by Jon Meacham
The thinking about happiness came to American shores most directly from the work of John Locke and from Scottish-Irish philosopher Francis Hutcheson. During the Enlightenment, thinkers and politicians struggled with redefining the role of the individual in an ethos so long dominated by feudalism, autocratic religious establishments, and the divine rights of kings. A key insight of the age was that reason, not revelation, should have primacy in human affairs. That belief in the power of reason was leading Western thinkers to focus on the idea of happiness, which in Jefferson’s hands—and in ours, down the ages—is better understood as the pursuit of individual excellence that shapes the life of a broader community.
Like, say, the newly emerging United States of America. Pre-Jefferson, the centrality of happiness was explicitly expressed in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, a document written by George Mason and very much on Jefferson’s mind in the summer of 1776. Men, wrote Mason, “are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights…namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
Property is often key to happiness, but Mason was thinking more broadly, drawing on the tradition of the ancients to articulate a larger scope for civic life. Much is often made of the fact that Jefferson inserted “the pursuit of happiness” in place of “property” from earlier formulations of fundamental rights. Yet property and prosperity are essential to the Jeffersonian pursuit, for economic progress has long proven a precursor of political and social liberty. As Jefferson’s friend and neighbor James Madison would say, the test is one of balance and proportion. Meacham, “Free to Be Happy,” Time.
EUDAIMONIA—THE GREEK WORD Kraut, “Aristotle’s Ethics.” “Aristotle asks what the ergon (“function,” “task,” “work”) of a human being is, and argues that it consists in activity of the rational part of the soul in accordance with virtue,” Kraut wrote. Ibid.
A BROAD UNDERSTANDING Schlesinger, “Lost Meaning,” 326.
“FROM THE RAPID PROGRESS” Robert A. Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York, 1980), 202.
THE IDEA THAT Ibid., 4–9. I also owe much to Nisbet’s “Idea of Progress: A Bibliographic Essay,” Online Library of Liberty, http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/idea-of-progress-a-bibliographical-essay-by-robert-nisbet. “Simply stated,” Nisbet wrote in his History, “the idea of progress holds that mankind has advanced in the past—from some aboriginal condition of primitiveness, barbarism, or even nullity—is now advancing, and will continue to advance through the foreseeable future….The idea must not be thought the companion of mere caprice or accident; it must be thought a part of the very scheme of things in universe and society. Advance from the inferior to the superior must seem as real and certain as anything in the laws of nature.” Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 4–5.
(“THE GODS DID NOT REVEAL”) Ibid., 11.
THE MYTH OF PROMETHEUS Ibid., 18–21.
“THE EDUCATION OF” Ibid., 61. “The Greeks contributed the seminal conception of the natural growth in time of knowledge, and accordingly the natural advance of the human condition,” Nisbet wrote.
This emphasis upon knowledge, upon the arts and sciences, is…very much a part of the Christian philosophy of history….The Christian philosophers, starting with Eusebius and Tertullian and reaching masterful and lasting expression in St. Augustine, endowed the idea of progress with new attributes which were bound to give it a spiritual force unknown to their pagan predecessors. I refer to such attributes as the vision of the unity of all mankind, the role of historical necessity, the image of progress as the unfolding through long ages of a design present from the very beginning of man’s history, and far from least, a confidence in the future that would become steadily greater and also more this-worldly in orientation as compared with next-worldly. Ibid., 47.
FOR THE AMERICAN FOUNDERS Ibid., 193–206.
“THE WHOLE HUMAN RACE” Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics, trans. Ronald L. Meek (Cambridge, 1973), 41.
“LIKE THE EBB AND FLOW” Ibid., 44.
“AMERICA IS THE HOPE” Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 193.
“EVERY MAN, AS LONG” Ibid., 191.
BY “PURSUING HIS” Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Library of Economics and Liberty, http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN13.html.
“HOW SELFISH SOEVER” Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Ryan Patrick Hanley (New York, 2009), 13.
“MACHIAVELLI, DISCOURSING ON THESE MATTERS” See, for instance, Alan Craig Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton, N.J., 2014), 146. Expanding on the point, Houston characterized Sidney’s view this way: “Only a republic could claim stability, strength, and the pursuit of the public interest, for only a republic was founded on obedience to the law, the defense of common interests, and the keeping of covenants.” Ibid., 147.
“WHAT THE TENDER POETIC YOUTH” Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 560.
“I THINK THAT” “Sojouner’s Words and Music,” Sojourner Truth Memorial Committee. See also Painter, Sojourner Truth, 121–31; 164–78. For the complicated history of the reports of Truth’s remarks, see, as noted above, ibid., 164–78.
“WE ASK,” ELIZABETH CADY STANTON TOLD Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address to the Legislature of New York, 1854,” “Women’s Rights,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/address-to-the-new-york-legislature-1854.htm.
“IF BLACK MEN” Frederick Douglass, “An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage,” The Atlantic Monthly, January 1867.
“ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO” “Remarks of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson,” May 30, 1963, http://www.usmemorialday.org/Speeches/President/may3063.txt.
“UNLESS WE ARE WILLING” Ibid.
TWO · The Long Shadow of Appomattox
THE PRINCIPLE FOR WHICH Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (New York, 1866), 749.
WE MAY SAY THAT ONLY Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial (New York, 1961), 15.
ON THE AFTERNOON OF APRIL 9, 1865 For my account of the surrender, I drew on Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative (New York, 1958), 3:939–56; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), 848–51; Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography (New York, 1935), 4:115–48. Elizabeth R. Varon, Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (New York, 2014) is an engaging and challenging study of how differing views of the surrender helped shape the conflicts of post-war America. “The two men represented competing visions of the peace,” Varon wrote.
For Grant, the Union victory was one of right over wrong. He believed that his magnanimity, no less than his victory, vindicated free society and the Union’s way of war. Grant’s eyes were on the future—a future in which Southerners, chastened and repentant, would join their Northern brethren in the march towards moral and material progress. Lee, by contrast, believed that the Union victory was one of might over right. In his view, Southerners had nothing to repent of and had survived the war with their honor and principles intact. He was intent on restoration—on turning the clock back, as much as possible, to the days when Virginia led the nation and before sectional extremism alienated the North from the South. Ibid., 1–2.
WITH A HANDSOME SWORD Foote, Civil War, 3:946.
LEE MET GRANT, WHO WORE ONLY McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 849.
THAT MORNING LEE HAD MUSED Freeman, R. E. Lee, 4:121.
“HOW EASILY I COULD” Ibid.
AS THE STORY IS TOLD Ibid.
“BUT IT IS OUR DUTY” Ibid.
“WHAT WILL BECOME
” Ibid.
GRANT, WHO ARRIVED Ibid., 4:134–35.
A DEBILITATING HEADACHE McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 848.
QUIETLY “JUBILANT,” HE RECALLED Foote, Civil War, 3:946.
CHOSE TO ENTER THE PARLOR ALONE Freeman, R. E. Lee, 4:135.
TAKING LEE’S HAND Foote, Civil War, 3:946–47.
“I MET YOU ONCE” Ibid. “I have always remembered your appearance and I think I should have recognized you anywhere,” Grant said. “Yes, I know I met you on that occasion,” Lee replied, “and I have often thought of it and tried to recollect how you looked. But I have never been able to recall a single feature.” As Foote noted, drily: “If this was a snub Grant did not realize it, or else he let it pass.” Ibid. See also Freeman, R. E. Lee, 4:135–36.
AT LAST IT FELL TO LEE Foote, Civil War, 3:947.
“I SUPPOSE, GENERAL GRANT” Ibid.
GRANT WAS MAGNANIMOUS Ibid. See also McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 849.
“PUT IN A CROP” McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 849.
“THIS WILL HAVE” Ibid.
“AS HE WAS A MAN” Foote, Civil War, 3:946.
“THE WAR IS OVER” McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 850.
AS THE TWO GENERALS PARTED Foote, Civil War, 3:950.
THE “FIERY TRIAL” Abraham Lincoln: “Second Annual Message,” December 1, 1862, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29503. Lincoln’s peroration is among the most memorable in the literature of the American presidency:
Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.” Ibid.
IN THE CREED OF THE LOST CAUSE I learned much from the Edward Pollard books cited below, as well as from W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Redeeming a Failed Revolution: Confederate Memory,” in In the Cause of Liberty, ed. Cooper and McCardell, 126–35; David W. Blight, “Traced by Blood: African Americans and the Legacies of the Civil War,” ibid., 136–53; Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), especially 255–99; Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2013) 133–96; Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, eds., The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington, Ind., 2000); Thomas L. Connelly and Barbara L. Bellows, eds., God and General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind (Baton Rouge, La., 1982); Connelly, The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (Baton Rouge, La., 1977); Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York, 1987); Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens, Ga., 2009); and Varon, Appomattox, especially 208–43; 252–55.
BETWEEN ONE IN THREE AND ONE IN FIVE Brundage, “Redeeming a Failed Revolution,” 127. For discussions of casualties in the war as a whole, see, for instance, Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, 2008), xi–xvii; Gallagher, Union War, 164–65; J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57, no. 4, (December 2011): 307–48. The overall toll, North and South, military and civilian, was, James McPherson wrote, “as great as in all of the nation’s other wars combined through Vietnam. Was the liberation of four million slaves and the preservation of the Union worth the cost? That question too will probably never cease to be debated—but in 1865 few black people and not many northerners doubted the answer.” McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 854. Faust wrote: “The American Civil War produced carnage that has often been thought reserved for the combination of technological proficiency and inhumanity characteristic of a later time.” Faust, This Republic of Suffering, xii.
MISSISSIPPI EARMARKED 20 PERCENT Brundage, “Redeeming a Failed Revolution,” 127. See also Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York, 2017), 28.
PRESTON BROOKS OF SOUTH CAROLINA Williamjames Hull Hoffer, The Caning of Charles Sumner: Honor, Idealism, and the Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore, 2010).
VIRGINIA CHOSE TO HANG JOHN BROWN Warren, Legacy of the Civil War, 40.
“THEREBY PROVED AGAIN” Ibid.
HIS STATE WAS “TOO SMALL” Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005), 769. See also Wilentz, “Why Did Southerners Secede?” in In the Cause of Liberty, 31.
THE “IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT” “The Irrepressible Conflict.; History of Slavery as a Political Issue…Speech of Hon. William H. Seward in the Senate of the United States,” NYT, March 1, 1860.
IN HIS MEMOIRS James M. McPherson, “Southern Comfort,” New York Review of Books, April 12, 2001.
“AFRICAN SERVITUDE WAS” Ibid.
HIS “CORNERSTONE SPEECH” IN SAVANNAH Alexander H. Stephens, “ ‘Corner Stone’ Speech,” March 21, 1861, TeachingAmericanHistory.org, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/cornerstone-speech/.
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S EMERGENCE Eric Foner, “The Ideology of the Republican Party” in The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans’ First Generation, ed. Robert F. Engs and Randall M. Miller (Philadelphia, 2002), 8–28; Mark E. Neely, Jr., “Politics Purified: Religion and the Growth of Antislavery Idealism in Republican Ideology During the Civil War,” ibid., 103–27; Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 679; 685.
“I AM NATURALLY” Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York, 2010), 3.
A “MONSTROUS INJUSTICE” Ibid., 66. Foner’s treatment of the Peoria speech can be found ibid., 63–70.
“LET US RE-ADOPT” Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Peoria, Illinois,” Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln2/1:282.1?rgn=div2;view=fulltext.
“IF ALL EARTHLY POWER” Ibid.
MY FIRST IMPULSE Ibid.
WAS “ALWAYS CALCULATING” Goldsmith, Growth of Presidential Power, 2:894.
HE REJECTED ANY COMPROMISE Foner, Fiery Trial, 144–57; and Ronald C. White, Jr., A. Lincoln: A Biography (New York, 2009), 360–61. See also Harold Holzer, Lincoln President Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter (New York, 2008); and William J. Cooper, Jr., We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860–April 1861 (New York, 2012).
BY THE SUMMER OF 1862 Foner, Fiery Trial, 206–47. The Second Confiscation Act, passed and signed in July 1862, was also a critical turning point. “The bill…authorized the president to warn all supporters of the Confederacy to abandon the rebellion or face the confiscation and sale by federal courts of their property,” Foner wrote. “The ninth section declared ‘forever free of their servitude’ all rebel-owned slaves who escaped to Union lines or lived in Confederate territory subsequently occupied by Union troops.” Ibid., 215.
TO PREPARE PUBLIC OPINION Ibid., 228–29.
“MY PARAMOUNT OBJECT” “Letter to Horace Greeley,” Abraham Lincoln Online.org, http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm.
BY SPEAKING OF Foner, Fiery Trial, 229.
IN
THE WAKE OF THE CONFEDERATE SETBACK Ibid., 230–31.
LINCOLN TOLD HIS CABINET Ibid., 231.
HE HAD DRAFTED Ibid.; Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, 2:362–64.
HE HAD, HE TOLD THEM Ibid., 2:363.
WITH THE PRELIMINARY EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION Foner, Fiery Trial, 231. See also “Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, 1862,” American Originals, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals_iv/sections/preliminary_emancipation_proclamation.html. See also Foner, Fiery Trial, 206–89, for a complete treatment, as well as Allen Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York, 2004). The Proclamation, the twentieth-century historian C. Vann Woodward remarked, transformed the war for the North. “For one thing, it helped to elevate the war to a new plane,” Woodward wrote. “It was still a war for union, but not as before—a war for union with slavery. It was no longer merely a war against something [secession] but for something, a war for something greatly cherished in American tradition and creed, a war for freedom. What had started as a war for political ends had, by virtue of military necessity, undergone a metamorphosis into a higher and finer thing, a war for moral ends.” Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge, La., 1993), 73.
THE WORDS THAT JULIA WARD HOWE HAD WRITTEN Julia Ward Howe, “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” The Atlantic Monthly, February 1862.
“THE UNION” Woodward, Burden of Southern History, 84.
“YOUR RACE ARE SUFFERING” Abraham Lincoln, “Address on Colonization to a Deputation of Negroes,” Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 5, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln5/1:812?rgn=div1;view=fulltext.