Thomas Paine
This is the worst year—and a perfect time—to commemorate the American Revolution. The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is arriving at a political moment wholly inconsistent with the Declaration itself. Our own leader is a would-be king, responsible for “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object,” namely his own power and glory, which he confuses with the nation’s. “Neo-royalist” is an apt term for his conduct of the presidency and his posture toward the world.
Donald Trump has so thoroughly appropriated and degraded the celebration of the 250th that liberals and progressives may want to have nothing to do with it. But that’s a mistake. Precisely because America has strayed so far from its founding heritage, this is a perfect time to celebrate, reflect on our revolutionary beginning, and recognize what the Revolution achieved and what it didn’t.
The idea that the American Revolution wasn’t all that revolutionary has long had its advocates on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Some conservatives have argued that the Revolution aimed only to restore traditional British liberties, while some on the left have claimed that it only changed the form of government but left slavery undisturbed and even reinforced social inequalities.
Neither of those views gives the Revolution its due. Although it fell short of abolishing slavery, the Revolution did far more to advance freedom and equality than just restoring traditional liberties. It set in motion radical changes in both social life and government. This is the revolutionary heritage we should be celebrating.
The American colonies were societies of inherited rank, where a wide gulf separated the rich and well-born from commoners, and where colonists with connections to the Crown—future Loyalists—enjoyed patronage and privileges. Birth order remained a critical source of inequality: In much of colonial America, as in Britain, the eldest son in a wealthy family inherited the estate under rules of primogeniture and entail. That system of inheritance in Britain had for centuries locked up landed wealth and power in a small aristocracy.
Cherished stories about the Puritans and other early settlers have misled us about the social status of most of those who crossed the Atlantic to the colonies. Data on colonial migrants on British ships show that the great majority came in an unfree condition. Most of the unfree were enslaved Africans, but more than half the whites arriving in the colonies south of New England came as indentured servants or convicts.
Like the enslaved, they were bound to forced labor, subject to harsh control by their masters, and liable to be bought and sold. Unlike the enslaved, they were bound for a fixed period, generally five to seven years for indentured servants. At any one moment, according to the late historian Gordon Wood, about half the colonial population was legally unfree.
Revolutionary America began overturning these bases of social subordination. As Wood writes in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, “By the time the Revolution had run its course in the early nineteenth century, American society had been radically and thoroughly transformed.”
Amid all the contentious arguments about the Revolution’s impact, certain facts are beyond dispute. The reason the United States became divided between free and slave states is that the states in the North began abolishing slavery in the Revolutionary era, and Congress in 1787 prohibited slavery in the western territories north of the Ohio River. The Constitution barred titles of nobility, and the states in the following years did away with primogeniture and indentured servitude.
Instead of a society stratified by inherited rank, the America that emerged from the Revolution outside the South was unusually fluid and open to mobility. Ordinary white men had less reason to feel resigned to a status assigned them at birth. After visiting America in 1831-1832, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville reported that the equality of condition had unleashed a surge of energy, ambition, and frenetic activity in nearly every sphere, politics and civic associations as well as the economy.
Washington Irving’s 1819 short story “Rip Van Winkle” describes that postrevolutionary transformation. After falling into a deep sleep before the Revolution, Rip awakens 20 years later, enters his old village during an election, and discovers a changed world: “The very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility.”
Under modern definitions, the early American republic would not qualify as a democracy because the majority of adults still had no right to vote, but the Revolution immediately created a more popular politics. One sign was a more plainspoken, easily grasped political language. Tom Paine’s Common Sense, the February 1776 pamphlet that set the colonies on the path to independence, also set the new standard for popular persuasion, appealing to what in the 18th century was just beginning to be called “public opinion.”
The new government fostered the expansion of the press and the public through the post office. Britain taxed newspapers to make them more expensive and prevent the rise of a dangerous popular press. Congress, however, starting in 1792, subsidized the distribution of newspapers with cheap postal rates and a right for printers to exchange copies free of postal charges. That was the basis for something extraordinary for its time, indeed any time: a government-subsidized but uncensored national news network. Unlike European countries, the United States also extended post roads and post offices to small towns and villages. Many people adopted a new habit, keeping up with the news.
By changing the system of government, the American Revolution had created a new political society. Strikingly, neither the growth of the press nor the energized public life and popular politics developed at that time in Canada, the part of British North America that hadn’t joined the Revolution and instead welcomed the fleeing Loyalists. When Britain’s Parliament granted Canada independence in 1867, it described the federation’s purpose as “Peace, Order, and good Government.”
The American Declaration of Independence had spelled out a different moral theory of government: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” to secure men’s “unalienable Rights,” among them “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Those electrifying words, written under the immediate pressure to inspire men to risk their lives in war, did two things in the long run. They established founding principles, a founding promise. And they left America with a founding contradiction because the American republic in practice originally denied those rights to Black and indigenous people, women, and even white men without property.
Still, no matter the intent of the Declaration’s signers, their words defined the American project as many in later generations would come to understand it: fulfilling the promise and overcoming the contradiction. At Gettysburg, Lincoln said America was “dedicated” to a “proposition,” the proposition that “all men are created equal,” and that it was “for us the living … to be dedicated here to the unfinished work,” the work required for a “new birth of freedom.”
That conception of America and the continued meaning of the Declaration is not, however, universally held. Last July, JD Vance declared, “This country is not a contradiction … not some unfinished or contradictory project.” He was criticizing a post the previous day, July 4, by Zohran Mamdani, who had said: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished,” words that, in the vice president’s view, showed Mamdani’s lack of gratitude to earlier generations who had “turned [America’s] wilderness into the most powerful nation in the world.”
Vance was defending a different proposition from the one that Lincoln spoke about at Gettysburg. It’s the proposition that those who count America as their ancestral homeland going back to our early history—“heritage Americans,” some call them—have a singular “claim” to the nation: “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”
Of course, neither Mamdani nor liberals who define the core of American identity by its founding ideals say that people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War “don’t belong.” What they say is that America still has work to do to make good on its founding promise.
Donald Trump’s monarchical presidency has made that work more urgent. Unlike originalists in the law, Trump’s governing philosophy might be described as “pre-originalist”: a return to rule by proclamation and prerogative, the very thing America’s founders abhorred and tried to prevent through constitutional restraints. This year’s anniversary ought to reawaken that foundational opposition to arbitrary, personal rule, slumbering in the hearts of the president’s supporters.
The world will surely “little note, nor long remember” what any of us say at the celebrations this July. But it will again be true that it is for “us the living” to do the unfinished work that freedom perennially requires. All those who take up that challenge can count themselves heritage Americans and celebrate the 250th in a spirit faithful to the Declaration.
Paul Starr is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Bancroft Prize in American history.
Reprinted with permission from The American Prospect.
Start your day with National Memo Newsletter
Know first.
The opinions that matter. Delivered to your inbox every morning
