The Founders Created a Country, Not An Idea
The Founders Created a Country, Not An Idea
Our Founding Fathers’ sacrifice, America’s people, and July 4th
On this day 248 years ago, 56 American men, our Founding Fathers, formally agreed to declare independence from Great Britain through the Declaration of Independence.
Though they could not have known it at the time, these men forever changed the course of human history.
The 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence represented each of the 13 colonies. The youngest signer was 26-year-old Edward Rutledge of South Carolina. The oldest was 70-year-old Benjamin Franklin. All but eight signers were born in America.
Each of the men who signed the document did so at great personal risk. Signing the Declaration was effectively treason. If the Americans failed in the ensuing Revolutionary War, the signers would likely have been killed, or at least imprisoned, for their acts.
Some of the Founders also sacrificed their own material wealth for the cause of freedom.
George Washington, for example, lost half of his net worth during the war. The British captured his livestock and slaves at Mount Vernon while he was leading the newly formed Continental Army. Washington was so cash poor by the end of the war that he had to borrow money from a neighbor to attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson also had their properties ransacked by the British. Jefferson was also unable to pay his debts when the war ended, as his British creditors refused to accept newly minted American dollars as payment. According to historian Willard Sterne Randall, this permanently damaged Jefferson’s finances. At one point, Jefferson even had to borrow money from one of his slaves.
The lengths to which these men were willing to lose everything are unfathomable for most Americans today. Few Americans, if any, will ever feel so passionately about a cause that they would be willing to sacrifice their own livelihoods. And worse is the fact that fewer and fewer Americans appreciate our Founding Fathers and our nation’s history.
A 2020 survey found that 40 percent of Generation Z believe the Founders are “better described as villains” than “as heroes.” A Gallup survey from just a few days ago found pride in being an American is near a record low. 18 percent of the survey respondents said they were “moderately proud” to be American. 10 percent were “only a little proud.” And five percent were “not at all” proud to be American. Only 41 percent said they were “extremely proud.”
Sadly, none of this is particularly surprising. Young Americans are now taught to hate their country. The media and certain segments of the American education system teach that America has a hateful, dark history. The Democrat Party and its leaders, starting with the President of the United States, also publicly denigrate this country and its heritage.
When he was running for President in 2020, Joe Biden declared that “America has never lived up to our founding promise.” In 2008, Michelle Obama said she was proud of America “for the first time” in her adult lifetime because of the support her husband was receiving. Today Obama himself claimed America is an “inclusive experiment,” and that the country “has always been an experiment.” He added that “we need to keep fighting for it, keep improving it, and keep making sure it reflects the better angels of our nature.” It’s as if to say, America is not a real, tangible place or country. It’s an idea that can be tinkered with and molded as he and others see fit.
This belief that “America is an idea” isn’t new. Its proponents argue that this American “idea” can be subscribed to by any people, anywhere in the world.
It’s true that certain American ideas and values can be adopted by others. But America herself is not an idea. Nothing could be further from the truth.
America is a country. She is every town and city from the East Coast to the West. America is every mountain in the Rockies, every beach in Florida, and every tree along the Mississippi River. America is a people and their stories, the stories of those who toiled, sacrificed, and died creating this land. America is heritage that for some, like me, predate the American Revolution. For us, America is our birthright that others have the privilege, not the right, to participate in.
Though most of the Founders viewed themselves as British, there is no denying that they believed in the idea of a uniquely American citizen.
Consider this passage from Founding Father John Jay in Federalist No. 2.
I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people--a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.
This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.
“One united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.” This is America. Or at least, it once was.
John Quincy Adams also wrote about Americans in his July 4th speech in 1821, when he was serving as Secretary of State.
From the day of the Declaration, the people of the North American union, and of its constituent states, were associated bodies of civilized men and Christians, in a state of nature, but not of anarchy. They were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of the gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledged as the rules of their conduct. They were bound by the principles which they themselves had proclaimed in the declaration. They were bound by all those tender and endearing sympathies, the absence of which, in the British government and nation, towards them, was the primary cause of the distressing conflict in which they had been precipitated by the headlong rashness and unfeeling insolence of their oppressors. They were bound by all the beneficent laws and institutions, which their forefathers had brought with them from their mother country, not as servitudes but as rights. They were bound by habits of hardy industry, by frugal and hospitable manners, by the general sentiments of social equality, by pure and virtuous morals; and lastly they were bound by the grappling-hooks of common suffering under the scourge of oppression.
As professor and author Angelo Codevilla wrote in his book America's Rise and Fall among Nations, “Adams was acutely aware of the American people’s defining characteristics…America was a lot more than a set of ideas. It was a peculiar people, in a peculiar place, with distinct habits.”
Is it still? That’s debatable, but the belief is still worth defending.
After leaving the Constitutional Convention, just after the Constitution had been adopted and the new American government officially formed, Ben Franklin was asked by a group of citizens what type of government the delegates had formed. He famously remarked, “a republic, if you can keep it.”
Franklin was right. The United States is less of a republic now than it was then. Though past Americans failed to heed his message, today’s Americans are faced with their own version of Franklin’s warning.
What is America? A country, if you can keep it.