When the Stars and Stripes Was Flung to the Breeze

As Americans celebrate Independence Day, headlines and social media grumble about a litany of challenges. The malaise resembles that which followed the Civil War, reminding us of a July 4 that demonstrates how the Spirit of 1776 calls the nation to overcome troubles rather than be consumed by them.The Long Depression — called the Great Depression until the 1930s — began with the Panic of 1873. In the two decades before it ended with President McKinley’s election in 1896, some 18,000 businesses went bankrupt, and unemployment hit 8.25 percent.In 1874, the economic pains were just beginning, even as wounds from the war that had torn the nation apart remained fresh. Six hundred thousand combatants lay, in the words of “John Brown’s Body,” “moldering” in their graves.Razed farms and civilian infrastructure were struggling to recover. Thirteen states chafed under military occupation. Survivors of the war shambled in the streets, often begging for coins. Many were missing arms, legs, and eyes. The invisible trauma of PTSD — called “soldier’s heart” — was cloaked in shame, undiagnosed, and untreated.President Lincoln, who many believed would have shepherded in a more just peace, had been assassinated on the eve of victory in 1865. He was succeeded by President Andrew Johnson, a slave-owning Tennessee Democrat who proved ill-suited for the task of working with the Lincoln Republicans in Congress. Americans suffered through Johnson’s impeachment, the nation’s first, in 1868. “The country,” a Pennsylvania Republican, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, said after Johnson’s acquittal by a single vote in the Senate, “is going to the devil.”The Civil War is much romanticized today, but it was easy in the 1870s to call Stevens a prophet, to look at the Grand Old Flag and despair at the cost of keeping it flying. Americans yearned to, as Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural, “bind up the nation’s wounds.”With so much suffering, Americans could be excused for marking Independence Day 1874 in somber fashion. Instead, they looked to their past and the privations of the Revolution to face their hardships with a spirit of joyous resolve.On July 4, 1874, the Sun reported atop its front page that Independence Day was an “opportunity for everybody to enjoy himself as may suit his whim — excursions, dinners, gunpowder, and bunting.” Forts around Gotham “saluted the flag at sunrise.”All business was “suspended,” save the post office which closed early. Veterans paraded up Broadway, across Fourteenth Street, and up Fifth Avenue to the square named for, in Madison, the Father of the Constitution. “The Stars and Stripes,” the Sun reported, were “flung to the breeze” from the Old Block Fort in Central Park.Fireworks displays boomed across Manhattan. The Sun reported New Yorkers enjoying delightful sails to enjoy the beautiful scenery on the Hudson River. A crowning event was the reading of the Declaration of Independence, an honor that fell to an independent-minded Democrat alderman, James Thayer.Thayer “opened with an allusion to the approach of the Centennial” in 1876 and to both “the boys in blue” and “rebels in gray.” It was an aspirational moment, one that didn’t dwell on the bitterness of places like Vicksburg, Mississippi, which wouldn’t celebrate July 4 — also the day of its surrender to President Grant — until World War II.Thayer encouraged his audience to use “hardships and battles” as ways to “inspire valor and fortitude” to solve the nation’s troubles. “Today,” he said, “we need it all — the hopes, the pride, the universal tolerance … all the traits, all the energies” that had birthed the nation in the Revolution and renewed it in the Civil War.Independence Day 1874 provided a chance for Americans to celebrate those who had sacrificed to create a more perfect union and to call on fellow citizens to do the same. “The country needs,” Thayer said, all of its best qualities “to win a victory of peace.”This Independence Day, Americans will celebrate with fireworks, parades, and speeches just as they did in 1874 — and then as now, we can draw inspiration from those who overcame difficulties in generations past. When we do, we’ll be recapturing the Spirit of 1776, and forging our own links in the chain of liberty.

When the Stars and Stripes Was Flung to the Breeze

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