The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic - Hardcover

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Michael Medved’s daily three-hour radio program, The Michael Medved Show, reaches five million listeners on more than three hundred stations coast to coast. He is the author of twelve other books, including the bestsellers The 10 Big Lies About America, Hollywood vs. America, Hospital, and What Really Happened to the Class of ’65? He is a member of USA Today’s board of contributors, is a former chief film critic for the New York Post, and, for more than a decade, cohosted Sneak Previews, the weekly movie-review show on PBS. Medved is an honors graduate of Yale with departmental honors in American history. He lives with his family in the Seattle area.

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The Glorious Fourth

Dedication, Death, and Fifty Years of Miracles

Coincidence alone could never explain it: that much seemed obvious to Americans of 1826, just as it does to citizens of today. The eerie events of that epochal Independence Day suggested the intervention of supernatural forces, mixing death and dedication in such powerful ways that observers of all faiths, and of no faith, saw evidence of destiny’s direction in American affairs. Even now, after nearly two hundred years of turbulent history, recollections of that “Glorious Fourth” can compel the most skeptical scholars to acknowledge weird, wonderful aspects in the rise of the Republic, and to reconsider the disconcerting old idea that God shows special tenderness toward the American experiment.

On the occasion of the fiftieth Fourth of July, such confidence in providential protection seemed not only logical but unavoidable. After all, the older citizens of the federal Union had already witnessed a half century of miracles, highlighted by the new nation’s prodigious growth and unprecedented prosperity. Americans viewed themselves as a chosen people, selected for special responsibilities to accompany their special blessings, and so looked to biblical references to establish the proper context for major public celebrations.

The preparations for the anniversary repeatedly invoked the Old Testament notion of jubilee, citing a well-known verse in Leviticus: “And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout all the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto you” (25:10). After all, a portion of this same verse had been inscribed onto the Liberty Bell itself--already a cherished national icon just two generations after it reputedly rang out in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall to celebrate signing of the Declaration.

A half century later, leaders in every corner of the country arranged for pealing bells in cities, villages, and crossroads churches, in recognition of the breathtaking growth of the young Republic. The most recent census showed almost twelve million inhabitants--nearly five times the population that had launched a world-changing revolution. Even more dramatic, a loose coalition of thirteen thinly settled colonies, clinging to a relatively narrow band of territory at the edge of the Atlantic, had given way to twenty-four flourishing states with plausible dreams of an American empire someday reaching all the way to the Pacific.

In the midst of this dizzying change, Americans of the era clung to their precious remaining connections to the nation’s heroic origins, expressing special gratitude for the unlikely survival of the two titans who had played the most prominent roles in declaring independence. At a time when male life expectancy barely reached forty years, John Adams, the “Atlas of Independence” and the second president of the United States, had passed his ninetieth birthday with his faculties and health remarkably intact. From his ancestral home outside of Boston, he watched with passionate engagement as his oldest son (and intellectual soul mate) presided over the government in faraway Washington as the sixth president. In fact, one of the former chief executive’s doctors reported that the inauguration of his son in 1825 actually enhanced the old man’s strength and vitality. “But physicians do not always consider how much the powers of the mind, and what is called good spirits, can recover the lost energies of the body,” wrote Benjamin Waterhouse to President John Quincy Adams. “I really believe that your father’s revival is mainly owing to the demonstration that his son has not served an ungrateful public.”

Six hundred miles away, at the elegant hilltop plantation house he had designed for himself, Adams’s old friend (and sometime bitter rival) Thomas Jefferson also defied the actuarial tables. At eighty-three, the third president struggled with various digestive and urinary tract afflictions, but he received frequent visitors and maintained a prolific correspondence, commenting eloquently on current affairs. He told his grandson that “I am like an old watch, with a pinion worn out here, and a wheel there, until I can go no longer.” He also carefully prepared for his own demise, penning a valedictory poem to his adored surviving daughter, enclosing it in a simple, elegant box she opened only after his death:

Then farewell, my dear, my lov’d daughter, adieu!

The last pang of life is in parting from you!

Yet even with his intensifying focus on his own mortality, Jefferson expressed a fierce determination to survive one more Fourth of July so that “he might breathe the air of the Fiftieth Anniversary.”

As the great day approached, organizers of the elaborate public festivities in all of the nation’s most important cities turned their attention to Adams and Jefferson as potential guests to lend historic weight to their celebrations. In the Continental Congress of 1776, it had been Adams who led the relentless fight for independence and who, once he had succeeded, recommended his young friend Jefferson to draft the declaration that would explain the decision to a wondering world. Now, of the fifty-six patriots who had affixed their signatures to that final document, only these two and one more--eighty-eight-year-old Charles Carroll of Maryland--were alive to see the half-century commemoration of their handiwork.

Despite pleas from every corner of the country, frail health and the rigors of travel made the journey unthinkable for each of the old men. Adams would have dearly loved to join his son at the White House to preside together over the capital’s Grand Jubilee, but a journey to Washington would have consumed more than five days, rattling over rough roads in stiflingly hot stagecoaches and making brief water passages on belching, filthy steamboats.

Instead, he received visitors in the sprawling, comfortably cluttered two-story Quincy residence, Peacefield, he had called home since 1788. He had inhabited the house for the quarter century since disillusioned voters turned him out of the White House after his single term, following an exceptionally nasty and painfully personal campaign waged against him by followers of Jefferson, his old friend. Adams and his wife, Abigail, first acquired the structure and its forty acres of verdant fields and orchards at the conclusion of his diplomatic service in Europe following the Revolution; it stood just down a country road from the modest saltbox home in which he had been born and raised, and from the similarly unassuming neighboring structure in which his son John Quincy first opened his eyes to the New England sunlight. The old man still owned both buildings and hoped to keep them in the family for perpetuity. His beloved Abigail had left him a widower eight years before with her reported last words, “Do not grieve, my friend, my dearest friend. I am ready to go. And John, it will not be long.” She rested now in the local churchyard, where her husband of fifty-four years meant to join her when his time came.

Leaders from Boston hoped to lure the old lion to the festive commemorations they had planned in the nearby city, but Adams declined to make the ten-mile trip. He even turned down the local Independence Day committee from Quincy, though he provided them with a sharply worded letter they could read aloud at the upcoming anniversary. He wrote: “My best wishes, in the joys, and festivities, and the solemn services of that day on which will be completed the fiftieth year from its birth, of the independence of the United States: a memorable epoch in the annals of the human race, destined in future history to form the...