess, met President Lincoln in the White House in November, 1861. That night, as a guest at the nearby Willard Hotel, she responded to requests to write new words to the popular song “John Brown’s Body Lies A-Moldering in the Grave.” It was an incitement to fight the Confederacy, but Mrs Howe took it a step further, writing the immortal Battle Hymn of the Republic to its tune. Ironically, Mrs Howe’s life-long crusades included abolitionism, women’s suffrage… and pacifism. But she knew that some battles were proper to fight. This amazing video clip is of Judy Collins performing before tens of thousands of citizens on the National Mall 30 years ago, with the US Army Band Soldiers’ Chorus, and the Harlem Boys Choir. Significantly, Judy sings some little-known verses – reminding us that this is a Christian hymn, not just a battle song.

Click: Battle Hymn Of the Republic