Frederic Edwin Church: Our Banner in the Sky (1861)

Gallery Text:
Within this vibrant scene of atmospheric flux, an opening within a roiling cloud layer reveals stars against a blue firmament. The barren tree in the foreground doubles as a pole for this celestial apparition of the “broad stripes and bright stars” of the U.S. flag. Following the rapid succession of political provocations that led to Confederate forces firing on Fort Sumter, Church channeled his belief in the divine righteousness of the Union cause into this patriotic visual spectacle.

As the sectarian conflict stretched from weeks into months, the oil sketch, with its allegorical river valley resembling the Catskills and the Hudson River, was translated into a popular chromolithograph. The prints were issued by the New York branch of Goupil & Cie as a subscription fundraiser to support the families of Union soldiers. This is one of the few lithographs from the series that Church painted by hand.

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"We live with our thumbs on the scale."

Something ails us. Something has always ailed us, back to our earliest aspirations. We firmly believed ourselves to be blessed beyond all others. We were seldom humbled in acknowledgement. We took possession and became possessed. Perhaps it was the blessing that possessed us to behave not as if we deserved the blessing but as if we were owed it.

Our original sin was greater than many others. We reneged on every promise we made to the natives, who committed the grave sin of treating us like siblings when they were lesser beings. We did what we could for those who were damned from the outset. We took dominion because we were clearly the chosen ones.

The first Holy Roman Emperor earned that title by slaughtering more heathens than any previous king. He scared those he didn't kill into accepting Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, and the Roman Catholic Church as their enslaver and benefactor. Most of the earliest Christians were coerced into their faith. We didn't come to share the land or learn of other cultures. We came in the name of investment, with a debt we'd promised to repay. We mortgaged ourselves to be free.

We have been suffering the effects ever since. We might be the most parochial place on the planet. We pride ourselves on our independence. We presume we're better than others, and, more significantly, that they're naturally worse than us. We are prejudiced in favor of ourselves, which creates the perfect context for endless injustice. We see a potential enemy in every neighbor. We believe someone is trying to take advantage of our advantages, so we preemptively take advantage of them first, but only to maintain balance.

We think we're more intelligent than the average bear. This explains why we so often behave as if we are stupid. We believe it is our inheritance that makes us more intelligent. We almost always insist upon the reward without first completing the necessary effort. We believe we're owed. We want others to be dependent on us while we display a beligerent independence. God shed his grace on us, not on them. He crowned our good with brotherhood, too, from sea to shining sea. We read our self-aggrandizing promotional posters and worshiped them.

We live so far away from the rest of the world that most of us will never get the chance to meet anyone on their native soil. We pride ourselves on our independence and consider dependence a form of weakness rather than a source of power. We perceive power as emanating from rather than accreting to. We believe it's a sin not to use power possessed. We believe one can possess power without it also possessing them. We firmly believe ourselves to be first among equals. We live with our thumbs on the scale.

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