In Old Maine Cemeteries

It was mostly in old, family cemeteries that we found graves of Revolutionary War soldiers. Last week my wife accompanied me on an exploration of rural Maine, one of my favorite activities. Since I’ve been up every road within a 25-mile radius of my home town of Lovell, Maine, It’s become necessary to range farther afield if I’m to survey new territory. Heading east, we found ourselves in the Hebron/Buckfield area with my dog-eared Maine Gazetteer. As a retired history teacher, I felt compelled to stop at every cemetery along the way because they provide a quick, thumbnail sketch of local history.

Well, I shouldn’t claim we stopped at every cemetery. From the road, I could tell if each set of plots was old or new. If I only saw modern, granite stones from the 20th century, I’d pass on by, but if I spotted weathering marble headstones, I knew they were from the 19th century. The oldest stones were dark slate and most of those were from the 18th century. Well-tended cemeteries displayed small American flags on graves containing veterans of America’s wars. Each flag was held up by an iron medallion stuck in the ground next to the headstone with an embossed insignia designating the war in which the soldier buried there fought.

Civil War veterans are so designated by an embossed circle with “GAR” in the middle for “Grand Army of the Republic.” Revolutionary War soldiers’ graves show a circle with a period soldier carrying a musket and wearing a tricorne hat. Some of those gravestones were of weathered marble if they survived into the eighteen hundreds, which many did. Acid rain has taken a toll on those stones, but the older, slate stones have held up well and the lettering remains easy to read.

Most roads lead into the center of town in Hebron which is dominated by the well-tended grounds and buildings of Hebron Academy. It was founded in 1804 by Revolutionary War veterans who were given land grants in town in payment for their service by Commonwealth of Massachusetts, of which Maine was a part — until 1820 when it became its own state along with Missouri. Notable Hebron Academy graduates include Leon Leonwood Bean, or L. L. Bean as he is better known, as well as Hannibal Hamlin who was Lincoln’s first Vice President. Other alumni include Freelan Oscar Stanley, inventor of the Stanley Steamer and Maine comedian Tim Sample.

Finding the grave of a Revolutionary War soldier in an untended cemetery off in the woods brought a certain sadness. While all veterans deserve respect, it seems the men who went out from their farms and shops and fought the most powerful military on earth deserve a bit more of it. They risked the most because even if they weren’t killed or wounded, should their side lose they would lose everything. The British weren’t kind to defeated rebels — as they’d shown over and over in Ireland. Those with the most property had the most to lose, and most who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence were men of means.

Those old, untended cemeteries were symbolic of something else that saddened me. They made me reflect on recent trends in public education, especially that study of the subject I taught. American History has been watered down by progressive educators both during my career and after. Fewer young people are learning what those first American rebels risked in the late 18th century when they demanded rights from England and staked everything they had on those demands. Few students today are taught what is unique about the United States of America — that no other country in history was founded on an idea.

That idea is that government exists to preserve our God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. How much happiness one obtains in that pursuit is usually gauged according to individual initiative and perseverance. That’s what those Revolutionary veterans fought for and that’s what has been preserved by veterans of America’s subsequent wars — those buried under the rest of the little flags in those old cemeteries.

Today’s students instead learn a history emphasizing America’s carbuncles as if the United States were the only country to countenance slavery. Ignored are historical facts showing that virtually all nations practiced it, including American Indian tribes living here before Europeans arrived. All that is ignored now as students learn about “white privilege” and old white guys who owned slaves. De-emphasized or ignored altogether are old white guys who led movements to abolish slavery and who died by the thousands in that pursuit.

Men buried in those old cemeteries were not perfect and neither was their country. Such a thing is impossible this side of heaven, but ours is the country likely to get closest — if we stick to the ideas upon which it was founded. Keep that in mind on Veteran’s Day, November 11th.

Political Tensions in America: 1860 and 2018

Growing political divisions in our country worry me. I used to help students understand what lead Americans to kill each other by the thousands between 1861 and 1865, and now I see tensions building again. Could America be heading for another civil war? I sure hope not, but I can’t ignore what I’m seeing around me.

A left-wing sniper last year fired over 200 rounds at a group of Republican congressmen at a baseball practice just outside Washington DC and nearly killed one, crippling him for life. This year a congresswoman told her constituents to harass Trump cabinet members saying: “They won’t be able to go to a restaurant, they won’t be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop at a department store. The people are going to turn on them. They’re going to protest. They’re absolutely going to harass them until they decide that they’re going to tell the president, ‘No, I can’t hang with you.’”

Radical, left-wing “Antifa” groups attack whomever they perceive as “fascist” with increasing frequency and define the term to include most Republicans and conservatives. Bloody street brawls are getting commonplace. Other radical left groups advocate assassinations on twitter and other social media. Radical, right-wing activists have shot abortion doctors. The New York Times reports: “At least 11 people have been killed in attacks on abortion clinics in the United States since 1993.” A woman was run over and killed by a “Unite The Right” activist in Charlottesville last year.

With all this in mind, I invited local Civil War historian William Marvel of Conway, NH to appear on my “Left and Right” show and get his opinion. He’s at work on his 18th book about that awful conflict and I opened by asking him if he sees parallels between the political divisions in 2018 and 1860.

“Well, in many ways I do,” he said. “There is certainly the same sort of polarization, fragmentation among the major parties, hostility for opposing viewpoints.” He related a discussion with a friend at the local dump after the 2016 election “about whether we are more divided now than we have been since the Civil War. My conclusion was that we are as divided now. Whether it will lead to the same thing, I doubt.”

“Oh good,” I said.

“But that’s only because divisions are among communities, not between communities. The geographic cohesiveness of the slave issue allowed for a regional contest… but certainly, the seeds of societal and governmental dissolution are there [now], through simple fragmentation and hostility toward government, depending on who’s in charge.”

I remembered sound bites preceding documentaries on the Civil War describing that conflict as father against son and brother against brother. Well, today’s divisions have affected my family,” I said. “We no longer discuss politics at family gatherings. It’s verboten now because it’s become so emotional it threatens relationships.”

Marvel said he’s had similar experiences. Though his immediate family has almost all passed on, “I’ve had… virtually altercations with friends with whom I used to be in political concert.” He said he used to be liberal and twice voted for Obama, but now people perceive him as conservative. He doesn’t see that he’s changed much though. “To me, it’s society. In moving much farther to the left, society has made me look more conservative.”

I then asked him to consider the Bolshevik Revolution/Russian civil war a century ago that didn’t have clear geographical delineations but was ideological with a left and right divide.

“Well, we have certainly a lot of mob violence now,” he said, “almost entirely on the left…” Referring to Congresswoman Maxine Waters incitement he said, “An economic uprising among urban masses is possible, but whether that would lead to bloodshed I don’t know because, well, New York certainly has strict gun laws and I don’t know if a revolution could succeed on six-round magazines.”

He then speculated on the possibility of armed conflict that might spark a civil war. “That might come from outside. Oftentimes, when individual nations are divided between themselves, neighbors or rivals will take advantage of that. That often creates an international conflict that foments an internal rebellion. But the emotional impetus for that certainly is there.”

Mention of emotion led to a discussion of the Justice Kavanaugh hearings in the Senate as a window on America’s ever-deepening political divide. “Although I don’t know… how I would feel about [Kavanaugh] as a Supreme Court Justice, it’s more important now that he be confirmed to discredit and disavow the process that’s been used to try to destroy him. That’s more important, I think, than whatever his rise to the Supreme Court might yield.”

I’ll post a link to the hour-long discussion with Bill Marvel here in the next day or two after it’s uploaded to Youtube.