America survives
The Fourth of July isn’t only the day the Declaration of Independence was printed 241 years ago, heralding years of armed rebellion and centuries of internal struggle to attain its ideals of equality and self-rule.
It’s also the day that, 50 years later, two of the nation’s original political enemies turned geriatric pen pals, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both expired — the latter having wondered, “Is it the Fourth?” and the former reportedly muttering mysteriously (and mistakenly), “Thomas Jefferson survives.”
And it’s the day that, four score and seven years later, Ulysses S. Grant retook the Mississippi for the Union at Vicksburg, and Robert E. Lee’s dread invading army, barely defeated, began a retreat from Pennsylvania — a turning point but far from the end of a bloody national expiation of original sin.
The presidential address on that great battlefield could fit within about 10 tweets, and secessionist sentiment still abounds this Independence Day. But our current leader has much less in common with Lincoln than with his regrettable predecessor, James Buchanan.
President Trump’s speech marking the holiday weekend in Washington dwelled on tribal divisions and cast his opponents as “fake” journalists rather than real voters. “But I’m president,” he added, “and they’re not.”
This year, in other words, it’s up to all the non-presidents of the United States to recall what still holds an unlikely nation together instead of what might tear it apart — to appreciate hardwon progress rather than, as Mayor Mitch Landrieu put it recently after ordering New Orleans’ Lee monument at long last removed, “rewrite history to hide the truth.”
On July 3, 1776, Adams acknowledged “the toil, and blood, and treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this declaration . ... Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of light and glory; I can see that the end is more than worth all the means.” He hoped the occasion would inspire “bonfires and illuminations, from one end of the continent to the other,” and for an improbably long time, it has. It is the Fourth, and America survives.