These are the times that try men's souls.
Tom Paine wrote that opening sentence of the popular pamphlet that came to
be known as "Common Sense" even before there was a United States of America.
At the time, his countrymen were still fighting for the rights of Š
Englishmen. And still proclaiming allegiance to His Majesty George III.
The war that had had begun at Concord and Lexington in the spring of 1775
would only later become the war for American independence. The struggle was
less than a year old when Tom Paine's stirring words appeared, and people
were already war-weary.
Nor was the country united behind the Patriots' cause, In the glow of all
the Fourth of July celebrations since, we forget how evenly, and bitterly,
the country was divided before there was even a first Fourth of July.
We forget, too, how often the times that try men's souls keep returning in a
national history entwined with so contentious and flammable an idea as
freedom, or as Tom Paine would print it in his pamphlet, FREEDOM.
Instead, we tend to assume there is such a thing as Normalcy in the affairs
of men and nations, and conclude that war is but a temporary aberration -
and one we can avoid at that. All we need do is withdraw from the world's
problems, the theory goes, and peace will reign.
Isolationism must be the most characteristic and enduring of American
illusions, which is natural enough in a New World where the plagues of the
Old were to be left safely behind.
But as an American general who fought in more than one terrible conflict -
Douglas MacArthur - noted in his valedictory address, only the dead have
seen the end of war.
Almost a century after Tom Paine, as another conflict threatened to divide
the country, literally, another rhetorician urged an embattled president to
avoid war at all costs, even if the price included the Union itself. "Let
the erring sisters go in peace," Horace Greeley wrote in his influential New
York Tribune.
Instead, Abraham Lincoln would accept war rather than let this one nation
become two. And the most devastating war in American history was under way.
Almost immediately a joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War
was formed to second-guess the president - and his generals - at every
difficult turn.
Dissension grew on all sides; defeatism set in; unity eroded. In the next
congressional elections, amid the chaos of civil war, Mr. Lincoln's party
would drop 22 seats in the House.