American Questions
The story of what happened on July 2nd in 1776, 1863, and 1964.
On July 2nd, 1776, the Second Continental Congress—in a hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia—ratified the Resolution for Independence, severing ties from the British Empire and raising the stakes of the Revolution a year into the war. America, the world would soon find out, was the world’s newest nation.
The official declaration would come out two days later, on July 4th. Still, the war was far from over. The Treaty of Paris, which officially recognized the new nation as sovereign, wasn’t signed for another seven and a half years. But as the war wound down, questions remained. Questions about how the new nation would be governed, questions about who would have power, and questions if—as the Declaration of Independence stated—all men were indeed created equal.
For the next eight decades, those questions hung over the Republic. They hung over the same room in Philadelphia where the Declaration of Independence was signed—what we now call Independence Hall—when many of the same men who signed the Declaration of Independence ratified the Constitution in the summer of 1787. They hung over the halls of Congress in the new capital in 1820 when the Great Compromiser, Henry Clay of Kentucky, helped broker the Missouri Compromise, dividing the nation along the 36°30′ parallel—one half slave, one half free. Thirty years later, those same questions still hung over those same halls, as the same Henry Clay—by then in his 70s—again brokered a truce between North and South, this time through the Compromise of 1850, as new territories became part of the ever-expanding Union after the Mexican American War.
Still those questions were left unanswered. For by then it had become clear that in the United States, the whole of its people were not fully free—and for the nearly 4 million Black slaves in the South, it was not clear if they ever would be.
But exactly 87 years to the day after America announced its independence—on July 2, 1863—after two years of fighting in a Civil War, those questions began to be answered in blood in two towns that today don’t amount to 30,000 people in population combined: Vicksburg, Mississippi and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Vicksburg was the lynchpin of the Mississippi River—what commanding Confederate officer John Pemberton called “the most important point in the Confederacy,” what President Lincoln called “the key to the war,” and what Confederate President Jefferson Davis called “the nail head that holds the South's two halves together.” To Vicksburg’s immediate west was Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas—and if the Union were to control it, and control the Mississippi River that divided the two halves, it would split the Confederacy in two.
In Vicksburg, Pemberton and his men were waiting for reinforcements and supplies—badly needed supplies, as soldiers began to live off skinned rats and mule meat—waiting for six weeks, aware that by late May, Grant had surrounded them. But the reinforcements would never come, for earlier that May, a meeting in Richmond had been convened between President Jefferson Davis, Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon, General James Longstreet—and General Robert E. Lee.
The discussion had been about the “question between Virginia and Mississippi”—and where to send the Confederacy’s dwindling resources. Longstreet favored sending regiments to Mississippi to stave off Grant and maintain control of the mighty Mississippi. Seddon agreed, and Davis too, liked the idea. But the only voice that mattered belonged to the man who even then was known as the greatest field commander of his time, the man who had just won his greatest victory at Chancellorsville, General Lee.
Lee said Grant’s siege wouldn’t work because “the climate in June will force the enemy to retire.” But he had underestimated Grant—as so many of his combatants who laid dead in open fields had. Instead, Lee had a different idea, a radical one that if successful would bring the prospect of both a brokered peace and foreign recognition of the Confederacy to the table, from both the British and especially the French, led by the Confederate sympathizer, Napoleon III. The idea was to invade Pennsylvania, in the Union’s backyard, and slowly begin to end the war on terms of a truce—officially establishing a slave republic in the American South.
As Pemberton’s men in Vicksburg were literally starving—they had threatened mutiny on June 28—Lee’s men marched north. That same day, one of his lieutenants, General A.P. Hill, heard of a supply of shoes in a town where dozens of roads converged, the same town where Lee had planned to reunite the various brigades. Unaware that Union commander John Buford had arrived in town the previous day, the Battle of Gettysburg began by coincidence on July 1st, 1863.
By the afternoon of the 1st, it appeared that another Confederate victory would soon be at hand. But that evening, upon the arrival of Major General George Meade, Union corps established a position along the high ground from Cemetery Ridge to a hill called Little Round Top. That evening, Longstreet advised Lee not to attack such an advantageous position the following day. But Lee ignored Longstreet’s advice, just as he had ignored his advice when it came to sending reinforcements to Vicksburg instead.
On July 2nd, in both theaters, the battles came to a head.
Pemberton, having finally realized that Grant would simply wait him out, made the decision to surrender, asking for terms the following morning. Grant who had been working in his brother’s leather shop in Galena, Illinois when the war broke out, whose best grades at West Point were in painting and drawing, who had defied the advice of his own lieutenants including William Tecumseh Sherman, had captured Vicksburg, gained control of the Mississippi River, and split the Confederacy in two, all in one fell swoop.
That same day in Pennsylvania, Lee sent Longstreet to attack the Union’s high position. Longstreet was reluctant, waiting until 4PM to attack, but in the end, he did so dutifully, and so ensued perhaps the war’s bloodiest fighting. For hours, men from the same country killed one another mercilessly in an open field in South Central Pennsylvania with muskets, revolvers, swords and in some cases, their bare hands. As the battle reached its peak, Union commanders realized Confederate soldiers were gaining on Little Round Top, the battlefield’s commanding position. For two hours, they were held off by men under the control of a modern languages professor at Bowdoin College in Maine, Joshua L. Chamberlain. The men from Maine held off the boys from Alabama until finally, they ran out of bullets. The Confederates, pausing in relief after a long march up the hill, took the moment to rest before a final charge. As they did, they had not realized that Chamberlain’s men from Maine had fixed bayonets to their guns, attacking from above, as Rebel yells twisted into shrieks of terror, as blood spilled down the hill. The Professor had prevailed; the Union held Little Round Top.
At the end of the day on July 2nd, 1863, after two days of fighting, 35,000 soldiers were dead. The Confederacy’s hopes for a quick victory, along with Lee’s desire to march on Philadelphia, were dashed. The next day, as Pemberton surrendered to Grant in Mississippi, Confederate forces took on more losses, as General Lee’s overzealous and overconfident tactics lost him the battle that proved to be the war’s turning point. At the end of three days of fighting, 51,000 soldiers were dead. Humiliated, the Confederates marched back south to Virginia in the pouring rain, unable to celebrate a Fourth of July holiday that did not exist for the country they had made for themselves.
The war continued, with bloody battles still ahead. In the end, nearly 750,000 Americans were dead. Still, many of those same questions remained, some answered, others left hanging in the air like smoke from cannon fire for another century.
101 years after the decisive day at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, 188 years after the Resolution for Independence, a man from the poverty-stricken Hill Country of Texas sat alone at a desk in Washington, D.C. to finally answer those questions. It was July 2, 1964—and the President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, a man who for the first two decades of his Congressional career had voted against every bill that proposed to expand the freedom of Black Americans, sat down to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ending the practice of racial segregation that had kept alive the question if all Americans would ever truly be free.
After signing the act into the books of law, the President addressed the nation, beginning that, “One hundred and eighty-eight years ago this week a small band of valiant men began a long struggle for freedom.” Today, 248 years after that long struggle for freedom began, the fight continues, and questions remain. But this July 2nd, and this Independence Day, Americans—all Americans—must remember how far we have come as a nation and ask themselves not whether they have answers to those questions but whether they have it within themselves to continue that struggle at all.
Happy Fourth of July.
Sources:
James McPherson. Battle Cry of Freedom. Oxford University Press, 1988.
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/lee-resolution
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/civil-war-toll-up-by-20-percent-in-new-estimate.html