A Hundred Circling Camps
There are 87 years between July 1776 and July 1863.
We were a new nation, born bloody, fiery, and glorious. The smell of cannon fire had barely cleared from our noses before we turned on one another - Revolutionary grandchildren dying to figure out what to do with the inheritance their grandfathers left them.
And so it was that two Revolutionary bloodlines met in Pennsylvania at the Beginning of July, 1863.
One had a father who was a Revolutionary War hero and close friend of George Washington. The other was born in Spain to American merchants who strongly supported the American cause against the British.
Both patriots.
Both West Point graduates.
Both admired.
Both near the town of Gettysburg.
Their handshake cost roughly 15,000 lives in one day.
20,000 on the second day.
13,000 on the third.
Their three-day conversation cost roughly 50,000 lives and ended in rain and mud for both and a long walk back to his Virginia home for one.
That was July 3, 1863.
Just one day later, July 4th, 1863 and across the new nation to the south and west, after 47 days of siege, 29,000 people surrendered the doomed ground they had occupied in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The one who accepted the surrender was another man with family ties to the Revolution. Another West Point graduate. This Ohio native watched as they piled up their rifles near a crater left from a massive explosion.
This man would be promoted and travel east -
Chatanooga area - Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge.
Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor.
Petersburg.
He would meet the Virginian in his home state in the tiny stagecoach village of Appomattox on April 9, 1865 to shake hands with him.
Heroism.
Wisdom.
Carnage.
Tragedy.
Tragedies.
Stories made for songs.
It is fitting, perhaps, that the tune was borrowed. After all, the problems in 1861 were hand-me-downs as well. After four more years of tragic stories, her lyrics, draped on a borrowed frame, would be all the more powerful.
She would write,
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword,
His truth is marching on.CHORUS:
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps,
His day is marching on.CHORUS
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His Judgement Seat.
Oh! Be swift, my soul, to answer Him, be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.CHORUS
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me;
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
An irresistible power is in these words.
I see soldiers milling around fires, talking small talk while a few stare into the flames calmly coming to grips with near-certain agony and very possible death that they would face upon the daybreak.
God bless them.
The imagery here is so real to me. I am from a rural area and am very familiar with evening dews and damps. I know exactly what this feels like coming through my shoes. I’m familiar with staring into fires, and with (once omnipresent) Scripture. I can imagine the fields of lightning bugs the soldiers would have seen and all the sounds of summer nights in the East - whooperwhills at dusk, frogs and crickets all night. Bats overhead. Then stars.
The past is sometimes like a dream - something that exists only in memories - things that seem half real, or less. I was thinking about July 4th and all that has happened around this date. Armies could not travel well in the winters, so they would have to wait until that was easier. Therefore, a lot of action happened in the spring and summer months. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the same day - July 4, 1826. This may be a big reason why we celebrate on July 4 and not July 2.
Regardless of why this date comes up, it does come up often, and that opens the door for us to revisit the stories, to sit around the campfire of the mind and stare into the flames, each crackle a musket shot, each ember a fiery prayer.
I am hoping that this short offering will prick your heart to remember our nation’s birth and troubled youth with softness - not glossy, romantic nostalgia, but with forgiveness that one gives to those with noble intentions who get dragged down into the dirt. They lived in trying times. A new nation was birthing a new world. That does not happen very often, and I’m not sure they could see it as we do.
We also live in trying times, but we are ill fit to deal with them. Story is made into whatever shape is needed to extract the most attention and money, so we -
despite having more information than anyone ever in the history of mankind -
are more and more lost.
As we are encouraged by our politicians to once again fight one another over far less grievous things, let us remember that liberty is not threatened by neither wisdom nor patience. We - the everyday people of the United States - must choose to see one another as Countrymen, not as rivals. Let us learn this one lesson.
Let us remember that most people want what is simple and good. Let us remember one another. The blood of our countrymen is in the ground we walk over. Push forward with Wisdom and Patience, recognizing that compromise may be the advice of them both.
(Also, put down the screens. Go outside this evening or tomorrow morning and let the dew get on your feet. Let the crickets and frogs and bats and stars remind you of what will outlast us all. Snarky pettiness is beneath us. Live in peace with others.)
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 battle-field 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 can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not 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 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.
Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863
