What We Are Celebrating on America’s 250th Birthday
The Mayflower Compact is an iconic moment in American history. Blown off course by a storm, the separatists and strangers on the ship made an emergency landing at Plymouth Rock. Forty-one men put their names to the compact (which was originally known as the Plymouth Combination) and “solemnly and mutually” swore to “covenant and combine” themselves “into a civil body politick.” Notably, they did not combine themselves into a “city” or a “republic,” nor a “nation-state” or “empire,” nor even a “political community.” Instead, they referred to themselves as a “body politic,” invoking the analogy between the political community and the human person—an ancient analogy going back to Plato but also relied upon by the great natural lawyers (e.g., Grotius and Pufendorf) as well as Thomas Hobbes in his assertion that the commonwealth is an artificial person.
The Pilgrims believed they could unite themselves politically into a new thing—a true union of bodies and souls in a commonwealth that could operate as a single entity—a moral person. This act was not just political, but ethnic and religious as well. Throughout the colonies during the seventeenth century and into the early eighteenth century, these acts of union and ethnogenesis were taking place.
Yet to take this political union one step further and seek to unite all the colonies into a single national body—a union of unions—would be an unprecedented and difficult task. The desire to combine similar colonies was not unheard of before the late eighteenth century. Many attempts had been made to bring the colonies into some type of union, but all ultimately failed.
In 1751, Ben Franklin, the primary author of the Albany Plan of Union (1754), noted in a letter to James Parker that it would not only be to the Americans’ advantage to form such a union, but that the conditions were right for its accomplishment. What were the conditions Franklin identified? First, it was becoming a necessity because of the size and commercial wealth of the growing colonies, and because of impending conflicts with the Indian tribes and European powers (the French and Indian War was only a few years away). Second, Franklin argued that it would be to the colonists’ advantage. Finally, the colonists understood their own interests and shared in those interests precisely because they already possessed the commonality of being English in origin.
Yet even the best ideas on paper can run afoul of factional interests and the general human resistance to dramatic or sudden change. It would take an unusual course of events and Providential favor to finally bring the Americans together as one people.
One People
The Declaration of Independence strikingly opens by declaring that the Americans, as “one people,” are breaking away from Great Britain to establish their own nation. The clause that precedes this—”when in the course of human events”—is indicative of why the Americans came to see themselves as one people and believed independence was a necessity.
The most immediate “human events” the Declaration references were those of the imperial crisis that began with the Sugar and Stamp Acts of 1764 and 1765. The ensuing decade opened an irreparable rift between the British and Americans, despite earnest attempts by the colonists to reconcile with their Mother Country. Although some were eager for independence (Samuel Adams), most leaders in the Continental Congress were still seeking peace with the Crown and Parliament well into the summer of 1775. The prospects of a bloody war with the British Empire were not promising, yet the necessity of war became clear by the spring of 1776. Human events were not completely under the control of the humans living through them.
Yet the arguments the colonists made against Parliament and their willingness to die to defend their rights, liberties, and ways of life point to a further horizon of “human events”—the horizon of the first settlements in America. The history of colonial America is supremely important for understanding the conditions that made both peoplehood and the success of the revolution possible.
A striking trait of colonial America is the variety of peoples, histories, Indian relations, laws, social classes, commercial endeavors, and religious practices that one encounters. The English settled Virginia and Massachusetts (and many other areas); the Dutch bought Manhattan from the Lenape Indians and named it New Amsterdam; the Swedes founded Delaware as New Sweden in 1638; and Germans and Quakers clustered in Pennsylvania. Colonial governments also took on different forms: royal, proprietary, charter, and trustee.
In all the diversity, it is easy to lose sight of the commonalities. The colonies were dominated by the English. Accordingly, by the late eighteenth century, 60% of all colonists could trace their ancestry to England, and 85% came from the British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland). The largest ethnic subgroup was the Germans in Pennsylvania, who made up almost 9%, while another 5% were Dutch, French, and Swedish. Thus, by the Constitutional Convention, roughly 95% of all colonists could trace their ethnic heritage to the British Isles and Germany—giving rise to the belief in an Anglo-Saxon America. Strikingly, virtually all white colonists came from Northwest Europe—there were negligible numbers of central, southern, and eastern Europeans, and certainly no Asians, subcontinent Indians, or Hispanics.
Politically, the colonies shared one trait: with the exception of Georgia until 1751, all the colonies had elected legislative assemblies. If nothing else, the Americans were a self-governing people, and they believed self-government to be both a divine right and a way of life—one they fiercely defended as essential to liberty and human happiness. It was this characteristic above all else that shaped the Americans’ resistance to Parliamentary supremacy: Parliament had the right to legislate over the colonies in general acts for the purposes of imperial administration, but not the right to impose internal taxes for the purpose of raising revenue. The colonists flatly rejected “virtual representation” in Parliament as unjust; only actual representation by elected officials would suffice.
In addition, the colonies were overwhelmingly Protestant. Despite pockets of other sects and religions (Catholics, Quakers, and Jews), 98% of all religiously devout colonists were practicing Protestants of one kind or another. Edmund Burke emphasized this point in 1775 in his “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies,” arguing that the colonists were Protestants “of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion”—a disposition that expressed itself politically as “the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.”
Thus, the “one people” of America were formed from a common ethnic and religious strand and for over a hundred and fifty years had lived a spirited and self-governing way of life that required fortitude, innovation, hard work, negotiation, sincere piety, and the cultivation of frontier and martial virtues. It is these traits that made the American people who they were and thus facilitated their union as one people fit to establish a new nation.
The Gift of Trump
Many will ask, “Where are the American people today?” It is fashionable today to decry the decrepit state of American government and society. These critiques are often true and are worth expounding upon because they affect the quality of our lives.
Yet the Trump years over the past decade have been a gift to America. They have revealed that, despite all these woes and troubles encountered across society and government, the American people live on. They rallied to Trump as a disruptor of the system and found identity and solidarity in a populist movement opposed to radical elements of the political left.
The American body politic is alive, even if not well. It is a subset of the total population of America, requiring the painful and often confusing task of separating friend from enemy among the people who live in this country. Yet at the height of elite maladministration—COVID, the summer of BLM, border invasions—the immune system of America’s body politic awoke and hit back, using Trump and the energy from his administration to lead the charge.
It is this historic body politic that we must seek to preserve at all costs, for it is the essence of America. It is in identifying with this peoplehood—her spirit, virtues, and inspiration—that we will find the strength and courage to overcome our challenges. A people always precedes the formal establishment of nations, the writing of constitutions, and the implementation of laws. America is no different in this respect. When the latter become corrupted, it is the former—the people—who take action “to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government” upon a foundation that will affect their safety and happiness.
The American people, rightly understood, are what we celebrate this Fourth of July and on America’s 250th anniversary—not the Declaration nor the Constitution; not great men like Jefferson and Washington; not creeds or principles or lofty ideals of republics long gone; but the people and their way of life that made this country the greatest country on earth.
