Civil War for the day

The New York Times has an ongoing series on the Civil War:

Three hearses, flag-draped and drawn by horses, rolled through the streets of Boston on 1 May. The men of the Sixth Massachusetts— the “noble sons who have given their life’s blood in defense of the laws and maintenance of their country’s honor,” in the words of the next morning’s newspaper— had come home. The cortège, accompanied by Governor John A. Andrew and by militia cadets marching with their muskets reversed, drew up at last before the staid eighteenth-century portico of King’s Chapel on Tremont Street. Slowly, the chapel’s great bell, cast in bronze by Paul Revere himself, tolled a dirge.
It was appropriate that the fallen soldiers had been brought to a place literally resonant with history. The first combat fatalities of the Civil War, they had been killed two weeks earlier in the streets of Baltimore, struck down by an angry pro-Southern mob that hurled bricks and stones, then fired pistols at the Union soldiers in the streets. The first man of all the 620,000 who would perish in the four years to come, was a seventeen-year-old farmboy named Luther C. Ladd. He was said to have gone down gasping his own epitaph: All hail to the Stars and Stripes!
But most resonant of all to the silent throngs of Bostonians watching the funeral procession was the date on which the men had died: 19 April. On that same day, 86 years earlier, in 1775, the first patriot martyrs of the American Revolution had been killed at nearby Lexington.
This remarkable coincidence attracted comment across both the Union and the Confederacy. “The First Blood of the First and Last Revolution,” the Albany Journal headlined the news from Baltimore. “The same scenes, on a larger scale, were re-acted on the 19th of April, 1861, which were acted on the 19th of April, 1775, in Massachusetts.”
Governor Andrew had lost no time in noting “the parallel the day and the event suggest with the 19th of April, 1775, and the immortal memories which cluster around the men of Lexington and Concord.” Other Unionists confidently declared that “the blood that flowed at Baltimore will be no less surely avenged than that which consecrated Lexington to liberty.” For what had the American Revolution been if not the foundation of that very Union that the north now fought to preserve?
Southerners had their own interpretation: hadn’t the American Revolution been a struggle in which a secessionist group of rebels sought to break away from established authority? “It is the old Revolutionary fight over again, a fight between the people and a strong Government,” one pro-Southern journalist declared.
A Virginia newspaper shrewdly observed that George Washington had been branded a rebel and a traitor by the British, while the New Orleans Daily Picayune recalled how the British officer who confronted the minutemen at Lexington had cried out “throw down your arms, you rebels, and disperse” in much the way Lincoln demanded that the Confederate States put down their own weapons. Further developing the parallel, the paper compared the way patriots stopped the British march on Concord “for the purpose of crippling the liberties of the American colonies,” just as the Baltimore mob blocked the Union soldiers “summoned for the purpose of aiding in suppressing the rights of a unanimous people to independence. …It reads like a rehearsal of the Past, another battle of Lexington, another immolation of life for the purposes of another war upon Freedom.”
Historical analogies can be tricky things, as is evident in Currier and Ives’s pro-Union lithograph The Lexington of 1861, issued shortly after the combat in Baltimore. It portrays the mob scene in all its torrid, smoky mess, and its visual cues are equally confused. As in 1775, the “enemy” in the print wears red, probably meant to suggest the shirts of volunteer firemen, often in the front ranks of urban mobs. But then the markers break down. At Lexington, the British had been the ones who, like the Union men now, were orderly, uniformed and well armed, in contrast to the haphazardly organized patriots. The lithograph’s depiction of troops advancing head-on against the civilian mob might have suggested strength and rectitude to Union sympathizers, but the image also bears an uncanny resemblance to a notorious indictment of just such organized force from the American Revolutionary era, Revere’s woodcut of the Boston Massacre.
Such ambiguities did not prevent Bostonians from harking back across eight decades to find parallels to the present. The renowned poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. visited the tree near Harvard’s campus beneath whose branches Washington was supposed to have taken command of the Continental Army. His resulting composition, entitled Under the Washington Elm, Cambridge, April 27, 1861, began:

Eighty years have passed, and more,
Since under the brave old tree
Our fathers gathered in arms, and swore
They would follow the sign their banners bore,
And fight till the land was free.
Half of their work was done,
Half is left to do,—
Cambridge, and Concord, and Lexington!
When the battle is fought and won,
What shall be told of you?

And on 1 May, the same day on which the fallen Massachusetts soldiers’ remains were brought to King’s Chapel, another patriotic gathering was held at nearby Old South Church, a sanctuary even more closely associated with Revolutionary history. Here Unionists raised a large American flag inscribed with the motto True to Our Revolutionary Principles. Orators invoked Franklin and Adams, the Boston Massacre and the Tea Party, encouraging listeners to recall “the glorious history of which we should all be proud.”
Yet one orator at the old church, amid his own litany of historic icons, also struck a different, forward-looking note. Like Holmes, the Reverend J.M. Manning suggested that the revolutionary struggle of 1861 was not just about honoring the legacy of 1775, but also about enlarging it. The clergyman was more explicit than the poet. “The African, out of his ages of bondage, is peering, with a strange thrill of joy, at these Stars and Stripes,” Manning said. “To him, they are an auroral vision, the early twilight, with its streak of flame, telling him that the day of redemption draweth nigh. Into this shadow flock those who would honor the mighty past, and secure a mightier future.”