America began on July 4, 1776, with the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. From that day onward, this unique “creedal” nation, the United States, has struggled to make good on this promise of liberty and equality for all – and struggles still.
So goes the customary, tidy, stirring and Whiggish narrative that I and millions of other Americans were taught as schoolchildren. As recently as a decade ago, this account dominated, heartily endorsed by politicians from both parties, constantly propounded in the Atlantic and other liberal outlets, and apparently buttressed by the research of eminent historians such as Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood.
But in this story of American identity, what role does the generation of 1776 have? At the last great anniversary, in 1976, their descendants still held pride of place in middle American national notions, mixed with the still-living memory of total war. Robert Altman’s film Nashville, released on the eve of America’s 200th anniversary, painted a masterly – and uncomfortably familiar – portrait of a confused, suddenly violent nation turning sharply to the political right, its culture caught in a turbulent zone between naivety and cynicism.
“My mother’s people came by ship, and fought at Bunker Hill,” a country musician lamely chants in the opening scene, accompanied by dutiful banjos. “My daddy lost a leg in France, I have his medal still. My brother served with Patton, I saw action in Algiers. Oh, we must be doin’ somethin’ right to last 200 years!”
By then, bragging about being descended from colonial settlers and Revolutionary War veterans was already out of fashion in the liberal mainstream, where efforts were concentrated on extending the idea of citizenship – not just to black Americans, for whom, as Frederick Douglass pointed out, the Fourth of July had long been a painful date, a reminder of how cruelly the fruits of liberty were denied them, but increasingly also to new immigrants from non-European countries who arrived after racial restrictions were lifted in the 1960s.
A more universalist story accordingly emerged: while those who set down the creed may have, by and large, had British heritage in common, genetically and culturally, the main thing they fought for were values, and across the centuries since, the American creed has been so often renewed by immigrants from far-flung places eager to pledge allegiance.
America’s 250th birthday arrives with this story in tatters. What else can be concluded from a Supreme Court decision this week (on 30 June) that upholds birthright citizenship – the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment – with only a bare majority fully joining in the decision? The anniversary and the creedal narrative attached to it have come under attack from left and right for over a decade, as each, in very different ways, has come to believe that people, more than ideas, lie at the heart of the founding. A new profusion of alternative founding stories has etched a question mark next to the year 1776, undercutting the bisesquicentennial just as a divided nation reaches for a unifying moment.
Where do we come from? Americans, no longer able to agree, have pried open a Pandora’s box of competing narratives of sin and slavery, blood and soil. The truth is that the universalist, creedal story was bound to collapse – it had so little to say about the society that made the revolution. The shame is that its squabbling successors, who have so much to say on the subject, are so dishonest about it. For so much about America – and, indeed, about 1776 – can only be fully understood by looking to the years that came before.
In recent years, thinkers on the contemporary right have levelled a wide range of contradictory attacks on the narrative of an Enlightenment-inspired American founding in 1776. For Yoram Hazony, Israeli-American think-tanker and leading figure of “national conservatism”, America’s real founding tradition is not “rationalist” or Enlightened but rather English, Christian and conservative; for Patrick Deneen, political theorist and author of the 2016 landmark Why Liberalism Failed, the promises made by the framers were all broken, the whole project a disaster.
Most influential in recent years has been a meatier nationalism, propounded by prominent Republicans such as Vice President JD Vance, who argued last year that America “is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.” In this version, the ideas expressed in the Declaration are important but, compared with mainstream conservative rhetoric of earlier vintage, they have suffered a certain demotion – now, they only tell part of the story.
Vance picks out the weak spots in the “creedal” narrative. If belonging to America depends merely on agreement with the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence, he observes, this would seem to include millions of people abroad: “Must we admit them tomorrow?” And what about the native-born Americans who disagree – should they be deported? (Many contemporary liberals, of course, would be happy to answer in the affirmative to both.)
Online, meanwhile, many go further, raising the banner of “Heritage America” and affirming the very idea the “creedal nation” story most explicitly forbids: that those who can claim deeper genealogical ties to the country are more American than recent arrivals. Such notions form a piece with rising discontent with mass immigration, with the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, and its attempt to limit birthright citizenship.
Yet the right can claim, not without justification, that it was liberals who cast the first stone against 1776. That was heaved into the air, amid a climate of “racial reckoning” that already seems like a distant memory, back in 2019 with the 1619 Project, the series of essays in the New York Times magazine dedicated to the idea that America’s true founding came with the arrival of the first ship of enslaved Africans, representing the nation’s “original sin”.
The ensuing controversy almost completely submerged the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing (though that dour group, if could they be asked, might have quite liked people talking about sin). It also provoked the then-outgoing Trump administration to prepare a counterblast in defence of the founding through a “1776 Committee”. Half a decade later, it is a sign of the sea change in the national climate that the conversation has turned from the left challenging the founding story, to the right.
It would be going too far to say that 1776 has lost its centrality. The American Revolution and its ideas, as encapsulated in the Declaration and the Constitution, remain at the heart of most Americans’ sense of their political identity – and rightly so, since these are the founding documents of the republic still in place a quarter of a millennium later, a remarkable accomplishment.
But the American republic and the American nation are not quite the same thing, as difficult as it often is to distinguish the two. National self-consciousness arrived with the Revolution, which constructed the republic under which America has lived its entire independent life. The relative flexibility of Americanness, the fact that it has long been easier to become fully American than it is to become fully Japanese or even German – despite the Bundesrepublik’s successful incorporation of many non-ethnically German arrivals – owes much to this superposition of nation and republic.
So, too, does it owe to the specific ideological character of the founding, a cocktail of newer Enlightenment doctrines and older British traditions, with a dash of classical antiquity. The American Revolution, to be sure, was hardly motivated by the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence alone. Less noble motives such as land speculation and smuggling played a major role in precipitating the war, though it was not, as Nikole Hannah-Jones’ lead essay in the 1619 Project argued, a struggle to preserve slavery. Even as it left human bondage intact, the revolution was intensely bound up with a certain set of ideas about freedom – selectively applied, as all political ideas are. And since the struggle for independence left such deep impressions upon Americans’ emerging sense of themselves as a people, its ideas impressed themselves on that sense, too.
Gordon Wood, the American historian who died in June, was for many decades the most learned defender of the revolution’s intellectual inspiration and political legacy. One of the key figures in a turn in American historiography, beginning in the 1960s, away from a previous school of thought that emphasised its economic motives, Wood argued the revolution was incomprehensible without a sense of its supporters’ notions of liberty. A tireless supporter of what he considered the radical legacy of those notions, by the end of his career Wood found himself defending the revolution against the 1619 Project’s criticism – and then defending himself against his colleagues’ broadsides. His had become a lonely voice.
But it is no accident that both left and right have found themselves looking back further into American history for a fuller sense of the character of the country. The revolution took place more than 150 years after the first English settlers arrived in Virginia. During those long years, a society of millions was carved out of the American woods, at the cost of great suffering and death among native populations, and often among settlers, too. How could that experience have left no trace on the people that made the revolution – or, for that matter, on those who arrived later in the land they had shaped? Wood’s work, rarely dealing in detail with social history, offers few answers.
The online right has a favourite work of American history which, to their minds, responds to this question nicely: Albion’s Seed, the 1989 doorstopper by Brandeis University historian David Hackett Fischer. This book considers America to be the product of four transplanted regional British cultures: Massachusetts, from East Anglian Puritans; Virginia, from Royalist southerners; Pennsylvania, from Midlands Quakers; and Appalachia, from Ireland, Scotland and Northern England. Across 900 pages, Fischer analyses how the “folkways” of these areas – everything from sexual mores to concepts of political freedom – were carried across the Atlantic by settlers and planted in American soil prior to the revolution. Fischer readily admits his intention is to rehabilitate the narrative that prefigured the civic-creedal story: the race-science-tinctured, 19th-century “Teutonic germ” theory – itself a transplant of a transplant – which held that Anglo-Saxon settlers brought English free institutions with them, having derived them in turn from the barbarians of Roman-era Germany.
That several of Fischer’s groups left their mark on America’s regional cultures is undeniable, but he claims vastly more: that they, not the Declaration of Independence, represent the essence of the American creed. His book is received so warmly by right-wing “race realists” because it purports to accomplish what would seem impossible: to construct the basis for a folkloric nationalism in a country whose history is defined by dislocation, rootlessness and the collision of peoples. Its conceit, presenting what amount to four ideal types of Heritage Americans, feels almost like a videogame – a treasure trove of fantasy-world “lore”, a Choose Your Fighter interpretation of American history tailor-made for the tireless roleplaying exercises of the online right. By providing an ethnic, rather than intellectual, account of the American concept of liberty, Fischer, whether or not by intention, provides a ready justification for those who wish to deny it to those outside the ethnos.
Fischer’s regional transplantation thesis also collapses under the slightest examination. In Virginia, Fischer laughably says the colony’s indentured servants came from the English region that stretches from “Kent and Devon [to] Staffordshire”. One might as reasonably speak of the American region that stretches from Arizona and Alabama to Iowa. In Pennsylvania, Fischer has to admit that by independence, his Quakers were already outnumbered by other ethnic groups in Pennsylvania, weakly protesting that some of these groups had things in common with them. And in Appalachia, which as the only ethnically homogeneous region of the United States home to people descended from those who emigrated from the British Isles should be his strongest area, Fischer embarrasses himself trying to argue that Irish Catholics, Protestant Ulstermen, Scottish Lowlanders and English Northerners were all members of a single, unified regional culture before arrival, instead of – as everyone knows – arriving different and eventually merging into a novel and distinctively American “Scotch-Irish” population.
A different and far more revealing account, though one with little to delight the online right, is provided in Bernard Bailyn’s remarkable 2012 work The Barbarous Years. Bailyn, who died in 2020, stands alongside Wood as one of the leading figures of the turn back towards the thought of the American Revolution. But unlike many intellectual historians, especially lately, he was also a formidable and keen social historian.
Bailyn never saw the Revolution in purely propositional terms. Rather, its ideas articulated developments long brewing in the social world of the American colonies: “intellectual developments in the decade before Independence”, he writes, “led to a radical idealization and conceptualization of the previous century and a half of American experience”.
What was the nature of that experience? For many years, it was almost unbelievably brutal and primitive. Like all American schoolchildren, I had learned about the killing winters and the malarial summers at Jamestown, but I had little idea of the sheer scale of the “death on a coastal fringe” until reading Barbarous Years, whose title is a fitting description of the first two generations of European settlement of the eastern coast of North America.
For decades, mortality in Virginia approached 90 per cent, with settlers dying in their hundreds from disease, malnutrition, cold, murder and conflict with indigenous populations that quickly turned genocidal. In May 1610, only 60 of 400 arrivals in Virginia survived; in 1616, 350 of 2,000; and by 1625, of more than 8,000 who came to Virginia, barely more than 1,000 were left alive. Settlers to Virginia in those crucial early years, Bailyn writes, came from “no one region of the country, no one subculture, no one economic environment”. Charts from his painstaking research into emigrant records reveal a distribution widely scattered across England, not focused in a single region as per Fischer. The colony’s overseers, desperate to replenish the settlers’ rapidly diminishing ranks, used their connections in London to scour the city’s orphanages and public institutions for “idle wastrels, petty thieves, and dissolute women”, shipped to Virginia by the hundreds to suffer and die.
A few brave second sons from the cream of the English gentry also came, in search of the land primogeniture had denied them – and more often than not found horrific death instead. The standards of living were shockingly low, on a level with the very worst in the old world. Most lived in thatched, dirt-floored huts, and even the most successful planters’ houses were, as one contemporary source put it, “small, inconspicuous, and inconsequential”. Far from Fischer’s rosy vision of noble Cavaliers flying to Virginia, a later wave of well-to-do migrants who arrived after the colony had stabilized by 1640 were “a strange, rather disreputable lot, flamboyantly active for a time but no founders of a distinct ‘royalist’ culture”.
The founding generation was not so far removed from this isolated and crude world as we are often taught to think. I was surprised to learn, upon moving last year to Charlottesville, Virginia, that the surroundings of Thomas Jefferson’s hometown had barely ceased to be a lightly settled frontier area when the author of the Declaration of Independence began construction on his home at Monticello in 1768. The last violent clash between Indians and settlers in the Shenandoah Valley, just over the mountains from Charlottesville, had taken place only two years earlier.
Elsewhere – in New England and the Dutch colony in what would become New York – standards of living were no better, genocidal war with native groups no less inhuman, and the emigrants no more unified in regional origin. Bailyn convincingly shows that no English region dominated in the Massachusetts Bay colony – while New Amsterdam, later New York City, was already in the 17th century what it still is today: an almost Babel-like profusion of peoples, tongues, and religions. In 1646, at least 18 different languages were spoken in the colony. And as for the Puritans, they emerge not as triumphant founders of a “city on a hill” that still persists today, but as failures. Those most committed to the strict Calvinist purity of their “Bible Commonwealth” came to view the commercial success of the colony as a bitter disappointment.
Bailyn’s investigation offers so many foretastes of the dynamics and paradoxes of American life today – for example, the great difficulty colonial overseers experienced in forming cities. Despite intense encouragements for colonists to band together, where they would be easier to defend from natives, the hunger for land proved stronger, hurling colonists further and further afield and creating a strange landscape of scattered, incoherent dwellings amid hacked-off stumps. Four hundred years later, through countless twists and turns, cities in America today remain something of a work in progress, as former industrial centres in the Midwest struggle to keep their residents from fleeing to the booming fringes of Phoenix or Dallas, where rows of cookie-cutter houses inspire in international visitors a similar sense of alienation from this odd, centrifugal civilisation.
For Bailyn, America began with the tragic failure of Fischerian transplantation. As colonists desperately tried to cling on to whatever scraps they could find of the familiar patterns of life in the old world, the unfathomably terrible conditions in the new obliged them to join those scraps together with the scraps of others, and with whatever could be found ready to hand in their American surroundings, to form wholly new patchworks. Under the awful pressure of frontier life, the hegemonic social, political, and cultural forces that held sway in a Europe dominated by the ancien régime could not survive – neither the state, nor the church, nor the Fischerian “folkways” and patterns of discourse that supported both. As the colonists finished the task of butchering surrounding natives and as agriculture, commerce and populations expanded over the course of the century leading up to 1776, the colonies built atop a social foundation stripped radically bare of old-world encumbrances. That bare foundation made the colonies the ideal site for a revolt against English rule, justified by a novel combination of Enlightenment contributions with older English doctrines. In France, freedom of worship was a polemical idea; in America, it had long been, in considerable measure, an effective fact.
The colonists invented less wonderful things, too. Bailyn shows that the process of establishing chattel slavery of African captives was a slow one in what would become the American South, not accomplished at a stroke with the arrival of that first ship. Those brought in captivity from Africa faced white resentment from the start, but for a time their legal status was not firmly different from that of the many white indentured labourers. The consolidation of what came to be called “chattel slavery” took decades.
It is not surprising that in such a violent and unstable society, making money often required institutionalised viciousness. “There was logic but no prior design in the development of this barbarous system of human debasement, nor had it been inherited or borrowed from abroad,” writes Bailyn. “It had been devised in the course of three generations by ambitious planters and merchants in the Chesapeake colonies desperate for profits, familiar with human degradation, and freed from moral scruples by their deep, pervasive racism.”
The 1619 Project, then, was surely right to look before independence to understand contemporary America’s enduring racial divides, but its completely naïve description of the 1619 slave ship as America’s “original sin” reflected all the fatal errors of 2010s progressivism: the basic lack of intellectual seriousness, the moral crudeness, the incongruously Christian overtones. The truth of the matter is not less damning.
Slavery and revolution: an indication of the range of possibilities for good and ill that reside in a society founded in a mass plunge into the primitive. The possibility, indeed, to create a political order, in the immortal words of Alexander Hamilton’s 1787 essay “Federalist No.1”, by “reflection and choice” where once had been only “accident and force”, and equally the potential to descend to the depths of human cruelty.
The notion that American history is characterised by encounters with barbarism was once popular, during the early twentieth-century heyday of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis”, which described westward expansion in rosy terms, arguing it preserved opportunity and vitality. Turner’s followers thought the frontier era was over as America seemed to be converging with Europe in the New Deal era.
But new frontiers, as the optimists on today’s American right remind us, are never in short supply in America – from the ongoing movement toward the Sunbelt, to the technological frontiers of artificial intelligence and the Wild West of prediction markets. Like a good republic, as Machiavelli says, America is always returning to its origins – and those origins, long before its political independence, lie in violent clash between civilisation and its opposite. That clash is not between America and its enemies, nor even within “the soul of the nation”; it is a very material one, between old rules and new realities.
On July 4, we mark a quarter of a millennium since one of the great moments in the history of human freedom – and watch the republic it launched battle decline. What comes next? A society with these origins is capable of many things.
[Further reading: The Degradation of Independence]
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