Is government the enemy?
To show you how times have changed: once upon a time the federal government was considered the very heart and soul of the country. An attack on it was considered an attack on American democracy itself.
How many people think that is the case today? Not as many as in 1861, I’ll bet.
Let me explain.
On April 12, 1861, Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, S.C., was bombarded and forced to surrender. The Civil War was on.
In Uniontown, newspaper editor Edward G. Roddy editorialized: “Amidst the civilizations of the 19th century, we are on the brink of ruin, despotism and destruction.”
Actually, for the moment, it was Roddy himself who seemed to be on the brink of ruin.
In the wake of Sumter’s capitulation, a deafening patriotic chorus swelled across the North. In Uniontown, bands of boys and men crowded the sidewalks and streets and moved in and out of bars.
On every street corner, songs mingled with angry denunciations of Roddy and his paper, the staunchly Democratic The Genius of Liberty.
Now that hostilities had commenced, few citizens had patience with the paper’s anti-Republican, anti-administration and anti-Lincoln positions.
Talk ran wild: was Roddy a secessionist, a traitor?
On April 16, Roddy received the first of many threatening messages. It demanded that the editor unfurl the Stars and Stripes atop the Genius of Liberty building before midnight. If not, the office would be “gutted.”
There was worst to come. Three “valiant Republicans,” as Roddy sarcastically called them, threatened to see that Roddy was crucified.
“To the credit of the town,” Roddy wrote several weeks later, ” the threats were never carried out.”
Thank goodness.
Now, you might be thinking: the county was a hotbed of Republicanism. Wrong. It was a Democratic stronghold. Not once did Abraham Lincoln carry Fayette County. Not even in 1864.
Nevertheless, in the spring of 1861, Roddy soon got the message to tone down his opposition, to cool it.
“We owe allegiance to the Federal Government,” he wrote, “and are duty bound to sustain, protect and defend it without any reference whatsoever to the person who may administer it. It behooves every citizen to prepare for the defense of his Government … .”
The first Sunday of the Civil War, the Rev. R.M. Wallace of the First Presbyterian Church in Brownsville thundered from the pulpit: “It is the duty of all citizens to aid the constitutional authorities in maintaining the supremacy of the Constitution and the laws.”
Soon enough, local citizen-soldiers were streaming to the Capitol to protect Washington against the Confederate army.
One of those enlisting was a Uniontown attorney by the name of Joshua Howell, a fiercely partisan Democrat, which meant, in the days before the war, he sided with the South, more or less, over slavery. Several years earlier, he had represented a Morgantown slave owner who went to court to demand that his runaway slaves, who had fled to Uniontown, be returned.
Howell won the case.
Howell assumed command of the 85th Pennsylvania Regiment. He called on men to fight in a “great and momentous Struggle” that would “determine the integrity of the Union and the permanence of our free institutions.”
Howell was killed in front of Petersburg, Va., in 1864.
Today, the government in Washington is held by a great many people, including several who are running for president, to be the enemy of freedom. “An all-encompassing animosity toward the government and its institutions” is a hallmark, as Philip Gourevitch has pointed out, of Donald Trump’s campaign.
Assailing the federal government for partisan gridlock is one thing. And it’s perfectly fine to point out that Washington is in enthrall to the moneyed-elite and special interests.
But trashing the government as a general proposition and calling it despotic is something else all together.
A little while ago the then governor of Texas suggested his state could legally secede from the Union. Most people got a good chuckle at Gov. Perry’s expense.
Nobody, however, was laughing in 1861, when an attack on the government was an attack on the country.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books- “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.