A Traveling Exhibition Coming in 2013

Author: Matthew Pinsker

1787 –Liberty, Justice, and Union

National Constitution Center, March 18, 2008

“The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.  Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.”

–Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 18, 2008

The opening of this Civil War anniversary exhibition challenges visitors by drawing their attention to Barack Obama’s 2008 race speech which was a pivotal event in the election of the nation’s first black president but not, at least on the surface, a conventional window on the 1860s.  Yet Obama’s political struggles and his thoughtful words set the stage for an important insight to be gained from this exhibition, one first enunciated by James Madison in 1792, when he acknowledged that “every word” in the Constitution “decides a question between power & liberty.”  In Obama’s phrasing, power trumped liberty on the question of “this nation’s original sin of slavery” and then left the promise of equality “unfinished.” The brief opening will highlight how several of these compromises occurred in the early Republic, using graphic resources and hands-on activities to demonstrate what the nation’s Founders achieved  –but more importantly, what they omitted from their version of the American experiment in self-government.

1792 (Compromising for Union) James Madison

Courtesy of Wikimedia

Describing the stark choice that confronted the 55 men who met in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787, James Madison once wrote about the Constitution that “Every word … decides a question between power & liberty.”

Source:  “Charters,” The National Gazette, January 19, 1792; available in The Writings of James Madison, 1790-1802, Volume 6, Edited by Gaillard Hunt, available via Google Books

1840s –What Hath God Wrought!

The Mexican-American War was an aggressive and  smashing victory that saw the United States acquire massive new territories in the south-west and along the Pacific coast.  This typified a dynamic decade that saw the admission of four new states, two slave and two free, the rise of women’s rights activity, the intensification of the Underground Railroad, and the discovery of gold in California that touched off an unprecedented and frantic western migration.

“Manifest Destiny”
Democratic writer and columnist John L. O’Sullivan wrote first in the Democratic Review in July 1845 and then in his column in the New York Morning News in December that it was “the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.” The popularity of the phrase sparked political controversy but it captured much of the spirit in the country at the time and has endured as an important definer of American attitudes.

Washington Monument
Washington Monument 1860The cornerstone of the Washington Monument was laid on July 4, 1848.  Construction to the design of Robert Mills began soon after but was halted in 1854 through lack of funding. Construction was not resumed until 1879.  The obelisk was finally dedicated on Washington’s Birthday, 1885, completed in late 1886, and opened to the public on October 9, 1888.  It was the tallest building in the world at the time.

The Telegraph
The invention and instant spread of the electric telegraph revolutionized communications.  In the United States, its development was largely the work of Samuel Morse, who demonstrated his work in a link between Washington DC and Baltimore, sending the famous biblical question “What Hath God Wrought” on May 24, 1844.  Within two decades almost every part of the United States had a telegraph office that send text over thousands of miles within seconds.

Charles Dickens in America
Already an international celebrity, the thirty-year old author and his wife spent two months in North America in June and July 1842.  Mobbed wherever he went, he gathered his keen and often humorous observations into American Notes, published soon after he returned home to England.  Critical yet admiring, his Notes reserved their harshest words for America’s continuing institution of slavery.  Dickens published his famous Christmas Carol the next year in 1843.

1869 –BLUE-GRAY REUNION

This picture from ten volume The Photographic History of the Civil War edited by Francis Miller (1911) highlights an unexpected gathering of former Confederate generals, including Robert E. Lee,  and a few former Union generals such as John Geary and Lew Wallace that occurred in White Sulphur Springs, Virginia in August 1869. This was probably the first photograph of a “Blue-Gray” reunion. For full details, consult Miller’s volume 10 (Armies and Leaders) at Google Books, and see especially p. 4.

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