The Meaning of America - 162 Years Ago Today

The Battle of Gettysburg and the Crisis of Our National Soul

It wasn’t really that long ago. The hands which now type these words once gripped the hilt of my great-grandfather’s saber, which he wore as a sixteen-year-old Irish immigrant private in the Army of the Potomac that day. John Cornelius Dunn had reached the United States as a ten-year-old aboard one of the infamous Coffin Ships which brought so many thousands of Irish survivors of The Famine to these shores. As a fifteen-year-old, he ran away from home to join the Union Army, was turned away as too young, and rejoined the moment he turned sixteen - just in time for the bloodiest battle in American history.

(A Minnesota regiment in a bayonet charge on the second day of The Battle of Gettysburg)

He was promoted to sergeant that day (so the family legend runs), not for merit or bravery that we know of, but simply because nearly his entire unit was wiped out and he more or less inherited the role. By the time he turned eighteen he had taken part in a series of brutal and legendary campaigns, including William Techumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea through Georgia. After the war, as any self-respecting Irish rebel should do, he joined The Fenian Raiders, a band of Irish veterans of the Union Army determined to win the freedom of Ireland by conquering Canada. Their marching song went like this -

We are the Fenian Raiders, skilled in the arts of war. We’ve come to fight for Ireland, the land that we adore. Many a battle we have won, along with the Boys in Blue. Now we’ll go and conquer Canada, for we’ve nothing else to do!

(John Cornelius Dunn, veteran of The Battle of Gettysburg - and The Fenian Raiders)

Fighting the British oppressors came naturally to these Irishmen, of course. Fighting the slave-holding Confederacy made sense on the same basis, as the Irish had been de facto slaves of the British, shipped as enslaved labor to America in the 1600s and starved by the millions by British polices during the Great Blight.

British banking interests saw a crucial opportunity in the American Civil War - a chance to permanently weaken the emerging American republic by splitting it into two warring and weakened halves, into factions fatally weakened and deeply in debt to the bankers themselves who, as ever, would happily lend to both sides, emerging the financial victor regardless of who won. When the Southern states seceded from the Union in 1861, the London Times’ headline triumphantly crowed, “The Great Republic Bites the Dust!”

Abraham Lincoln, however, saw through their game, and refused the bankers’ offer of credit at ruinous rates, instead issuing “greenbacks” based on the ability of the American people to shoulder the price of freedom on their own.

On this level, the Civil War was one more battle in the age-long fight for freedom by “the people” against the forces of plutocracy - “labor vs capital” if you like, or plebians against the elite - you can trace the dynamic into the mists of history as far back as Periclean Athens and on forward into the Roman Empire, or the House of Lords and the Monarchy vs the Commons in the fall of King Charles the First. It is the same old story - one which now plays out in tragic-comic fashion in the America of 2025.

Our situation is more complex, of course, but is hauntingly similar to the “Irrepressible Conflict” doctrine which dominated national consciousness in the years immediately preceding the war. By the time of the Harper’s Ferry Raid and the hanging of Old John Brown (remember? His body lies a-mouldering in the grave, we were told…but the crazed old prophet may be rising yet again), the South and the North regarded each other as incarnations of evil, each viewed the other as hopelessly deluded by the propaganda of vested interests, and saw each other as recklessly bent upon the wanton destruction of all that was good in the American experiment.

Woke vs Awake, anyone?

I could dwell here on the well-established fact that the plutocracy infiltrates and manipulates right and left, red and blue, and that we nowhere empower them so effectively as when we demonize each other, failing to recognize our true oppressors. It’s Dorothy and the Wizard all over again - “Pay no attention to that Man Behind the Curtain!”

(The Wizard of Oz - an old charlatan pulling levers behind the scenes)

The Curtain, of course, being the corporate media, beating the drumbeat of war against the villain du jour - whose vanquishment will just happen to enrich the pockets of the elite.

But I’d rather dwell on the essence of why I’m still proud to be an American, though I am appalled and ashamed at the craven obedience of our government to the corrupt elite (an obedience which hasn’t faltered since the killing of John F. Kennedy 62 years ago next fall), ashamed of our support of genocide in Gaza, ashamed of the brazenly fascist policies of the MAGA cult, ashamed off our moral debasement, of the disintegation of the family, of the hypersexualization of our society - I could go on and on.

But I’m an idealist, an optimist, a Templar, and a storyteller - and so I share the stories that end well and lift up the soul.

So back to Gettysburg.

The stakes were clear that day and they were enormous. General Robert E. Lee, fresh from a series of triumphs which had given him an aura of invincibility, was determined to take the war to the North, to break through and possibly capture Washington itself, winning European recognition and fatally weakening public support for the bloodbath, then in its third year. On this day, on the eve of Independence Day, Lee saw the chance to win independence for the Confederacy. And he was determined to do it in a head-on assault upon the entrenched Union line, uphill against massive artillery and flanked by murderous grapeshot.

His closest adviser, Gen. Pete Longstreet, urged him to turn aside and make a break for Washington, forcing the Union Army to leave their advantageous position and pursue him in a race to save the capital.

“No, General - the enemy is there and I mean to fight him there.”

And so, as we know, Robert E. Lee sent 15,000 men into the suicidal attack known to history as Pickett’s Charge, the bloody disaster which would be called “the high tide of the Confederacy” - from which the slave-holding empire never recovered.

But let us suppose Lee had taken Longstreet’s advice, had turned for Washington, had captured the city, had forced Lincoln himself to flee. How would the world have been different? What if the South had triumphed? What if Lincoln’s bold Emancipation Proclamation had ended up on the dustbin of history, with millions of human beings remaining enslaved? What if the American Experiment had become a joke chortled at by the corrupt elite, and the Declaration of Independence itself had faded into a naive and hopeful document with had failed the test of history? What if the slaveholding interests had succeeded in their plan to spread slavery to the American West and on down into South America?

We would be living in a very different world.

I choose to celebrate the century of comparative freedom and self-expression which flowed from the victory that day - while facing the fact that we are now looking at the very real threat of pervasive control by the corrupt elite and the final ruin of the American Spirit - what is referred to in military terms as Full Spectrum Dominance - a final all-fronts victory which leaves opposition utterly helpless. The corrupt elite recovered, of course, and undertook the systematic plan which culminated in The Aldrich Act of 1912, leaving our country in control of the private banking cabal known as The Federal Reserve System. Elite control of the military-industrial complex, of Big Pharma, Big Agro, Big Oil, and the essential propaganda machine of the corporate media now threatens to extinguish the last sparks of American freedom.

All of which looks inevitable - if you leave God out of the equation, if you leave our dormant but still fiery American courage out of the equation…if you leave the power of story out of the equation.

One Confederate officer is said to have observed that the Union triumphed not because they had better soldiers, but better songs. The irresistible power of truth and beauty in song and story may yet, I fondly trust, make itself felt in a way which will light that fire again.

How do you defeat The Battle Hymn of The Republic? Or The Battle Cry of Freedom? How do you rally against the words “in the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea. As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free. His truth is marching on.”

The distorted vulgarized bastardization of the teachings of Christ which now holds sway in the MAGA movement (as well as the watered-down hypocritical pseudo-spirituality to which the DNC pays lipservice) cannot hold American hearts for long. I now see that the Union for which my great-grandfather fought may have to dissolve, to fall apart, so that we may return to the Constitution’s intent to “form a more perfect union, to insure Domestic Tranquility…and to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

But the wizard will have to be stripped naked, and the curtain torn back. We will have to accept responsibility for the crimes we have unwittingly enabled. And we will need to remember and be grateful for the lives sacrificed that hot summer day in Pennsylvania 162 years ago, those men who gave “the last full measure of devotion…who gave their lives that this nation might live…that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

blessings,

Michael