[The start of a new year means my annual series on historic anniversaries. Leading up to a weekend post on some of what I’m planning for my Spring semester sabbatical!]
On losses, commemorations, and a moment that captures both as well as their limits.
I tend to want to highlight lesser-known histories as part of these anniversaries series, but some famous moments are just too iconic to ignore. And if we set aside assassinations and other violent deaths, I don’t think there are any deaths in American history more justifiably famous nor more understandably iconic than those of Thomas Jefferson and (just a few hours later) John Adams on July 4th, 1826. And while it’s a striking coincidence that both men passed on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (or at least of its first public reading; as I’ve noted here before, Adams had made the case for the 2nd as the real anniversary), I think these joint deaths have remained iconic precisely because they illustrate the passing of the Revolutionary generation and the concurrent need to remember those founding Americans. Just as with the 1990s development of the “Greatest Generation” narrative, it took those five decades and especially their evolving losses to really cement the mythos around the Revolution and its most famous figures.
As Revolutionary War historian and Adams Papers editor L.H. Butterfield argues in this thoughtful 1955 American Heritage article, the nation’s July 4th commemorations during that 50th anniversary year were inseparable from those interconnected, symbolic deaths and losses. But at the same time, the “Jubilee” celebrations in both Washington and around the country were also without question a reflection of the nation’s present, and especially of its newly expanded global presence as illustrated by the period’s “Monroe Doctrine.” One of the things I love most about Michael Kammen’s Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991) is how comprehensively he makes the case for commemoration as contemporary commentary—not because it can’t connect to the pasts it officially commemorates, but because it is always something constructed in and for the present and its issues, debates, and needs. While the 1826 Jubilee was certainly related to the life and loss of men like Jefferson and Adams, it was (as Butterfield likewise nicely argues) also and even more clearly related to the life and influence of the current president, John’s son John Quincy Adams.
Not too far from JQA’s Washington, in Alexandria, Virginia, occurred another 1826 moment that connects to both Revolutionary losses and commemorations in complex and crucial ways. During the construction of the new St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church, which was located next to the historic Old Presbyterian Meeting House, the remains of a man in a Continental Army uniform were unearthed. That soldier has never been identified, but thanks to local historian Mary Gregory Powell about a century later the find and spot were turned into a memorial, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution. That commemoration of a lost soldier, whose remains were discovered in the same year as Jefferson’s and Adams’s passings, offers a powerfully symbolic parallel to the year’s overarching trends and stories. And yet I would also note that it serves as a reminder that the Revolution, like every moment in American history, was defined more by the countless individuals and communities we haven’t remembered well than by the few focal figures who have remained famous and iconic. Of all these 1826 moments, then, I’d single out the unknown soldier as a particularly important one.
Next historic anniversary tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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