Thomas Jefferson, who owned more than 600 human beings, penned the stirring words justifying a revolution creating what would become the most prosperous, principled and powerful country in human history. The seeming contradiction — that someone whose life and wealth was made possible by exploiting and abusing other people could write down the radical assertion “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — encapsulates United States history as neatly as any other.
Our forefathers, or the forefathers of a small fraction of us, dissolved their bonds with Britain, and then came a long war, though its dust and the death, when the red, white and blue flag flew higher in victory.
But after independence came the question of how, without King and Parliament, we were to govern ourselves. The Articles of Confederation, adopted in the midst of war with the mother country, proved too weak in peacetime and were replaced, with much debate, with a Constitution, a written set of rules. What was the balance between the states and the Union? Between liberty and order? Between the roles of a single leader, assembled elected representatives and independent courts? Those questions still remain today.
We were not colonies but a new nation, an idealistic and energetic nation with near-fatal moral blindness that would take another hundred or so years to begin to overcome.
The new Constitution shamefully betrayed the promise of universal freedom in the Declaration and did not end slavery. But even with the Constitution’s acquiescence, traitors intent on keeping humans in bondage tried to sever the bonds between the states, but they could not, as brother took up arms against brother in a Civil War that finally extinguished slavery.
Mostly together, we kept moving in fits and starts toward a better version of our Union. Black men gained the rights that should have always been theirs; so did women, and workers, and a long litany of immigrants and others thought to be worth less than those who ruled the roost.
Even today, as we hold fast to our rights, we struggle to honor the promise of equal creation in a nation in which too many are still tied down by the worst threads in our history.
This experiment in self-government is being challenged by bitter partisanship that make Americans on one side of the political divide view their opposites as enemies, not fellow citizens.
We grow increasingly internally apart, as justices on our highest court enforce a narrow and dangerous vision of our freedoms that the majority of the population rejects. The Congress, meant to be co-equal to the executive, cowers before the president rather than checking and balancing him.
Our leader shall not be a king ruling by divine right, as that was decided on this day in Philadelphia 249 years ago, but one of the common folk elevated freely by fellow citizens.
The days of the demigods and their powdered wigs are gone, but the ideas that they put to parchment still guide us. Happy birthday America.
