A (Mostly) Happy 250th American Birthday
That America emerged from the revolution as a free republic at all is something of a miracle. Most revolutions end in blood and tyranny, not liberty. As historian Gordon Wood has documented, the U.S. revolution was “radical” in its ideas about liberty and the rights of man. Its ideas emerged from the British Enlightenment—David Hume, Adam Smith, John Locke—that so influenced Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.
“All men are created equal” was about as radical an idea as you could express in 1776. Yes, that equality was imperfectly realized at the time. But the seed was planted, and then nurtured in the soil of the Declaration’s call for liberty and self-government. And as Wood explains in his great book, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” these ideas would spread and unleash the republican spirit of free men and women who built America.
The two Presidents after the Founders who best understood the Declaration were arguably Lincoln and Calvin Coolidge. Lincoln invoked the universal principles of the Declaration to make the case that ending slavery was essential for America to be true to its founding. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, came eventually to agree with Lincoln.
As for Coolidge, his oration in 1926 on the 150th anniversary deserves to be remembered more than it is:
