Two hundred fifty years is a long time, and 1776 can feel very far from us.
It was a world of kings and gilded hierarchy, of slavery and deference, of wives promising obedience, of empires and colonies. Elite men sported powdered wigs and short breeches under long floral waistcoats. Their daughters sucked in their breath to squeeze into stays, corsets and petticoats.
The most reliable sources of information were four-page newspapers and letters written with quills dipped in ink pots, both of which took at least two months to cross the Atlantic. The fiercest weapons were cannons and muskets. Heck, they didn’t even have electricity or flushing toilets.
Yet for all the differences, the founding generation of America still speaks to us. A few of those men in wigs crafted an extraordinary document, the Declaration of Independence, in 1776, in which they announced to the world their decision to become a new nation.
The United States commemorates the publication of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 as the founding event. For 250 years, people all over the world have looked to it as an inspiration and a guide. Yet what is of such world historical importance is not just the ink-stained Declaration itself, but the positive principles that informed it.
These values were not restricted to Founding Fathers in 13 British colonies (and by the way, there were actually 26 British American colonies in 1775).
Those ideals — such as life, happiness and equality — emerged out of a world shot through with what people saw as oppression, what one New England minister called “enslaved Empires.”
Americans were willing to take extraordinary risks and even to make the ultimate sacrifice of their “Lives … Fortunes, and … sacred Honor” in order to support these values. Ordinary soldiers marched with their muskets into hellish landscapes, sometimes with bodies so thick on the ground that it was almost impossible to walk.
One word on a powder horn carried into battle starts to reveal why: liberty. In 1775, this word started showing up on American-made containers for gunpowder, including one now housed in a Washington, DC, museum. As it happens, the soldier, Prince Simbo, who had this horn in his possession at Valley Forge in 1778, was black, possibly enslaved himself and almost certainly related to enslaved people. In Connecticut in 1777, when Simbo took possession of this powder horn, slavery was legal, as it was throughout the colonies, north and south.
Liberty, then, had multiple meanings for Simbo, as for many. To be sure, it was a rallying cry against British oppression; other soldiers held horns scratched with “liberty or death!” It fired Simbo up to fight for the common cause, one for which he was later injured. Yet it was also an aspiration for a man who saw too many around him enduring slavery.
Simbo was not alone in his commitment to liberty. Another private, Ezra Tilden, called his side “Liberty People.” Among them was a soldier at Valley Forge, Colonel Joseph Louis Cook (Akiatonharónkweni), a member of the Oneida nation. He had been by the side of the famous American general Richard Montgomery, who died in December 1775, during an ill-fated American attempt to take Quebec.
Another soldier, Jeremiah Greenman, who served in that campaign and many others, kept a diary of a service which lasted for eight long years. In 1781, he recorded a Fourth of July celebration in his camp that launched with a series of toasts, the first about the new United States: “May they ever be free [and] Independent.” Most of the toasts were in fact to France, Spain and Holland for their support (soldiers toasted the Kings of France and Spain before they toasted General Washington). He and other men enjoyed a day off for celebration, in between marches and battles.
Women, too, worked hard to support the cause of liberty. One, Esther Reed, organized a campaign to provide support to suffering soldiers like Greenman. Even if people did not approve of women stepping out of their homes in order to raise money, Reed felt everyone at least had to “applaud our efforts for the relief of the armies which defend our lives, our possessions, our liberty.” She argued that women like her were “born for liberty, disdaining to bear the irons of a tyrannic Government.” A love of liberty fired her efforts — and those of so many other women and men in that long, painful war.
One soldier wrote to his wife in June 1775 that before deploying, he had made sure to draft a will “as Life is always uncertain.” In fact, this officer, George Washington, survived the war. His strategies had also helped to win it. He was willing to take risks, some of which paid off handsomely (some, like the disaster at Quebec, did not). What drove him to be bold, as he informed John Hancock, was that he worried about the costs of defeat. It meant the forfeiture of his reputation and fortune, and also the loss of “the inestimable blessing of liberty.”
In a world shot through with slavery and oppression, liberty and process were prized. To this day, a monument in Baltimore, where I live, depicts the 1783 moment in which Washington, the beloved commander-in-chief, handed in his resignation after the war ended. He could have lingered in this position of authority, but he felt it was right to move on. When pressed, years later, to return to public life, he did so only with reluctance — becoming the first US president under a new Constitution that mandated four-year terms for the job: an extraordinary innovation in a world still full of kings and tyrants.
Washington himself set the precedent that a president should not serve more than two terms. He knew the vital importance of stepping away from power; this mechanism was the only way this the valiant new republic could flourish. And he understood better than most that ideals such as liberty were more important than a single man, however important and impressive that man was.
In their wigs and breeches, Founding Fathers like Washington had a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” They wanted this new nation to be a beacon of liberty to the world. They did not achieve that goal in their lifetimes, as the US continued to practice slavery and to dispossess Indigenous people, including the relatives of valiant soldiers like Simbo and Cook.
Yet that aspiration has motivated Americans ever since, and it is worth taking the day off on July 4 to celebrate it.
However distant the American Revolution may seem, we still relish the idea of being a “Liberty People.” Despite so many differences, what connects us with that founding generation of the United States is a shared desire to live up to these stirring ideals — what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
