For all the pomp and circumstance of its presentation, there is something admirably humble about America’s national anthem.
Britain’s anthem is cartoonish, with its repeated entreaties to “save” an already-well-secured monarch and its insistence that God is destined to “scatter” the “knavish” enemies of the crown.
France’s anthem is utopian, with all those references to the “child of the fatherland,” the “day of glory,” and the prospect of “impure blood” watering the fields.
And well they might. Today, we celebrate July 4 in the knowledge that the nation it birthed has been a smashing success. When they began their journey toward independence, though, the Founders enjoyed no such guarantees. Benjamin Franklin’s quip that his comrades must “all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately” was meant literally: As Lincoln would later observe, Thomas Jefferson’s document did, indeed, contain “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,” and “a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression,” but it was also treason — and the penalty for treason was death.
Then, as so often afterwards, “does that star-spangled banner yet wave?” was an open question, for it was not guaranteed that the new nation would survive its push for independence, or that it would survive its first properly contested election, or that it would survive the War of 1812. The Civil War could well have ended the United States, as could have the Great Depression, World War II, and the rise of global communism.
Eschewing principle, the colonists could have succumbed to the Declaratory Act. Rejecting Cincinnatus’s example, George Washington could have chosen to stay in office. Ignoring Matthew 12:25, Abraham Lincoln could have forsaken Fort Sumter. We are here because they all took a different course.<
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