A Bold Declaration of Ideals for All

Celebrating the Fourth of July in Williamsburg, VA.

We’ve spent this weekend celebrating America’s 250^th anniversary with fireworks and food and patriotic flags, but what is it, exactly, that we are celebrating?

As we know, America is not two hundred and fifty years old. It is older than any historical record, and its first nations of Indigenous peoples developed governments and defined the civic duties of their citizens well before Spanish, English, and French explorers ever set foot on this continent. 

As colonists increasingly settled on native-inhabited lands, existing conflicts and animosities between native tribes ballooned to encompass these newcomers in the geopolitical landscape. Clashes over entire ways of being resulted in warfare at the worst, but often led to compromise and treaty-making as well.

By the time the English colonists in Virginia demanded a resolution for independence from the British crown in 1775, colonists had settled the entire east coast, displacing native peoples and reshaping or violating some of the very treaties they had agreed to. And as we know, independence was a word that would be reserved only legally for white land-owning men when the United States Constitution was first drafted.

How then, do we reconcile the words of our founders, that all men are created equal, with the flawed realities of the new government they were trying to build that did not include all men, or women?

To get to the heart of what makes the American message of freedom so unique, we must look at how people were expected to live under the European system of rule.

Under the principle of the Divine Right of Kings, a ruler was considered completely above the law. We see this not just in Europe but in most societies around the world at one time or another. Historically, politics and religion have gone hand in hand. From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the Royal Emperor of Japan, rulers have long been considered divinely appointed, if not divine themselves, and therefore above reproach of how exactly they govern their people. Their birth into royalty was considered proof that they were fit to lead because divinely placed there. No matter how cruel, ignorant, or mentally ill, a ruler was acknowledged to receive his or her power from authority not of this world. Of course, revolts and usurpations make up our historical record – people have tried to displace kings and queens for a very long time. But most revolutions operated inside the idea that a different king or queen would solve all their problems.

And then the colonists of America came along and boldly proclaimed that God does not give absolute power to one man, but to every single man on earth, in order to best govern himself. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson’s words, they decided to take the crown off of one man’s head and place it on every single man, to carry as his sacred duty.

This is radical.

Take a moment to actually read through the Declaration of Independence. In it you’ll find not just the first few lines of fiery rhetoric that call for freedom for all men; it is nothing short of a laundry list of all the ways in which King George III has failed his own people and proven himself an unfit ruler. This treasonous document dared to point out that the king was in fact a mortal, fallible man who had lost the respect of his people and was not fit to protect or lead them because of very specific failures in policy and attitude.

Building upon classical Greek ideas of democracy, in which every voice gets a vote, men like George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson argued that only someone who has lived among the people, who is a neighbor, a friend, an employer, can understand the daily needs and concerns of farmers, shop owners, tradesmen, and their families. What did a king three thousand miles away know of life in America and its people’s needs? What would any king with absolute power know about working with his hands to provide for his family, or ensuring his policies positively affected daily life in a hundred small ways, from the price of grain to which church someone could attend on Sundays?

And so our colonists resolved to throw off the yoke of British tyranny and rule themselves as God-given free men.

But what about those for whom voting, legal standing, and even freedom was denied?

Many of our founding fathers, white, land-owning men, recognized the deep hypocrisy of fighting for their own legal freedom while enslaving other men. John Adams, our second president, is a shining example of a man who recognized during his own time that the institution of slavery was horrendous and spoke out against it every chance he could. He didn’t just talk about his principles, either. He lived them. He never owned enslaved persons and his son John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, was a passionate abolitionist who not only represented Africans in court cases like the United States vs. The Amistad, but also advocated in Congress for lands for displaced Native Americans.

John Adams's wife Abigail is another exemplary person: a woman who refused to be defined by the norms of her time. Educated classically by her father, she reminded John in letter after letter to “remember the women” and hoped that the new government would acknowledge women’s enormous contributions to the building of this new nation. In addition to raising children, building communities, and running businesses, women were spies who helped George Washington gain vital intelligence during the war, and a few like Deborah Sampson even disguised themselves as men to fight on battlefields.

Enslaved men too took up arms to fight for the promise of a nation in which they could be their own governors. In an attempt to bolster their numbers, the British military promised freedom to any enslaved person who would fight for the Crown. In 1775 Virginia’s Governor Dunmore promised freedom to slaves who left Patriot families, and this was expanded in 1779 to include enslaved persons from all colonies. While some of these men went on to gain their freedom after the war, many others were re-captured. It would take almost a century for our United States Constitution to legally ban slavery as a practice in 1865 in the 13^th Amendment.

Clearly, this American experiment of freedom for all initially fell vastly, vastly short of its promises.

But the story doesn’t end there.

What makes it so vital, so important, for us to continue celebrating the ideal, self-governing nation is the fact that we have seen our country move towards a more perfect execution of this goal. A nation governed by free men and women of all races and classes whose voices are represented in their government is the vision toward which our feet must always continue stepping. Our founders planted the seed – they shed their blood, put their lives and families and everything they possessed body and soul into this seed and planted it in the ground. And its first roots were tenuous, shaky, imperfect, even hypocritical. But the best amongst them could see the mighty tree such a sapling would become, if only their children and grandchildren would continue tending to it. We, after generations of gardeners, are now tasked with watering, pruning, and nurturing this mighty tree.

Men and women of all races have looked around them and seen injustice here and in the wider world – in the displacement and killing of native peoples; of the enslavement of African Americans; in the mistreatment of women in both civic and private life. And they have risen to meet with, fight, and correct these wrongs. They have recalled the words that act as our North Star, and they have contributed to righting the ship. Abolitionists, suffragettes, presidents, farmers, soldiers, mothers, teachers, and neighbors – each has taken on the task of improving upon the flawed execution of a noble principle. Everyone has a sphere of influence in which they can shape the nation, the world, we all live in. Every single one of us has the ability, the God-given right, the responsibility, to contribute meaningfully to the idea of this nation, to the everlasting truth we celebrate on the Fourth of July, that all men and women are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I hope that each and every one of you spend your day, in ways large and small, contributing your unique gifts to this noble ideal.