Tonight, and in some nights past when I have been worried, I listened to what, to my ears, is the most inspirational, the most stirring, song ever written by an American. Listened to it twice today, once in the car this afternoon, once right before penning these lines.
There are only a few presidential elections that have the importance of that coming in a fortnight. The first, Washington's, has to rank as the most important, just to prove it could be done. The second, Adams', to prove the first was no fluke and we could do it again. And the third, Jefferson's, to show that an incumbent president could be defeated and that power could peacefully be transferred to another party.
After that the culture was sort of set.
But then came 1860. The election of Abraham Lincoln dissolved the United States. And it took all of Lincoln's first term, and then some, to win it back. 1864 proved the unthinkable, that a democracy could hold an election in the midst of civil war.
2016 presents the gravest threat to democracy in America as we have known it ever. Lincoln's elections won back the territory of the divided nation. 2016's is for the soul. The soul is a mutable thing but noone thought the soul of the country was in such danger of mutation. A significantly mutated soul is going to alter the machinery by which the nation works and once that machinery is retooled to accommodate the new soul it can take on a life of its own, as machines do. You start it up and it can be difficult to stop.
In the election of 2016 the soul of America and the form of government both, that machinery, is in the balance as never before.
And so in this quadrennial national "crisis," in Tocqueville's formulation, I think about and listen ro and read the lyrics of the home-grown song written in 1861, before that other territorial crisis that mutated into the defining moral battle in the history of the New Republic. Lincoln himself did not
grasp the morality involved, how the moral quality of the American soul was at stake, as well as the contours of its territory. The Battle Hymn of the Republic defined it long before Lincoln did. This should be America's national anthem.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p5mmFPyDK_8
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the 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 watch-fires 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)
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal";
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.
(Chorus)
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Since God is marching on.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
(Chorus)
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Our God is marching on.
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.
(Chorus)
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
While God is marching on.
