Political Division in America

My political leanings are no secret, so no one who knows me should be surprised that I am excited to see noon on Wednesday, January 20.With that said, this inauguration will be like no other in American history, with perhaps the notable exception of Abraham Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861. From the Wikipedia entry for Lincoln's first inauguration: 

On Inauguration Day, Lincoln's procession to the Capitol was surrounded by heavily armed cavalry and infantry, providing an unprecedented amount of protection for the President-elect as the nation stood on the brink of war. During the 16 weeks between Lincoln's victory in the 1860 presidential election and Inauguration Day, seven slave states had declared their secession from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America.

This week, some 25,000 National Guard soldiers, plus no doubt the entire alphabet soup of Federal and District of Columbia law enforcement, will be deployed to safeguard the Capitol and the new President and Vice President.

Those who have studied beyond the 11th-grade high school American History class full of platitudes and thinly-veiled jingoism understand that political division has characterized our public discourse from the very beginning. We lump our Founding Fathers and those we call the Framers of the Constitution into a monolithic group, oblivious to the deep ideological differences and personal rivalries that drove many of the decisions they made. Many considered Patrick Henry ("give me liberty or give me death") a kook, Thomas Paine (author of Common Sense) a whacko, and Alexander Hamilton devoid of principle other than advancing his own ambition. The personal animosity between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams is well documented, as is their eventual reconciliation. But the fact that George Washington himself was not universally idolized among those early politicians is not as widely known.

In his excellent biography of Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, historian Stephen Fried recounts a letter from former President John Adams to Dr. Rush, his old friend from the heady days of Philadelphia in 1776. Adams writes in February, 1805:

Is virtue the principle of our Government? Is honor? Or is ambition and avarice adulation, baseness, covetousness, the thirst of riches, indifference concerning the means of rising and enriching, the contempt of principle, the Spirit of party and of faction, the motive and the principle that governs? These are Serious and dangerous questions; but serious men ought not to flinch from dangerous questions.

Two centuries later, the questions raised by Adams deserve our attention again, as they do in every generation.