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Paperback / 284 pages
ISBN: 9781641772709
AVAILABLE: 07/26/2022
By the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States had become the world’s greatest economic power and an increasingly important actor on the world stage. Yet success presented a challenge to the country not to lose sight of its heritage of constitutional liberty and the virtues that had made its flourishing possible. That challenge remains for us today.
For Volume One, click here.
Wilfred M. McClay holds the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College.
We have concentrated on the drama of Reconstruction and have not yet done justice to the more general effects of the Civil War. But those effects were profound. It is no exaggeration to say that the Civil War marks the boundary between early America and modern America. The lightly settled farming republic of the nation’s earlier history was being left behind in favor of a new, larger, more drawn together, and more powerful industrial nation. The country found itself in the grip of compelling new forces. It was exhilarating and frightening at the same time.
Such moments of great historical change can be hard to bring to life. Too often, we lapse into big and abstract terms like industrialization, urbanization, nationalization, centralization, and professionalization to describe them. There are reasons to use such terms. But often it is hard to connect them with our experience, with the things we see or feel. Sometimes the example of a particular thing or event is needed to make it more real to us.
There was just such a significant moment at the very conclusion of the Civil War, a ceremonial occasion that we passed by in silence two chapters ago but to which we shall now return.
That moment was the Grand Review of the Union armies, a solemn but celebratory procession ordered by the War Department for May 18, 1865, thirty-nine days after Appomattox. The participants in the review were the men of the Army of the Potomac, under
General George Meade, and of the combined western armies that had fought through Georgia and the Carolinas under General William Tecumseh Sherman. The resulting parade was an astounding spectacle, on a scale never seen before: two hundred thousand men marching for two days through the streets of Washington, D.C., in a line stretching as long as twenty-five miles.
A steady flow of blue uniforms snaked its way through the city and past the shadow of the Capitol dome “like a tremendous python,” as one observer said. Walt Whitman was there, enchanted by the panorama. “For two days now,” wrote the poet, “the broad space of [Pennsylvania Avenue] along to Treasury hill, and so up to Georgetown, and across the aqueduct bridge, have been alive with a magnificent sight, the returning armies,” marching in “wide ranks stretching clear across the Avenue.” Spectators jammed the streets, sidewalks, doorsteps, windows, and balconies, craning their heads to watch, many having come from hundreds of miles away.
Other celebrations were going on across the country, but none even remotely like this one. And remember this. There had been no such Grand Review at the end of the Revolution, or of the War of 1812, or of the Mexican War. This was something new. It was a national pageant affirming the new primacy in American life of the American nation – of national power and national unity.
For too long we’ve lacked a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that offers American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their country. Such a fresh retelling of the American story is especially needed today, to shape and deepen young Americans’ sense of the land they inhabit, help them to understand its roots and share in its memories, all the while equipping them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society.
When and where was America founded? Was it in Virginia in 1619, when a pirate ship landed a group of captive Africans at Jamestown? So asserted the New York Times in August 2019 when it announced its 1619 Project. The Times set out to transform history by tracing American institutions, culture, and prosperity to that pirate ship and the exploitation of African Americans that followed. A controversy erupted, with historians pushing back against what they say is a false narrative conjured out of racial grievance.
The virtue of prudence suffuses the writings of Edmund Burke and Abraham Lincoln, yet the demands of statecraft compelled both to take daring positions against long odds: Burke against the seemingly inexorable march of the French Revolution, Lincoln against disunion at a moment when the Northern situation appeared untenable.
The 1776 Report is the official report of The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. Submitted to the President and released as a public document on January 18, 2021, the report explains the core principles of the American founding and how they have shaped American history, considers the leading challenges to these principles at home and abroad, and calls on all Americans to “restore our national unity by rekindling a brave and honest love for our country and by raising new generations of citizens who not only know the self-evident truths of our founding, but act worthy of them.”
From its beginnings America was a land of hope, a magnet for those seeking a new beginning for themselves. The American Founders created a unique plan of government designed to realize those ideals. Implementing the plan was not easy, though, and a bloody civil war would push the American experiment to the breaking point — and to a new birth of freedom.
This book is about the partnership of God and Mammon in the New World—about how Americans have made money and lost money, and about how they have thought about that obsessive and peculiarly American subject. Money is the basic American thing, the life’s blood of the country.
