By Allen C. Guelzo
Friday, July 03, 2026
Growing up in the early 1960s, nothing captured my
imagination more than a history magazine: American Heritage. While other
kids buried their noses in Mad and Batman, I was entranced by American
Heritage’s golden spread-eagle logo, the hardbound magazine covers, the
full-color reproductions of historic paintings, and the “junior” book
histories. And the “heritage” its articles celebrated was an open-armed jubilee
for what the magazine’s founding editor, Bruce Catton, called “that great,
unfinished, and illogically inspiring story of the American people doing and
being and becoming.”
A lifetime later, we are playing with a new definition of
heritage. If I access a Substack that flies under the banner “Heritage
Americans,” I learn that heritage now means being a lineal descendant of
“Protestant, English-speaking, Northwestern Europeans, primarily English, who
birthed the American nation, starting from Jamestown in 1607 to approximately
the 1870s.” Another website insists
that being a “heritage American” is best understood as “involving seven
inheritances: the English language, Christianity, self-government, Christian
government, liberty, equality under the law, and relationship with the physical
land.”
And whether he clearly intended this or not, Vice
President Vance almost made this definition of heritage official when he explained last July that “America is not just an idea,” and
that being an American is not “purely agreement with the creedal principles of
America.” It’s “a particular place with a particular people and a particular
set of beliefs and way of life.”
***
No one had better claim to the kind of heritage the
Substacks are describing than Abraham Lincoln. His most distant ancestors had
arrived at the peak of New England’s “Great Migration” of the 1630s; his
grandfather had fought in the Revolution, and several very distant relatives
had held office in Massachusetts politics.
But it never occurred to Lincoln to define himself as an
American in any other terms but those of 1776 and the principles of the
Declaration of Independence. He said in 1861 that the Revolution was about
“something even more than National Independence . . . something that held out a
great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come.” That
“something” was the Declaration’s announcement that all men are created
equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and
that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Lincoln
did not enter his plea against slavery by appealing to English common law, to
purple mountain majesties or to 17th-century bloodlines, but to certain
inherent principles which were hardwired into every human being and a
“proposition” to which Americans then “dedicated” themselves.
Lincoln was fully aware how much the landscape of America
had been changed by the crush of immigration in his day. “Perhaps half our
people,” he said in 1858, “are not descendants at all” of the Revolutionary
generation; “they are men who have come from Europe — German, Irish, French and
Scandinavian.” However, they have only to take up the Declaration, and there
they find
that those old men
say that ‘We hold these truths to be self -evident, that all men are created
equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day
evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral
principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were
blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that
Declaration, and so they are.
Like that golden spread-eagle in my old magazine, the
Declaration fires the imagination of everyone willing to grab hold of it. It is
the “electric cord,” Lincoln continued, “that links the hearts of patriotic and
liberty-loving men . . . as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of
men throughout the world.” Rather than “giving up that principle,” Lincoln
said, “I would rather be assassinated.” Which he was, and by John Wilkes Booth,
one of the supreme examples of those who believed that race, language, and
culture defined our heritage rather than a “proposition.”
Booth was hardly the only one who subscribed to such
notions. The paladin of the pro-slavery argument, John Calhoun, argued frankly
that the Declaration was an error, and that liberty was “a reward to be earned,
not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike.” And it was one of the
basic convictions of the monarchs and aristocracies of the 19th century that no
state founded simply upon a “proposition” — much less, one about human equality
— could survive. The turn-of-the-century reactionary, Joseph de Maistre,
sneered at the idea that “a political constitution could be written and created
a priori.” Declarations of great ideas are, at the end of the day, only
tracks of ink on paper and “would be useless to a people alien to liberty.”
Sixty-five years later, sitting in the House of Commons,
Sir John Ramsden cheered the outbreak of the Civil War as the bursting of “the
great republican bubble,” and the king of Belgium rejoiced that the American
Civil War would “raise a barrier against the United States and provide a
support for the monarchical-aristocratic principle in the Southern states.”
This was what forced Lincoln to the conclusion that whatever else the “great
civil war” represented, it was fundamentally a test that would determine “whether
this nation or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”
***
In 1863, a Danish-born captain named Hans Peter Jorgensen
set out a brief explanation of why he had volunteered for service in the Union
army. It had nothing to do with blood or soil, or the English language or the
“physical land.” It was much simpler for him: “Freedom is the same everywhere,
and I cheerfully give my life in its defense. I would give more if I had it.”
His comrades in the 15th Massachusetts buried him in the Evergreen Cemetery at
Leominster three weeks after he was killed at Gettysburg. Is there any, even
among the most ardent “new heritage” promoters, who will not say that that
burial plot is as sacred an American soil as any other acre on the continent?
It’s because we are the offspring of a great idea that we
do not need to check our genealogical charts to see if we qualify. We may well
be the offspring of any nationality (and we are usually the offspring of more
than we think, as historical DNA analysis will confirm). But in a larger sense,
we are also the children of Washington and Madison, of Abraham Lincoln and
Frederick Douglass, of Ma Ingalls and Ida Straus. And that golden spread-eagle
still embraces us all.
No comments:
Post a Comment