The Last Full Measure: 150 Years Later

One hundred and fifty years ago this past week a battle was fought in the Pennsylvania market town of Gettysburg that would become a seminal event within the seminal event of the 19th century – the American Civil War.

The battle was fought on July 1, 2, and 3 when elements of the Confederate and Union armies collided near the village as they were actively looking for each other. Lee had taken his army north for the second time because he couldn’t supply an army confined in a static defensive mode in Northern Virginia. Although his first foray into the north had led to a disastrous battle near Antietam Creek that cost Lee a quarter of his army, he hoped to smash the Union Army on this try. Lincoln, pressed hard by a growing number who were growing tired of the war’s toll, would have to sue for peace if Lee succeeded.

I’ve blogged about the Gettysburg battle in a previous post, most particularly the fighting on July 3, 1863 whose highlight was the infamous “Pickett’s Charge.” The details of the three-day battle are in that blog for all who care to read it.

For all its violence, something about this battle, among all others fought during the war, is mesmerizing. I have been everywhere on the Gettysburg battlefield many times – first as a child with my parents and several times afterward during my college years. As an infant I was scheduled to ride with my great-great-grandfather at Gettysburg in the last reunion of Civil War vets, although he had fought exclusively with General Forrest in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama and was never under Lee’s command. But “Grandpa” Doggett fell ill, missed the reunion, and died the following year.

Twenty-five years have now passed since my last visit when my wife and I spent a full day on the battlefield during the week before the 125th anniversary of the battle. We practically had the park to ourselves as if it had been reserved for a private showing. I “rented” one of the battlefield historians to join us in our car for a tour of the park because I wanted someone with me who knew more than I about what had happened there during those three awful days in July 125 years previously.

The contemporaries of the battle did not intend its story to be lost to the ages. A third of all photographs taken during the war were taken at Gettysburg. Fourteen hundred monuments dot the battlefield landscape to mark where Victorian era men struggled with a bravery that was characteristic of their time to accomplish a purpose that none really understood. History has been kind to some and harsh to others who fought there. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a Professor of Rhetoric and Languages and classmate of Harriett Beecher Stowe, is among those favorably treated by history. With no military training, he commanded the 20th Maine Regiment at Gettysburg and is credited with holding his position on Little Round Top against the fearsome Oates Alabama Regiment. For this feat he was awarded one of the 62 Medals of Honor – a recognition initially created for Gettysburg heroes. Chamberlain would rise from Lt. Colonel to General by war’s end and later become governor of Maine, helped in no small measure by his considerable self-promotion.

One treated harshly by history is Confederate General James Longstreet, who must be counted among the few truly intuitive commanders on either side of the war. Longstreet’s instinct for a battlefield equaled if not exceeded Lee’s, and he and Stonewall Jackson were considered Lee’s ablest lieutenants. Longstreet, however, made the “mistake” of telling Lee that the Union fortress at Gettysburg was unassailable and counseled his commander to move the Confederate Army eastward to get between Washington City and the Meade’s forces. That would compel Meade to abandon the hill fortifications and give Lee the defensive battle he originally sought. Instead, Lee’s answer was Pickett’s disastrous assault against the middle of the Union line, costing Pickett 7,500 men – half of his assault force.

Longstreet was born on a cotton plantation near modern-day Gainesville, Georgia, 40 miles north of Atlanta, although it was then part of South Carolina. He was not, therefore, part of the Virginia aristocracy that peppered the command ranks of the Confederate Army. Joining the Republican Party and serving in the Grant administration after the war contributed to his fall from grace among history’s “Lost Cause” revisionists (mostly Virginians) who charged him with culpable disobedience at Gettysburg and a main factor in the South’s loss of the war.

The Battle of Gettysburg has been labeled the turning point of the war. It was not. Vicksburg fell the day after the battle at Gettysburg ended, giving a rising reputation to its Union victor, General U.S. Grant. Grant would ultimately be called east to face Lee, replacing Meade and solving once and for all Lincoln’s search for a general who would fight.

General William Tecumseh Sherman, who at one time had been Grant’s superior and became his chief lieutenant in the Vicksburg campaign, would take over the Union command in Tennessee where he faced General Braxton Bragg, one of the most incompetent Confederate commanders in the war. In the aftermath of the Confederate victory at Chickamauga, General Nathan Bedford Forrest became so infuriated with Bragg – his boss – and the failure to follow up the enemy escaping toward Chattanooga that he threatened Bragg with death if he ever crossed Forrest’s path again. Jefferson Davis wisely sent Forrest as far away from Chattanooga as possible, where Forrest gave the Union Army as much grief as possible in Mississippi until the end of the war.

The Vicksburg victory released Grant to fight Lee and released Sherman against Bragg, which ultimately led to the fall of Chattanooga, Atlanta, and the March to the Sea – the “war is hell” scorched earth campaign that collapsed resistance in the Deep South. So we see Vicksburg as pivotal as Gettysburg in determining the South’s fate in the war.

It’s true that Lee’s loss of a third of his fighting force in Gettysburg forced him back to Virginia where a shortage of men and supplies would never again allow more aggressive campaigning than defense. But Lee gave as good as he got for the next 22 months in the battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor until he was finally cornered near Appomattox, Virginia in April 1865.

One thing leads to another in life and war, filling both with “what ifs” and “if onlys.” Gettysburg was “a” turning point but not “the” turning point of the war. If the Greeks had lost the battles of Marathon or Salamis to the Persians five centuries before the birth of Christ, the west would be speaking Farsi today instead of their native western languages. If the US Navy had lost the Battle of Midway in June 1942, Americans would likely be speaking Japanese today. It’s unlikely that the US Navy and Marines could have won the decisive Guadalcanal Campaign and their first offensive battle, which started the march toward the Japanese home islands and victory.

The combined Gettysburg losses in killed, wounded, and missing for both sides were about 50,000. Civilians were left to care for the wounded and dying and clean up the carnage left behind. Some wrote a record of what they saw:

… And then, these scenes themselves, who can adequately describe them? Houses demolished, fences destroyed, tall forest trees mowed down like so many stalks of hemp; artillery wagons crushed, broken muskets scattered in every direction, unused cartridges in immense numbers, balls of all kinds, ramrods and bayonets, bits of clothing, belts, gloves, knapsacks, letters in great quantities all lying promiscuously on the field; dead horses in great numbers, some torn almost asunder by cannon balls, some pierced in the side by grape shot, and others with their legs completely shot away; some noble chargers apparently kneeling in death, their necks, crested with flowing manes, gracefully arched, as if still proud of the riders on their backs.

And then many of the human dead, whose mutilated bodies, still unburied, were lying around in all positions. Some with their hands gently folded over on their breasts, others reclining gracefully on their elbows, and others still leaning against trees, stumps or stones, as if wrapped in the arms of sleep, and given over to sweet dreams.

Although given temporary burial after the battle, a permanent cemetery was conceived and constructed as the final resting place for those who died at Gettysburg. Lincoln was invited to make “appropriate remarks” to dedicate the cemetery, not the battlefield as commonly understood. Lincoln was not the keynote speaker for the dedication service, however. Edward Everett, a noted orator of the day, had been chosen for that task. And orate he did – for two hours, for almost 14,000 words.

When he had finished his speech, the ceremony passed to Lincoln, who in less than three minutes and 280 words delivered what has come to be known as the Gettysburg Address:

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 battlefield 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 cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot 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 may 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.

To understand what Lincoln really meant that November day in 1863, his words must be studied. They can’t simply be read. I will not parse its phrases. Indeed, Garry Wills has done a wonderful job of that in his 1992 book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America.

From the very first paragraph, however, Lincoln performs what Wills calls “one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight of hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked.” The concept of the Union of which Lincoln spoke and the one held by the audience was as different as night and day.

If you count back 87 years from 1863, you come to 1776 – the year of the Declaration of Independence. Our fathers did not bring forth a new nation in 1776. They declared independent colonies to be free of British rule – and no more. There was no nation. There were no states. While Rhode Island was the last colony to ratify the Constitution in 1790 and the Bill of Rights was ratified the next year, did a new nation exist at that point? Of course not. As I’ve said many times, the Founders were deeply suspicious of a central government and for a long time refused to support it financially. A representative to the Constitutional Convention or the colonial ratification conventions thought of himself as a Virginia man or a New Hampshire man. No one thought of themselves as an American. Their new Constitution “united” the states in name only.

That the American Civil War was fought to abolish slavery is part of the mythology fobbed today as historical fact. At its core, the war was a clash of two economic systems, one a people-intensive agrarian society and the other a capital-intensive industrial society. There were slaveholders on both sides of this conflict. Four Northern states that didn’t secede from the Union were slave states. Many in the Union officer corps owned slaves or were sympathetic to its institution.

Lincoln’s views on slavery were themselves ambiguous. In 1858 he said, "I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social, and political evil ... and look hopefully to the time when as a wrong it may come to an end." Yet the next year he told a Cincinnati audience, “I now assure you, that I neither ... had, nor have, nor ever had, any purpose in any way of interfering with the institution...[of slavery]." Once the war was underway, he told newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery." His Emancipation Proclamation was not universal. It was directed only to the slaves in the states in rebellion

And there you have it. The subtext of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address was his concept of what union meant. Slavery was not mentioned or inferred. Lincoln believed the United States was an indivisible union that could not be broken by secession. In contrast few, if any, of people in the North or South held that view in 1860. Their views had changed little from those of the Founders regarding the power of central government and the meaning of union.

At the beginning of the war the federal government was small and marginally significant. Lincoln saw a more powerful role for the federal government. Where Lincoln saw absolute indivisibility, the people saw a loose confederation of states. When Lee was offered command of the Union Army, he refused it. Lee saw himself as a Virginia man. His state came first; the Union second. Longstreet was later impugned by the Virginia revisionists because he was not a Virginia man. State loyalties ran strong in the near-century before the war.

There was no small concern in the debates leading up to the final eruption at Ft. Sumter that the sovereignty of southern states could be threatened by an overreaching central government. If Congress exceeded the powers enumerated to it on the slavery issue, what would prevent Congress or the President from consolidating even more power from the states?

And in fact, with the fall of Ft. Sumter, Lincoln blockaded Southern ports – an act of war taken without congressional consent. Lincoln raised an army for a three-year enlistment when the Constitution says only Congress can raise an army. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, declared martial law, arrested civilians for trial by illegal military tribunals, locked up 13 of Maryland’s legislators without trial to prevent their state’s secession, and essentially used the war as an excuse to consolidate presidential power and expand the influence of the federal government.

When Chief Justice Taney protested that Lincoln was going beyond the Constitution in the exercise of federal power, Lincoln ignored him. The Court has no way to enforce itself, relying on the Executive branch to enforce the Court or abide by its rulings. Nixon almost created a constitutional crisis by ignoring a court order to turn over the White House tapes in the Watergate scandal. He waited six days before he compiled. What if he hadn’t?

We’ve recently seen Proposition 8 – the will of the citizens of California to modify their Constitution through a lawful vote – overturned because their Governor and Attorney General refused to defend it against challenges that ultimately were appealed to the Supreme Court. Both the Governor and Attorney General had sworn to uphold the state’s Constitution of which Proposition 8 was a part. What happens when the political leaders of a state refuse to fulfill their responsibilities?

By ignoring Judge Taney, Lincoln was jeopardizing the balance of powers and the federal systems of checks and balances. That was a dangerous precedent.

The Civil War ended with more power invested in the federal government than ever before in the history of the Republic. Lincoln had said he would relinquish it when the war was ended. He didn’t live long enough at war’s end to prove true to his word, but his successor, Andrew Johnson, disassembled the wartime power structure. The Presidents who followed have reconsolidated it.

Today the American people are as divided as they were on the eve of the Civil War. But instead of a president who was fundamentally a uniter in 1860, we have one in 2008 who is fundamentally a divider. His respect for the Constitution is cavalier and his willful attempts to by-pass Congress in governing is standard operating procedure. The vast regulatory machinery he has created is replacing elective government. A bill no longer must run the political gauntlet to become law. It’s simply created by an unelected bureaucrat in the form of a regulation that becomes as binding as any law.

What has been happening in presidential power over the last 75 years should concern us all. In a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887, Lord Acton expressed a warning about the tendency of power to consolidate – ultimately in the hands of one person. It happened in the Roman republic. It is happening in the American republic.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

The President’s Speech

On March 4, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address. Thirty-eight days later he would be dead, felled by an assassin’s bullet.

Although less than 700 words in length, it was a magnificent and charitable speech that has been the subject of several books. It was a speech spoken by a tired and humble man who personally felt the burden of a four-year long war even though he never fired a weapon or witnessed a battle. The personal toll of 600,000 casualties on both sides weighed on him as if he were responsible for them. In a little more than a month, although Lincoln did not know it at the time of his speech, General Lee would surrender at Appomattox, ending the war in the north. But Lincoln knew as he wrote his inaugural address that the South was beaten and the end of the war was only a matter of time.

The Union had been saved. Yet Lincoln’s speech contained no verbal strutting, no uncharitable accusations against the South, no vilification of the vanquished army. To the contrary, the speech said of both North and South,

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully…

As he grappled to give an explanation for the war to his inaugural audience, he recalled the role of slavery as its cause (though not the only cause) for the war.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

While Lincoln considered slavery immoral, he was no abolitionist. The widely misunderstood Emancipation Proclamation, which Lincoln authored, freed no slaves in the border states which were under Union control. Only the slaves residing in the states and counties in rebellion were emancipated, but since the Union Army was not in control of that territory to enforce the Proclamation, no slaves were freed and the edict was largely symbolic.

Normally, the victor in war assumes no responsibility for the war. The loser caused it. What is remarkable about Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address is that it pins the blame for the war on slavery, and to that end, Lincoln believed, the North was as culpable as the South. He argued this point so subtly that it’s often overlooked in his speech.

The North had participated in the slave trade from the founding of this country and only ended its overt practice a few decades before the war. But Northern industrialists created the market demand for Southern cotton (as did abolitionist England), and while the North had discontinued the ownership of slaves, it perpetuated the institution by buying the product of the slave-owning plantations. Thus, Lincoln’ speech harks back to Matthew 18, quoting Jesus verbatim:

“Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.”

The offense came not only from the slave owners but also their enablers – the North. Both should be punished for the woe of slavery and the war was the chastening rod.

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

This is lawyerly argumentation. Lincoln, hoping that four years was sufficient atonement for the sin of slavery, pined that the war would end. But he recognized the long history of slavery in this country – dating it 250 years to the time of the Jamestown Settlement – and reinforcing “the divine attributes which believers in a living God always ascribe to Him” by reaffirming David in Psalm 19 that God’s judgment is fair:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

The measure of the man is revealed in the concluding appeal for reconciliation among North and South:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural is a truly remarkable speech – introspective, free of vainglory, and devoid of corrosive blame.

Obama’s Second Inaugural last week stands in stark contrast to Lincoln’s, although he has strained mightily to create parallels between himself and the 16^th president since his 2008 election. He arrived in 2009 by train for his first swearing in as Lincoln did for his in 1861. Criticized during the 2008 primaries for his inexperience, Obama noted that Lincoln was inexperienced also. He took his second term oath on the Lincoln bible and asked to deliver the first State of the Union of his second term on Lincoln’s birthday. Aides say that he frequently goes to the Lincoln bedroom to look at the handwritten draft of the Gettysburg Address which hangs on the wall there. In an interview he boasted that he keeps a copy of Team of Rivals – Doris Kearns Goodwin’s best seller on the Lincoln cabinet – in the Oval Office.

But there the diaphanous and cosmetic likenesses end. Unlike Lincoln, people would hardly describe Obama as humble, possessed of a charitable spirit, or given to reconciliation. Lincoln was mercilessly criticized and caricatured in ways that could not be publicized today and shrugged it off. Obama once took to task a columnist for mentioning his Dumbo-like ears. His thin-skinned self-absorption is renowned. More than once he has reminded Republicans “I won.” While Lincoln took the initiative to invite critics to the White House to make their case so he could better understand their point of view, Obama ridicules his critics – often while he is negotiating with them. Obama may have come from the Land of Lincoln, but there the similarity stops.

The 2,100-word text of Obama’s Second Inaugural Address is amply posted on the Internet for those who wish to read it. I have neither the space nor inclination to parse it paragraph by paragraph. But, while it is not a particularly good speech – because its abundant platitudes and clichés are distracting – the speech is noteworthy in revealing how Obama intends to govern (or rule) in his final term.

One cannot read the text of the address without being struck by how often Obama directly and indirectly impugns individualism and by inference glorifies government. Note the frequent references to “together” in this part of his address:

We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.

Together we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce, schools and colleges to train our workers. Together we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play. Together we resolve that a great nation must care for the vulnerable and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.

Curiously this follows a reference to the founding documents – the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution – both of which stressed individualism and the latter of which expressly limited the role of government. Rather than partnerships of government and private initiatives which Obama claims built this country, history plainly shows individual and small group achievements engaged in private enterprise largely created it while government is benignly insignificant. The Founders never envisioned American achievements as a duopolistic enterprise between government and private parties.

Obama’s enchantment with government was highlighted in a speech he gave in Roanoke VA last year in which he asserted that nobody could claim credit for their individual achievements because in almost every respect their achievement was made possible by government. The laughable caricature of Julia created by the Obama campaign last year portrays a woman who is dependent on government virtually from cradle to grave – apparently without help from family, friends, church, or society. The hijacking of the US healthcare system, done under the cloak of cost management, was in fact founded on the belief that government can manage a complex enterprise better than free, profit-motivated citizens can – despite the stark contrary examples of the US Postal Service and Amtrak.

Obama continues his collectivistic vision for America:

For we have always understood that when times change, so must we, that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges, that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.

For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future. Or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores.

Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people.

This is Julia on a national scale, a modern-day rehash of Soviet philosophy. “The American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone” … is he kidding? Tell that to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and countless millions of individuals who didn’t need the government or a village to “meet the demands of today’s world.”

The word “than” is meant to introduce a comparative proof. How is American individualism made impotent because American soldiers couldn’t “have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias?” Nor could they have used fly swatters and nunchucks! What kind of logic is this? That we have to do things collectively – implicitly partnering with, if not directed by, activist government – because soldiers can’t fight with obsolete and inadequate weapons? I would have gotten an “F” in logic class for that kind of reasoning.

And look at the sentence beginning, “No single person can train all the math and science teachers,” etc. What a banal argument. Does he really expect someone to show up and say, “Hi, I’m Bill. I’m here to train all of the math and science teachers.”? The issue isn’t how many people are required, the issue is does government do it, manage it, or participate in it. I say no. Obama says yes.

Asked in 2009 if he believed in American exceptionalism, Obama answered "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." Yet early in his speech he states:

What makes us exceptional, what makes us America is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago. We hold these truths to be self-evident …

So, it’s hard to know if Obama believes Americans are exceptional or not because he’s such a master of weasel wording. But apparently, Americans aren’t exceptional enough to take care of their own affairs:

For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing. That while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by his people here on earth.

Self-executing? That’s a term I’d expect to find in a user’s manual. I suspect what Obama meant in the context of his government panegyrics is that God gave the gift but not the means to secure our liberty. For that we need more government. Because of …

… the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall …

This is the fallacy of argumentum ad antiquitatem – because something was done in the past we ought to do it today. This comes hard on the heels of having said above that, “For we have always understood that when times change, so must we.” Does this guy ever read his speeches before delivering them?

Nonetheless, appealing to history Obama veers off into the politics of gender, race, and sexual preference. For that he called up images of the Seneca Falls Convention, the Selma civil rights marches, and the Stonewall Inn riots. While the audience undoubtedly knew about the 1965 Selma marches, I doubt that many knew the meaning of Seneca Falls – an 1848 women’s suffrage meeting in the state of New York – or Stonewall, which I had to Google to learn that it was a gay bar in Greenwich Village. In 1969 Stonewall Inn was regularly raided by the police and arrests were made because it was owned by the mafia and had no liquor license and male prostitution was openly for sale. On one occasion a riot broke out during a raid and continued for several days. The raids ended and were outlawed, and marches for Gay Pride Day throughout the nation are held today to celebrate the Stonewall riots.

While I would hardly call people who participated in events in 1965 and 1969 “our forebears” as Obama does, Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall were seminal events in three social movements whose rights are protected in law today. A fact that Obama conveniently failed to mention is that the suppression of these rights in their day were sanctioned by government – not protected by it. So in using these examples as a rationale for more government to protect the liberty of specific groups is nothing more than pandering.

Like most of his speeches, the inaugural was conspicuous for its straw man arguments and false choices. Here is a sampling:

For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.

But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.

The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few, or the rule of a mob.

We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky or happiness for the few.

We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.

… for our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts.

Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.

We cannot mistake absolutism for principle or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.

I could comment on each of these non-existent injustices, inequities, and forced choices but you get the point. These circumstances exist only in Obama’s quixotic mind. He is the knight-errant in a world of non-functioning windmills. The psychologist Abraham Maslow said, “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” In like manner, if you are selling activist government, you see every social ill as inadequate federal intervention.

After the straw man assertion noted above that “the patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob,” neither of which has ever existed, Obama went on to say:

They gave to us a republic, a government of and by and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.

This is undeniable. It is also undeniable that Obama’s first term is marked with attempts to subvert the “founding creed,” most recently losing an appeals court unanimous decision for unconstitutionally, and therefore illegally, making recess appointments (about which I blogged in January 2012.)  Why should we expect he will “keep safe our founding creed” in his second and final term when the restraint of running for reelection no longer exists? I don’t.

This is germane because, near the end of his speech, he says:

Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time.

I absolutely disagree. A good deal of mischief by the Obama administration and administrations going back to Franklin Roosevelt, if not beyond, is due to the unsettled debate about the role of government, especially the federal government.

Obama admits that the Founders “gave to us a republic, a government of and by and for the people.” Yet this very president ignores of, by, and for the people, forcing them to buy government-specified insurance and forcing organizations and businesses to violate their religious beliefs and pay for procedures and medications that are morally repugnant to them. The Founders would be shocked.

The Obama inaugural speech is peppered with references to citizens and citizenship. He doesn’t understand the meaning of those words. Though he off-handedly states that Americans are exceptional, he is on record for impugning American exceptionalism. A republic that has endured for 225 years, albeit in an increasingly eroded form, is exceptional in the history of the world’s governments. Citizenship means something in a 225-year constitutional republic that is different from its meaning in other countries and governments. It is exceptional!

Yet Obama says we can ignore debates about the role of government and that the lack of consensus is not an impediment to moving ahead – an attitude, to paraphrase Admiral Farragut, like “damn the disagreement, full speed ahead!”

With the role of government unsettled, can a government force its citizens to violate their conscience in the name of insurance reform or not? Can it restrict the gun ownership of its citizens or not? Can its agents touch or image its citizens in humiliating ways in the name of airline security or not? Are the President and Congress restrained by the Constitution and the Enumerated Powers of the Bill of Rights or not? May the government mortgage the incomes of unborn generations to avoid taxing the current generation for their expanded benefits or not? May the government divert taxes from paying its bills and into social engineering programs or not?

Many important questions are unanswerable without a consensus on the role of government.

Obama is no Lincoln. If his speech last week said anything, it said that he is committed to replacing “We the People” with “We the Government.”

It will be a long four years.

Thanksgiving through the Years

In early September of 1620, 104 men, women, and children crowded aboard a leaky ship that was about 90 feet long and 26 feet wide amidships and set sail for the New World. The ship, named the Mayflower, would be at sea for 66 days before making landfall on the point of the fish hook we call Cape Cod, where it anchored near the location that would become Provincetown. It was well north of its intended destination of Virginia and therefore the passengers had no patent from the English crown to settle in this place.

The passengers continued living on board for a month while a few men first explored the Cape area. Finding curious mounds, the explorers punched holes in several revealing some to be granaries for corn and beans but others to be graves whose desecration didn’t endear the trespassers to the natives. A boat was built to explore the leeward shoreline of Cape Cod, and finding the natural harbor at modern day Plymouth and a defensible hill above it, they decided to make their settlement there. With winter approaching, shelter had to be built before the majority of passengers could disembark.

The long ocean crossing and the additional month crammed aboard ship had done little to improve the disposition of the passengers, which was compounded by the fact that 44 of them were religious dissenters from the Church of England while 66 made the voyage as a business venture. The dissenters called themselves the “Saints” and called the others “Strangers” – hardly a good way to create unity. Despite having more differences than similarities, their survival depended on cooperation, of which there was little on board the ship. Therefore, William Bradford, who had emerged as the informal leader, recommended that before disembarking every passenger should sign an agreement that set forth rules for self-government, which later came to be called the Mayflower Compact.

The first winter was ghastly. Now calling themselves Pilgrims, over half of them died in three months. They were buried at night, fearing that the surrounding Indians would learn that their number was dwindling which might encourage an attack. Unlike the Indians encountered on the Cape, however, the Pilgrims had settled among the peaceful Wampanoags. And in March the tribal chief, Massasoit, sent Samoset as his ambassador to the settlers because Samoset spoke English which he had providentially learned from sailors who had fished the coast and briefly lived on land nearby. After his first encounter with the Pilgrims, Samoset returned with Tisquantum, known in history as Squanto, an Indian who had been kidnapped in 1614 by an English slave raider and sold in Málaga, Spain. There he had learned English from local friars, escaped slavery, and found his way back on an expedition ship headed to the New England coast in 1619 – the year before the Pilgrims arrived.

Since Squanto spoke better English than Samoset, he became the technical advisor to the Pilgrims, teaching them how to raise corn, where and how to catch fish, and how to make things needed for working and hunting. He showed them plants they could eat and others the Indians used for medicinal purposes. Squanto was the reason that the settlement survived during its first two years.

The first year the Pilgrims farmed communally and nearly starved. However, William Bradford’s diary tells us that it was decided thereafter that each man should farm for his own family’s food needs instead of communal farming. "This had very good success," Bradford wrote, "for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many." The Pilgrims’ experiment in socialism was a valuable lesson.

After taking in an abundant harvest in the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims invited Squanto, Samoset, Massasoit, and ninety other Wampanoag men to join them in a three-day celebration of their success, which consisted of games and feasting – and a not-so-subtle display of Pilgrim musketry just in case the natives became unfriendly in the future. This celebration is recorded in history as the first Thanksgiving – which it wasn’t.

In fact, two years earlier on December 4, 1619, a group of 38 English settlers arrived at Berkeley Hundred, part of the Virginia Colony, in an area then known as Charles Cittie (sic), It was located about 20 miles upstream from Jamestown, the first permanent settlement of the Virginia Colony, which had been established in 1607. The Berkley settlers celebrated the first known Thanksgiving in the New World. Their charter required that the day of arrival should be observed yearly as a "day of thanksgiving" to God. On that first Thanksgiving day, December 4, Captain John Woodleaf presided over the service. The charter specified the thanksgiving service: "Wee ordaine that the day of our ships arrival at the place assigned for plantacon in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually keept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God."

But not for long. Nine of the Berkley settlers were killed in the Indian Massacre of 1622 which also wiped out a third of the population of the Virginia Colony. Therefore, Berkeley and other outlying settlements were abandoned as the colonists moved back to Jamestown and other more secure points and Thanksgiving was forgotten.

The first national celebration of Thanksgiving occurred in 1777. This was a one-time only Thanksgiving in which the 13 colonies, rather than celebrating food and God’s providence, celebrated the defeat of the British at Saratoga in October by Washington’s Continental Army.

In 1789 President George Washington made the first presidential proclamation declaring Thanksgiving a national event. Under this proclamation it was to occur later that year on November 26. Some were opposed to it, particularly those in the south, who felt the hardships of a few Pilgrims did not warrant a national holiday and besides, such proclamations were excessively Yankee and Federalist – so they thought.

John Adams, the second president, issued a Thanksgiving proclamation in 1798 enlisting the help of the Almighty not only in cosmic struggles but also in the more pedestrian battles of his administration. He seemed to be asking God to side with the Federalists against his struggles with the Jeffersonians. When he later revealed that the proclamation had been recommended by a Presbyterian assembly, it set off a firestorm that Adams, a devout Unitarian, was leading a movement to establish the Presbyterian Church as the national religion. Adams became the first one-term president – a fact that he attributed to his proclamation.

In 1779, as Governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson decreed a day of “Public and solemn thanksgiving and prayer to Almighty God.” But as the third president, he opposed national Thanksgiving proclamations. Writing to a Reverend Samuel Miller, Jefferson said, “I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises …”

In 1817, New York became the first of several states to officially adopt an annual Thanksgiving holiday. Each state celebrated it on a different day, however, and the South remained largely unfamiliar with the tradition. Therefore, for almost 60 years following Jefferson’s presidency, Thanksgiving remained a non-event on the national scene with no advocate until Sarah Josepha Hale.

Hale was no nationalist shrinking violet. She raised $30,000 for the construction of the Bunker Hill monument in Boston and started the movement to preserve Washington’s Mount Vernon home for future generations. She was a fervent believer in God and the American Union, as well as being a fierce abolitionist. Hale had made it her business to advocate and get action on symbols that celebrated America and what today is known as American exceptionalism.

Hale had more than 15 minutes of fame. She authored the words to “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and was the editor for two prominent women’s magazines of her day. Since 1846 she had written editorials calling for a uniform national celebration of Thanksgiving, writing four presidents and dozens of congressmen to push her cause. In October 1863, America was embroiled in the American Civil War where the concept of "Union" was very much at issue. Hale tried again, this time writing to her fifth president, Abraham Lincoln.

Hale’s proposal found a place in the Lincoln psyche – perhaps because the battle of Gettysburg had been fought three months earlier and he would travel to the battlefield the following month to dedicate a military cemetery with a 278-word dedicatory address that would become his most famous utterance.

Touched by Hale’s pleas, Lincoln issued his Thanksgiving Proclamation on October 3, 1863 setting its observance on the last Thursday of November.

After Lincoln’s assassination, his successor, Andrew Johnson, ever the contrarian, issued an 1865 Proclamation to “observe the first Thursday of December next as a day of national thanksgiving to the Creator of the Universe …” Yet the next three proclamations of the quirky tailor from Greeneville Tennessee returned Thanksgiving to the last Thursday in November.

Notwithstanding the presidential proclamations, the states were free to go their own ways, and Southern governors often opted for idiosyncratic observances or none at all. Oran Milo Roberts, governor of Texas in the late 1880s refused to observe Thanksgiving in the Lone Star State, snorting, “It’s a damned Yankee institution anyway.” But the South, too, eventually succumbed.

Then along came Franklin D. Roosevelt whose finagling with the date of Thanksgiving created a national uproar.

In 1939 there were five Thursdays in November and the last one was the 30th, leaving only three weeks and change before Christmas. This wadded the boxers of the presidents for Gimbel Brothers, Lord & Taylor, and other retailers concerned less with tradition than sales in the waning years of the Great Depression. They asked Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving to the 23rd allowing an additional week for shopping. Although I’ve never understood why Christmas shopping couldn’t start before Thanksgiving, when Roosevelt acceded, the country went ballistic.

Polls showed that 60% of the public opposed the change in date. Republicans in Congress were affronted that Roosevelt, a Democrat, would change the precedent of Lincoln, a Republican.

In New England, from which the Thanksgiving tradition sprang, resistance was particularly intense. The selectmen of Plymouth, Massachusetts informed Roosevelt in no uncertain words, “It is a religious holiday and [you] have no right to change it for commercial reasons.” Massachusetts Governor Leverett Saltonstall harrumphed that “Thanksgiving is a day to give thanks to the Almighty and not for the inauguration of Christmas shopping.”

Methodist minister Norman Vincent Peal was outraged, calling it "...questionable thinking and contrary to the meaning of Thanksgiving for the president of this great nation to tinker with the sacred religious day with the specious excuse that it will help Christmas sales. The next thing we may expect is Christmas to be shifted to May first to help the New York World’s Fair of 1940."

Nor did all merchants favor the presidential rejiggering of the Thanksgiving date. One shopkeeper hung a sign in his window reading, “Do your shopping now. Who knows, tomorrow may be Christmas.”

Usually the states followed the federal government’s lead on Thanksgiving, but they never relinquished their right to set their state’s date for the holiday. Predictably 48 battles erupted. As usual, New Deal Republicans had all the wit, if not the votes. Republican Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire urged the President to abolish winter. The Republican mayor of Atlantic City recommended that Franklin Roosevelt’s holiday be renamed "Franksgiving," while the Republican Attorney General of Oregon came up with this bit of doggerel:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one.
Until we hear from Washington.

Twenty-three states celebrated Thanksgiving 1939 on November 23, and another 23 stood fast with November 30. Two states, Colorado and Texas, shrugged their shoulders and celebrated both days—Texas did so to avoid having to move the Texas versus Texas A&M football game. The 30th was labeled as the Republican Thanksgiving, while the 23rd became the Democrat Thanksgiving.

Roosevelt’s experiment in moving the Thanksgiving date to improve Christmas sales continued for two more years, although 1940 and 1941 had four-Thursday Novembers. But the evidence was against the assumptions – more shopping days did not increase sales. Roosevelt conceded and agreed to move Thanksgiving back to the last Thursday in November.

Under public pressure, the US House of Representatives passed a joint resolution in October 1941 to put Thanksgiving on the traditional last Thursday beginning in 1942. However, when the resolution reached the Senate in December, the Senate converted the resolution to law and changed one word: “last” was amended to “fourth” so never again would Thanksgiving fall on the 29th or 30th of November. The states followed suit, although Texas held on to the last Thursday until 1956.

So on this Thanksgiving, and all the future ones, let’s raise a drumstick in salute to Sarah Josepha Hale, who instituted its observance, and to Franklin Roosevelt, who went on to convince Americans that he could “save” daylight by moving an hour from the morning to the afternoon.