This is the first in a regular series of short articles commemorating the 250th anniversary of American independence, tracing in words and pictures how Americans have fulfilled, and at times struggled to fulfill, the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.
Never doubt the power of our ideals to make a better world.
For thousands of years people everywhere lived in darkness. They were ruled by tyrants, exploited and oppressed by men who claimed their power over others was ordained by God. Grotesque injustice was an everyday experience.
Then Americans — a colonial people living on the fringe of Western civilization — announced that all men are created equal and possess fundamental rights, including rights to live, to make decisions for their lives without unjust restraint, and to seek fulfillment by realizing their potential, serving others, and obeying God.
They declared that they were free.
They announced their independence. At that moment, 250 years ago, our modern world began, with all its potential and challenges.
The most ambitious of our revolutionaries — George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and James Wilson among them — recognized that they were living through a fleeting moment in history in which they had an opportunity to establish a new kind of nation, founded on rational principles articulated by the great thinkers of antiquity and the greatest minds of their own time.
Even the most far-sighted of them could not image where those principles would lead the nation they shaped. They had all been born and grown to adulthood in a society characterized by injustice, ruled by monarchs and dominated by aristocrats and the fortunate, wealthy few, governed by institutions perpetuated by such men for their benefit. The society in which our revolutionary leaders had spent most of their lives was built on the coarsest forms of exploitation — of people enslaved, indentured servants bought and sold, and women denied personal independence and opportunities for individual fulfillment. Most of the wider world was the same or worse, a dark and dreary place of cruelty and violence in which the vast potential of humanity was stifled by arrogance and greed.
This series presents a visual history of American freedom — of what Americans have done with their independence. It begins by tracing, in pictures and words, the remarkable story of how Americans declared and secured their independence, created written constitutions and new governments, and became citizens of the first great republic of modern times, committed to ideals defined by the American Revolution: independence, liberty, equality, natural and civil rights, and responsible citizenship under the rule of law.
These ideals were all expressed in our Declaration of Independence. They did not describe the United States as it was. They were aspirations for a free society Americans might make together, reflecting the aspirations of Americans of every sort — what Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called “the common sense of the subject,” by which he meant the ideas and hopes of plain people and philosophically inclined statesmen alike.
The revolutionary generation, despite its determination and talent, could not complete the work of creating and sustaining a truly free society. That requires overcoming layers of injustice, exploitation, and institutionalized oppression accumulated over many centuries and eliminating the ignorance, bigotry, and greed that support them. This is not an easy task, because a political order based on principles of universal right empowers ignorant, selfish, bigoted, callous, and greedy people in the same way it empowers the wise and virtuous — and because people of good will often disagree about the best way forward. Thus progress in free societies can be frustratingly slow, with periods of energetic change mixed with periods of inaction or even retreat. The flaw does not lie in our ideals or our institutions. It lies in human nature. Perseverance is the only answer.
Americans persevered, and in the nineteenth century Americans created a democratic society unlike anything that had ever existed — one that confounded the expectations of the creative statesman of the revolutionary generation. They had imagined that the sovereign people would defer to men of education, refinement, and culture — men like themselves who had the interests of the people at heart but who were wiser, or so they thought, than everyday Americans. Many of the mechanisms embedded in the Federal Constitution were intended to filter talent and ensure the republic would be governed by the kind of men they believed should lead.
Everyday Americans had ideas of their own. They elected plain men to office and the creative statesmen of the Revolutionary generation were replaced by politicians who possessed little of their intellectual ability but had talents for organizing ordinary people. Indeed by resting their republican governments on the sovereignty of the people, creative statemen like Jefferson, Franklin, and James Madison all but guaranteed that the nation would never know another generation of philosophically inclined statesmen like them.
We should not mourn this loss, even if it means we will never again be led by someone like George Washington. The democratic culture Americans created in the nineteenth century offered unprecedented opportunities for ordinary people to lead fulfilling lives and elevated people of extraordinary perception and ability. It is hard to imagine the kind of patrician republic Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and even Jefferson worked to shape would have benefited from the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln, a man born in poverty who was largely self-educated and succeeded without powerful patrons. Nor would a patrician republic have found Thurgood Marshall, the son of a dining car waiter, or Ronald Reagan, whose father was a traveling salesman, or Antonin Scalia, the son of a Sicilian immigrant who arrived at Ellis Island in 1920. Democratic culture has given us Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Frances Willard, Thomas Edison, and Martin Luther King, among thousands of accomplished people who rose from obscurity in a democratic society that rewards merit.
We are their heirs. The history of freedom in the United States is our story — the story of the American people. It is the story of a nation constantly renewed, facing the challenge of fulfilling our highest ideals under the pressure of constantly changing circumstances. It is a rich and complex story in which we should all take pride — of courageous people who worked to make better lives for themselves and their families, of men and women who argued, debated, petitioned, and protested to secure freedom, and those who struggled and died to sustain it. It is the story of brave Americans who fought to defend freedom against some of the worst tyrannies the world has known. Fulfilling the promise of our ideals by nurturing and protecting free society has been the task of every generation of Americans for the last 250 years. That task— and all we have done and all we have left to do — defines us.
“If you live in the presence of miracles,” Theodore Roosevelt warned, “you gradually grow accustomed to them.” We live in the presence of miracles — a nation defined by high ideals in which ordinary people can lead fulfilling lives — but we dare not grow complacent. The goal of every generation must be to protect the freedom that we have inherited and to fulfill the promise of freedom imagined when the United States was new.
Freedom begins with independence — not just national independence but personal independence — and with it the opportunity to think for ourselves and share our thoughts, including our ideas about how to sustain a free society. Personal independence is the essence of freedom.
The wisest of our revolutionary leaders knew this. In 1826, when John Adams was very old, a committee planning his town’s Fourth of July festivities visited him at his home to ask him for a toast they could read aloud at the celebration. They were probably expecting a speech — Adams was rarely a man of few words — but without hesitation he replied “Independence forever.”
