How our divided history created the United States
July 4 isn’t really the 250th birthday of America. And George Washington wasn’t the first President of the United States. I can back up both of those — so before you scroll on, give me a few paragraphs. The real story is stranger, and better, than the one we tell.
July 4, 1776 marks America’s declaration of separation from Great Britain. The Declaration of Independence, as the National Archives will tell you, isn’t a legally-binding document. Its power rests entirely in the ideals encoded within. The header reads THE UNANIMOUS DECLARATION of the thirteen united STATES OF AMERICA. It would take five more years to legally name the country in the Articles of Confederation. The separation was declared, but our nation hadn’t yet built a foundation of government.
The Declaration of Independence emerged from struggle and disagreement. Not only the struggle of the Revolutionary War itself, but also the fractures among the citizens of the several colonies. Some historians estimate that about 40 percent of the 2 million white colonists supported independence. 20 percent supported faithfulness to Great Britain. And the remaining 40 percent held moderate or neutral views. The descriptor ‘united’, written in lower-case in the Declaration, was more aspirational than accurate.
The 400,000 African slaves living in Colonial America left few words in the founding documents, but their views on liberty were legible enough — in freedom petitions to colonial legislatures, and in the thousands who ran toward British lines when the Crown offered emancipation. Their opinion on independence was never sought; the freedom being declared was not, at first, meant for them.
When Thomas Jefferson, himself a walking pile of contradictions, drafted the Declaration of Independence, its capstone accusation of tyrannies and usurpations by King George III was that he forced the colonies into the vile institution of slavery. That accusation didn’t survive debate and is missing from the finally-adopted document. The struggle for the meaning of America was well underway.
Five years after the Declaration, on March 1, 1781, lone holdout Maryland ratified the Articles of Confederation, which officially named the country The United States of America. The Articles bound the states into a “league of friendship”, but not what we would recognize as a federal government. It denied Congress the power to tax or regulate interstate or international commerce. (Interestingly, it also left the door open for Canada to join at a later time if they so desired.)
The first man addressed in official documents as President of the United States was Samuel Huntington — or John Hanson or one of several others, depending on where you start counting. The record blurs at the edges of the Confederation. Huntington and those who followed presided over the Congress of the Confederation. These were legislative offices, gavels rather than executive power, because the executive branch Washington would one day lead did not yet exist. The country had a government’s title before it had a government’s form. Still, each of these men held the office of President of the United States before George Washington took the oath. America wasn’t born whole; it emerged in fits and starts from turmoil and failed experiments.
James Madison arrived at the Constitutional Convention six years later knowing that the arrangement wasn’t working. He’d been doing his homework, studying forms of governance from ancient Greece to then-modern Switzerland. He drafted a second governing document, the Constitution of the United States, which gave us our current form of government. It was barely in force before the demand for change arrived: the first Congress proposed twelve amendments, the states ratified ten of them, and we have called those ten the Bill of Rights ever since. The Constitution has now been amended 27 times. Our form of government, as designed, is still evolving.
The question of what to do with 16 percent of the population dragged as slaves against their will into this experiment in far-flung self-government was too hot to be solved at the founding. A generation later that question would nearly tear apart the country. Lincoln won the Civil War and America subsequently lost the peace when reconstruction decayed into Jim Crow laws across the Southern states. America was free, but not all Americans were free.
President Lincoln, speaking 74 years into our Constitutional form of government, said that the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure”. He hoped that the nation would “have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
We are still testing whether our nation, conceived in contradiction and evolved through the struggle of competing interests, can long endure. At 250 years, I want to look back with clear eyes and look forward with hope. The ‘united’ in our country’s name remains more aspirational than descriptive.
We’ve always been divided — patriots against loyalists, Jeffersonians against Hamiltonians, Republicans against Democrats. Our task remains that of the founding fathers: to look back like Madison, who wrote in light of where we came from, and to look forward like Franklin, who foresaw the nation stretching across an unconquered continent and around the world.
But we won’t move into the future, we won’t long endure, if we can’t figure out how to move forward together. We must aspire to lay down divisions, dialogue through competing interests, move toward a more perfect union, and continue trying to become the United States of America.
