Hatred of Americans by Americans.
This partisan schism appears to express— as was said of Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy during the Civil War — “enough hatred … to burst 10,000 bottles.”
Past administrations have done their bit, but the present lot, with all the sophistication of fingers jammed into the eyes of its adversaries, has made things worse. No other administration — perhaps besides that of Democrat Andrew Jackson, a professional hater — has so uglied-up the national discourse.
Supporters defend the constant stream of petty insults and calls for revenge flowing from the White House as “honesty.”
Approaching 161 years ago this coming April, our 16th president, Republican Abraham Lincoln, showed us a better way.
Having just toured the Confederate capitol of Richmond, Virginia, one day after Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Gen. Ulysses Grant, Lincoln found himself back at the White House, serenaded by a band, and cheered by a crowd that had gathered in the darkness beneath the balcony to hear him speak.
The general expectation was that Lincoln would call a great victory ball, perhaps grind the face of the defeated South into the dust, gloat. But he didn’t do that. He was never the type of man who is consumed by a lust for revenge. Instead, with reconstruction and reconciliation on his mind, he recognized the value of symbolic olive branches, as he knew that few symbols meant more to white southerners than their de facto wartime anthem.
“I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I have ever heard,” Lincoln said of the tune, written by a northern man. “Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday — in Richmond — that we fairly captured it. I presented the question to the Attorney General, and he gave it as his legal opinion that it is our lawful prize. I now request the band to favor me with its performance.”
“It is good to show the rebels that, with us in power, they will be free to hear it again.” In each case, Lincoln clearly saw “Dixie” as a symbol on which to build a renewed Union.
A mere five days later, Lincoln was dead, fallen victim to a bullet fired from a Derringer into the back of his head while he enjoyed a light and comical piece of popular culture, the play “Our American Cousin.”
“The South is avenged,” John Wilkes Booth is quoted as crying out as he escaped Ford’s Theater.
A small lump of lead, fired to avenge. But for all that, as the poet Carl Sandburg noted, perhaps “the heaviest bullet” ever fired in American history. And I respect the present calls for avenging the supposed wrongs committed against Donald Trump as little as I respect what John Wilkes Booth did.
Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.
