dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Lexington and Concord – Where the Rubber Meets the Road

The New York Time’s controversial “1619 Project” and the historians’ war it sparked illustrate how this country’s founding – the American Revolution – is the cornerstone of our collective understanding of this country’s present. The “1619 Project” gives readers a race-themed narrative of the Revolution in an effort to help them see racism as pervasive in American life today. Such efforts to enlist the Revolution for a cause are not new – attempts to shape public opinion and public policy in the present often begin with a retelling of the country’s birth.

When, in 1861, Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln delivered their inaugural speeches – Davis as president of the Confederate States of America, Lincoln as president of the United States of America – both included a narration of the Revolution. Davis’ history lesson supported his claim that secession was peaceful and constitutional, that Northerners should accept it as such, and that the upper South should feel free to follow the lower South into secession. Lincoln’s history lesson supported his own claim that secession was unlawful and insurrectionary, that Americans in the North and upper South should reject it as such, and that the deep South should return to the Union. During that deadly war, both sides continued to retell Southern and Northern audiences about the Revolution, connecting the cause of the Civil War to the cause of the Revolution. These were efforts to inspire Americans to recommit themselves to the spirit of 1776, endure the hardships of war, and sacrifice more for victory. Most famously, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address began with a particular framing of the Revolution and ended with a challenge to his generation of Americans to vindicate – with military victory – what his history lesson asserted as the core cause of the Revolutionary generation.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/lexington_and_concord__where_the_rubber_meets_the_road.html