As the United States marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, its founding ideals remain undermined by the two histories it has never fully confronted: genocide and slavery.
People in the United States interested in words are learning a new one, semiquincentennial. It comes from Latin and literally means “half of 500 years.” It refers to the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776.
The actual decision “to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another” occurred on July 2, and the Revolutionary War had begun in April 1775.
The Declaration formally set out reasons that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved.”
The issuance of the Declaration by “the representatives of the United States of America, in general congress, assembled” is considered the birth of the United States of America.
The core of the Declaration sets forth a political philosophy that has inspired people in many places and situations ever since.
“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
Those words, along with the US Constitution of 1789 and the Federalist Papers that advocated and explained the new Constitution to the new republic’s voters, still inspire pride and hope.
Over the years, those words have been joined by other foundational documents, such as the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution) and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address, for American self-understanding and self-presentation.
However, those words are more aspirational and inspirational than descriptive. The nation and society they envision are yet to become a reality.
The ideals, like most ideals, have frequently been betrayed. They regularly receive unreflective pro forma praise, but throughout history, there has often been little effort to fulfill them.
The current administration in Washington, DC, and the political party that supports it use that reflexive pride to cover their own incompetence and corruption and to justify actions and policies that violate and roll back progress on those ideals.
The United States may be compared to a three-legged stool. One leg is the legacy of the philosophy and aspirations found in the nation’s founding documents and actions.
Unfortunately, the other two legs of the stool have generally been ignored, though both ultimately violate the first.
They are genocide and slavery.
The United States would not exist as we know it, and perhaps might not exist at all, without those two legs.
Every plot of land in the continental United States was once home to descendants of people who had crossed the Bering Strait from Asia thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. They had languages, cultures, religions, and political systems that had evolved to meet the opportunities and challenges of two continents, North and South America.
When Europeans arrived in what they called the New World, they unwittingly introduced diseases to which they had developed immunity or at least mitigation through centuries of natural selection. However, those diseases had never arisen in the Americas, and therefore the native inhabitants had no immunity to them. Smallpox and measles, for example, killed entire communities.
That was the unintended beginning of what eventually became an intentional destruction of the cultures and lives of the American Indian population. (A plurality of this population prefers “American Indian” or “Indian” to other names when referring to them as a whole.)
Lands were stolen, treaties were broken, open warfare was waged, whole peoples were forced to move to distant places and environments, and were confined to reservations. As late as the twentieth century, Indian children were torn from their families and communities and were forcibly placed in boarding schools, many of them conducted by Catholic religious orders and congregations.
In those schools, students were forbidden to use their native language or celebrate their culture. Many died of disease, neglect, and the effects of cultural demolition and kidnapping. Sexual abuse was not unknown.
When Europeans arrived in what is now the United States, there may have been as many as 18 million people living there. Today, the estimated Indian population is less than 350,000.
Accidental and intentional genocide have provided more than nine million square kilometres of land to the United States. Without that land and its resources, the second leg of the stool, there would be no country.
Despite that, Indians still face discrimination, poverty, and the ongoing effects of cultural catastrophe. The stool will wobble until that leg is fixed.
The third leg supporting the American stool is slavery.
Almost immediately after their arrival in what became the United States, Spanish, Dutch, French, English, and eventually American traders began dealing in African men, women, and children, buying them on the west coast of Africa and transporting them across the Atlantic Ocean. Untold numbers died en route. The survivors were enslaved for life, as were their descendants.
In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, in the list of complaints against King George III that justified rebellion, Thomas Jefferson wrote a condemnation of slavery.
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”
This paragraph was left out of the final version of the Declaration to secure the support of slaveholders.
Jefferson, who wrote so movingly of freedom, held about 130 people in bondage when he died on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration. In his lifetime, he freed only two men, and his will released a further five, but not Sally Hemmings, the woman with whom he had fathered some of those slaves.
Slave labor was an essential part of American economic development. Plantations worked by slaves produced indigo, tobacco and, most importantly, cotton. Slaves worked in factories and shops, enriching those who claimed the right to own fellow human beings.
Catholics were among those claimants. In 1838, the Jesuits in the state of Maryland, which was founded as a colony in 1634 as a refuge where Catholics could be free, decided to sell 272 of their slaves. It was only in the mid-2010s that Jesuits and Georgetown University, which had benefited from the sale, took steps toward restitution and remediation.
After the Civil War of 1861-5 brought about the emancipation of the slaves, the situation of Americans of African ancestry barely improved. Sharecropping (tenant farming) kept agricultural workers in debt and poverty. Lack of educational opportunities, lynching and other violence, racial segregation, and other forms of discrimination excluded them from the prosperity that their labor had produced.
To this day, discrimination in all parts of the country and the effects of slavery betray the aspirations of the founding documents of the nation.
The founding ideals of the United States have never been fully implemented. Until those words become actual deeds and policies, they are often merely nice but vapid verbiage.
After 250 years, it is time to honestly and humbly admit that until the United States follows through on the Declaration of Independence assertion that all people have God-given rights and until Americans make meaningful attempts to remedy centuries-old violations of those rights and act to protect and advance them today, the stool will always be unsteady.
The present political situation in the United States festers with attempts to override the rights of all people in the country, evidence that much more must be done.
Republished from Global Catholic
William J Grimm
William Grimm, a native of New York City, is a missioner and presbyter who since 1973 has served in Japan, Hong Kong and Cambodia. He is also the presenter of the popular Sunday homilies telecast through UCA News each week. A collection of those homilies has been published as Dialogue of One.