Two-hundred-and-fifty years ago this month, 56 men pledged–to each other and to all future generations of Americans–“our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to the cause of independence from Great Britain.
They kept their promise.
And so, today, must we.
French writer and philosophe Anne-Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, best known to history as the redoubtable Madame de Staël,told Boston intellectuals in 1817: “You are the advance guard of the human race.” Lincoln echoed the sentiment in 1862, calling Americans “the last, best hope of earth.”
In fact, we have always believed it.
In the Twentieth Century, President Woodrow Wilson would tell the American people, “It will now be our fortunate duty to assist by example, by sober, friendly counsel, and by material aid in the establishment of just democracy throughout the world.”
In 1918, everything seemed possible.
Especially to Americans.
Wilson’s predecessor, William Howard Taft, betraying the veiled racism of his time, enjoined Americans “to lift up your little brown brothers.” Taft was referring to dilemmas posed by recent U.S. territorial gains in the Pacific and the Caribbean. The apparent, but condescending, benevolence and the thinly concealed racism had deep roots in American history. Even Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, once declared, “Neither my own feelings nor those of the mass of whites will admit of making them (blacks) social and political equals.”
And yet de jure, if not yet full de facto, equality came.
The nation grows, and changes, and, still, all things seem possible.
Why?
An Eclectic and Estimable Land
The United States of America is a magnificent historical accident.
And for one reason above all others – for two precious centuries nobody gave a damn about it.
The phrase “benign neglect” was not coined by the Nixon Administration (referring to lax civil rights enforcement in the 1970s). It originated with British functionaries managing the Empire’s American Colonies, referred to rather dismissively by them as “the plantations.”
“Benign neglect” was really a sweetheart contract between British proprietors and American colonists. The colonists got what amounted to self-government, no taxes and the protection of the British fleet along principal shipping routes. In exchange, they were supposed to trade only with Britain. The “benign neglect” part was that the British let the Yankees smuggle just about everything they wanted, to or from anywhere they wanted, in and out of the colonies without–most of the time–raising an eyebrow or taxing a tealeaf.
The American Revolution came about when the British had to gall to try and collect on their side of the bargain.
Yet the American patriots were right. It was too late to collect.
British historian Paul Johnson, in his masterful History of the American People, spells out why: “The early establishment of assemblies and written constitutions—self-rule in fact—arose from the crown’s physical inability, in the first half of the Seventeenth Century, to exercise direct control. The crown was never able to recover this surrender of power.”
Johnson points out that the Connecticut Colony’s 1639 Fundamental Orders “was the first written constitution not only in America but in the world.” It marked Connecticut as “more modern” than Britian herself.
There were those in England who, at the time, understood this lesson all too well. They were a minority, but an influential one.
In Parliament, Edmund Burke, no radical, and Charles James Fox eloquently defended the Americans. They were joined by historian Horace Walpole who denounced crown policy with the cry “Oh, mad, mad England!”
In 1777, the wisest man in the realm raised his now enfeebled voice in a bid to avert the coming disaster. William Pitt the Elder, ennobled as Earl of Chatham, seemed to lay down a template for Churchill two centuries later when he told the House of Lords, “You cannot conquer America…If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms—never—never—never!”
But there was more than just political theory behind the American thirst for liberty…America deserved its free trade, its “no taxation,” and its embryonic colonial legislatures. When 102 religious refugees landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 they braved the autumn wilderness alone. No supplies were forthcoming from England, no reinforcements, no British fleet. They huddled alone in the cold, damp reaches of the North Atlantic.
The same was true for the original Pennsylvanians and the first Georgians and the first Marylanders, Roman Catholic refugees from Protestant English intolerance.
And when these indefatigable refugees constructed their own engines of intolerance, new refugees were created, spreading out over the land, building new communities, such as the colony of Rhode Island, based on still newer religious and political principles.
And England didn’t give a damn.
Why should they?
The Northeastern coast of America, unlike Peru and Mexico, was devoid of gold; in contrast to Brazil and the island colonies of the Caribbean, it was poor terrain for the lucrative sugar trade; it had no tar deposits, like Trinidad, no fruit groves, like the Central American coast; it didn’t even have lootable indigenous cultures. About all it had was space to spread out in, room to send the undesirables, like the English debtors who settled the colony of Georgia in the 1730s.
The British-American colonists, unlike their Latin American counterparts, were not yoked to a powerful colonial administration, heavy taxes, and European economic monopolies. On the contrary, they were sent forth to a new land to die or to flourish.
And they flourished.
On their own.
Because the new land was so expansive that even the authoritarian practices of some of those who first settled it, including the religious fanatics who landed at Plymouth Rock on that grey day late in 1620, were weaker than the power of the land to separate and preserve the new inhabitants.
The Gift Outright
Poet Robert Frost touched upon this in the first lines of The Gift Outright:
The land was ours before we were the land’s;
She was our land more than a hundred years before we were her people.
That was the poem Frost recited January 20, 1961, the bracing day of President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Temporarily blinded by glare, the poet, aged 87, was unable to read the work he had been commissioned to write for the occasion, a poem called A New Augustinian Age.
It’s just as well.
There would be no such age.
Nor could there have been.
Because there are no American Caesars.
Nor, perhaps, are there even Great American Men.
President Abraham Lincoln once visited General George B. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac, at the general’s field headquarters, located in a farmhouse. The general was asleep upstairs. An adjutant offered to awaken him but Lincoln demurred and, after a short stay, took his leave. The general, Lincoln said, needed his sleep more than the president did. Today, Lincoln is an icon, McClellan a footnote, along with other would-be Caesars like Douglas MacArthur and Aaron Burr.
French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville, renoundéd as the author of Democracy in America, suggested that Americans built their triumphal arches with bricks so they can easily tear them down to hurl the rubble at their former heroes.
One of the greatest Americans of all is, like Lincoln, a portrait in personal humility. Hardly the stuff of heroes, James Madison stood at five feet and weighed a mere 100 pounds. A soft-spoken, bespectacled lawyer and Hebrew scholar, in 1787 he made a series of proposals to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia which eventually became, in reworked and compromised form, “The Supreme Law of the Land” and one of the most monumental and durable constitutions in history.
When formidable North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin brandished his dog-eared copy of that sacred text during the Watergate Hearings in 1973, he was evoking the handiwork and philosophy of Madison. (The little Virginian’s other great invention is the Democratic Party; while the American Constitution is the oldest continually functioning covenant of its kind, the Democratic Party is the oldest such political organization in the world.)
Both the handiwork and the philosophy are as relevant today as they were in 1787.
Madison summed up the American experiment, then and now, in a series of newspaper columns published soon after the Constitutional Convention ended. Today, they are known as The Federalist Papers and, although informal in nature, are rightly considered among the founding documents of the American Republic.
In Federalist No. 10, the best known of the columns, Madison explained why a country like the United States could expand both physically and economically, on the one hand, while preserving democratic freedoms, on the other. He told us that we enjoyed “the benefits of an extended republic in which no single regional or economic interest” could dominate the other regions or interests that composed the nation. He said the mechanisms of government should be “separated and balanced” against one another to guarantee that “no combination of interests” could overwhelm the other elements of the polity. He argued that “an intolerant majority” was unlikely because there would be no permanent majorities at all: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”
Madison was not cynical.
He was pragmatic.
And he was right.
The United States is so big, so complex, and so eclectic that no possible combination of powers ever adds up to 50% plus one for more than an instant. Every party, every movement, and every president, including the incumbent (49.5% of the vote in the last election down to a current job approval rating of 35%), learns this lesson.
And still, we have promises to keep—the promise of the Constitution’s Preamble “to establish justice and…promote the general welfare,” the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment to guarantee “the equal protection of the laws” to all, the Fifteenth Amendment’s promise that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged…on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” the promise at the base of the Statue of Liberty that the homeless and hungry will always be welcomed, the promise of President Theodore Roosevelt that “a grove of giant redwood shall be kept just as we keep a great and beautiful cathedral.”
Wrote Frost:
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become.
And such as she is still becoming.
-Thomas Murphy, 2026
Photo Credits: John Trumbull, National Portrait Gallery, Washington; Richard Brompton, National Portrait Gallery, London; John Vanderlyn, White House Historical Association
Coming Next Month: Reporter’s Notebook: Big Man, Made Man, Dead Man
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