April: A Consequential Month for America
Hope for another consequential April day
By Tim Wilson
As I write this, we’re just a few days into May. In the past few weeks, I’ve been reminded by a couple of TV shows and a book that over the course of American history, April has been a quite consequential month in both good and bad ways.
In the beginning
It was April of 1775 when a push by the British came to a shove back by American colonists in the form of the shot heard ‘round the world in a pre-dawn mist on Lexington Green.
Typically, its Opening Day and baseball that we think of when hearing the expression: “Hope springs eternal.” But the pursuit of a pennant pales in comparison to April of 1775 when the hopes of a not-yet birthed nation hung on the audaciousness of farmers and tradesmen, bookkeepers and fishermen, to think they could take on the then-greatest fighting force in the world.
Growing up and living in Greater Boston and being a history buff, I’ve always connected April with the beginnings of our nation’s fight for independence. A book I’ve been reading by Stacy Schiff, “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams” reminds me why the motto of Lexington, Mass., is “What a Glorious Morning for America!” Certainly, a lot happened between April 19, 1775, and the surrender of the British at Yorktown in October of 1781. None of it happens, however, if Adams and his Sons of Liberty crew don’t stir things up enough to motivate minutemen from every Middlesex village and town to rush to Concord and chase the British back to Boston.
The Battle of Lexington and Concord gave America a lead in the first-inning of that particular World Series. But it didn’t keep the home team from going down by a lot more than 3 games to none while facing a truly evil empire. It did, however, provide inspiration that carried George Washington and his ragtag army through some tough times until Benjamin Franklin swung a monumental deal that brought in fresh arms from France to shore up the bullpen.
Another book by Schiff, “A Great Improvisation: Benjamin Franklin, France, and the Birth of America”, has been brought to life in an Apple TV miniseries and tells how Franklin was the master negotiator and manipulator who pulled off the mid-season acquisition of all time. This show has also brought into focus just how ballsy Franklin and his fellow founding fathers were when they decided to take on the British. And just like many other big moments that turned an idea into action, it took a first gutsy move on one April morning to set things in motion.
The end of the beginning
April is the month an idea started turning into a new reality for the world, but it is also when the world looked on and wondered if this idea had run its course.
On April 12, 1861, Confederate artillery opened fire on the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, S.C., sparking the U.S. Civil War. Cannon balls may have bombarded the walls of the fort that day but the damage to the Union had been under way internally since its birth. The original sin of slavery was a cancer that grew at the nation’s core from the start when the foundational words of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” were denied a place in the formation of our government.
As the nation grew that cancer metastasized, and the body politic was fighting itself. It became clear that highly invasive measures were required to save the union and somehow remove the cancer. What began in April of 1861 was an unscheduled but inevitable surgical procedure that would last four years and be bloody, devastating and excruciatingly painful for the patient and the surgeons.
After four years, on April 9, 1865, the last of the tumors were removed with the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. This stopped the spread of the cancer, but the nation was torn apart. Fortunately, the man who oversaw the operation knew long before its conclusion that the healing process would be lengthy with a need for extensive post-op treatment. He prescribed years earlier in Gettysburg that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Sadly, less than a week later, on another consequential and tragic April day, those plans for healing were derailed by a madman who took Abraham Lincoln’s life.
A long delayed new beginning
Yet another recent TV series reminded me just how different things might have been. “Manhunt”, a Netflix miniseries, chronicles Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s search for Lincoln’s assassin. Beyond the story of the manhunt, we are reminded how Lincoln and Stanton’s plans for Reconstruction to bind up the nation’s wounds were thwarted by President Andrew Johnson and others, leaving the nation’s still gaping wound open, and mostly untreated.
Fortunately, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments passed between 1865 and 1870, and ultimately the Civil Rights Act of 1964, applied some measure of therapy and treatment, but an infection remained. We were reminded of that on the evening of April 4, 1968, when another healer, Martin Luther King Jr., was shot down in Memphis.
The nation’s wounds from that April date and others remain, but I think we can say they are no longer denied. The healing continues and will for a long time. As individual Americans what we can do is strive to be instruments of healing and seek to mend this wound that hurts all of us. In this way we can look to the future with hopes for another consequential April day that is glorious again, not tragic.
About the author: Tim Wilson is a lifelong resident of Massachusetts. He is passionate about his family, Marquette University, bicycling and all Boston sports.