As early as February of 1765, John Adams had his eye on the ball. Complaining of British officials who “treated us like servants” while insisting the colonists had no “rights” but instead owed the mother country “a filial duty and submission,” Adams, in an essay, reminded his readers of the hardships faced by early settlers.
“Recollect … their bitter sufferings – the hunger, the nakedness, the cold… amidst dangers from wild beasts and savage men,” he wrote. “Let us recollect it was liberty, the hope of liberty for themselves and us and ours, which conquered all discouragements, dangers, and trials.”
He insisted, 11 years before the Declaration of Independence, that “many of our rights are inherent and essential, agreed on as maxims, and established as preliminaries, even before a parliament existed.”
He then called on colleges and public discourse to “become the instruments of impressing upon the tender mind, and of spreading and distributing far and wide, the ideas of right and the sensations of freedom.”
Later that year, in his own diary, describing reactions to the Stamp Act tax imposed upon the colonies, Adams wrote that “the people, even to the lowest ranks, have become more attentive to their liberties … [and] more determined to defend them.” Result: “Innumerable have been the monuments of wit, humor, sense, learning, spirit, patriotism, and heroism, erected in the several colonies and provinces.”
This – this – was the essence of what became the United States of America.
All throughout the colonies, consistently through those 11 years, even the most loyal subjects of Great Britain – of all walks of life – insisted that they possessed certain “natural rights” that government must respect. Crucially, the people themselves had the right to control their own government, not the other way around. The central, unassailable principle, as expressed by Connecticut lawyer Roger Sherman in that same 1765, was that “No laws bind the people but such as they consent to be governed by.”
This is why Thomas Jefferson explained that the Declaration of Independence, which he drafted as a member of a committee consisting of himself, Adams, Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, and Robert Livingston, was not original to him, but instead was “an expression of the American mind.” Jefferson crystallized the colonists’ understandings that had been developing for years.
The key clause of the Declaration combined Adams’ idea of unassailable rights with Sherman’s declarative point: “To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
To all of which, far too many of today’s Americans merely shrug. The indifference is both ignorant and maddening. Nowhere else in the world back then, not even in England itself, was there such a sense (if any sense at all) of humans as self-governing, rights-owning individuals, not mere subjects. This was, to apply Adams’ words, a new, unique, and heroic “learning [and] spirit.”
Fifty years ago, during a 15-month-long Bicentennial commemoration, every school child was led to understand the magic and miracle of how these seminal ideas actually were effectuated. Very few Americans took these achievements for granted. And the near universal belief, an entirely accurate belief, was that this nation’s adherence to these ideals – and indeed, its ever-growing manifestation of the ideals, slowly but steadily eradicating earlier flaws – was astonishingly admirable and worth major celebration.
In 1975 and 1976, we got it right. We started in April 1775 by feeling the fear and commending the courage of the militia who fired the “shot[s] heard round the world” at Lexington and Concord. We relished the story of how the “loss” of Bunker (and Breed’s) Hill was considered a moral victory. We learned of Washington’s remarkable victory in the siege of Boston, and of his army’s miraculous escape from the loss on Long Island.
And finally, of course, came the exuberance on the Bicentennial itself, a national joy-fest of epic proportions, proving the truth of Adams’ immediate predictions that for centuries afterward, the Declaration would be celebrated with “pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations.”
The exuberance and joy were neither fake nor misplaced. Despite what too many schools teach too many children these days, the United States, over time, has come far closer than not to living up to the Declaration’s ideals. Plenty of columns and will make , but for now, as we enter the week of our Semiquincentennial, let us belatedly but enthusiastically rediscover the “sense, learning, spirit, patriotism, and heroism” of which Adams wrote.
Freedom is both our heritage and our gift to the world. That heritage and gift are wondrous blessings. We must sustain them and consecrate them forever.