Three lifetimes. Laid end to end.
Not so very long, in those terms. Between Saturday, July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America, and the event being celebrated.
Take an 83-year-old — about the life expectancy of an American woman — and go back to her birth, 1943, the middle of a global war against fascism, aptly enough.
Tag another 83-year old. Trace back to his birth — talk about ironies — in 1860, the brink of our epic Civil War, fought to extinguish slavery, the devil’s bargain hard-wired into our Constitution to draw slave-holding Southern states into a risky new national enterprise.
One more lifetime — 84 years — puts us back to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, an empire-shattering document that echoed around the world, and down to this day, with its still-stirring assertion:
“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.”
And that is only the second sentence. The Founders hadn’t yet gotten to the point.
“We’ve become obsessed with the second paragraph,” said Eric Slauter, the University of Chicago professor who curated an exhibit on our nation’s foundational document at the Newberry Library, standing before an enormous blow-up.
“What we know is most contemporary readers glossed over that. They cared a lot about the charges against the king. This is an indictment. The real meat of the declaration, what made it a declaration of independence and not a declaration of rights, was this part. You can tell it was important because it’s in capital letters.”
The part, toward the bottom, declaring, in all-caps, that the now former colonies are “FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES.”
As much as nationalists today imagine a whites-only world in 1776, that was the leadership, not the people. A fifth of Americans in the revolutionary era were Black — most held in slavery in the South, but still there. What would bind our nation together, sort of, eventually, was not race or faith, but the words on this document.
“Certain nations are grounded in ethnicity or common religion, or a common language,” said Slauter. “But that has never been true of the United States. From the beginning it is a nation bound together by documents. Ink on paper is the medium of the United States.”
That is really what we are celebrating on the 4th. A written promise. A check to be cashed. Not an end result — Americans had five years of bloody battle ahead of them before victory at Yorktown.
Let’s talk about that. Since we have a president who demands that history be an uninterrupted fairy tale of glory, and because many of my fellow citizens view our current era with justifiable despair, I would remind them of the actual moment that we are commemorating.
Doom was gathering. By August, 32,000 British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries were camped on Staten Island — more than the entire population of New York — plus 10,000 sailors and 2,000 marines on 30 man-of-wars and 400 transport ships in the harbor.
The British had triple the men that George Washington had under him. More New Yorkers were signing up to fight for the king than were joining the Continental Army. While copies of the declaration were being read aloud in colonial squares, General William Howe was sending envoys to Washington, brusquely demanding his immediate surrender.
It got worse. By month’s end, American forces had been butchered at the Battle of Long Island, a slaughter that saw Washington’s men panicking and bolting for their lives.
Even then, Washington dithered, remaining on Manhattan, refusing to admit defeat and retreat to safety, a decision universally described by historians as “militarily inexplicable and tactically suicidal.” The only thing that saved him — and American hopes — was that Howe, who could have easily destroyed the Continental Army, declined to do so. Another saving American grace — however badly we blunder, our foes always seem to do worse.
But Washington learned, developing his most vital battlefield tactic: he became a master at running away.
“He transformed retreat into an art form, recognizing that merely keeping the Continental Army alive was a victory in itself.” wrote historian Thomas Fleming.
A useful strategy.
“We should never despair, our situation before has been unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust, it will again,” Washington wrote to Maj. General Philip Schuyler in 1777. “If new difficulties arise, we must only put forth New Exertions and proportion our Efforts to the exigency of the times.”
Sometimes you win; sometimes the best you can do is live to fight another day.