This spring I read the first two volumes of Rick Atkinson’s history of the Revolutionary War. By the 4th of July I was ready to honor the sacrifice and courage of those who fought for independence. Their achievement is crucial for our attempt to affirm community in our time for two reasons: the first is that our nation was not founded on claims to land, race or religion, but allegiance to liberty and equality; the second is that whenever community is compromised, it is helpful to celebrate liberty and equality. Since these compromises are perennial, usually elevating people in ways relating to land, class/wealth, race and language, the American ideal requires continual renewal of hearts and minds to the very things at the heart of America, allegiance to liberty and equality. Given this, I find reading this history a profoundly spiritual exercise, wherein we are called again to own our heritage in the face of all manner of compromise.
This was a terrible war, preceded by a breakdown in relations between the King and those wanting independence. Before a shot was fired, the British governing class and military saw the rebels as ungrateful and disobedient. The colonists, by contrast, saw themselves as people who had created a new world by their invention and hard work, deserving equal status with citizens in England. They thought their life should be governed by the same values and rules at work in their home land. But things only get worse when people on both sides started being killed. Families were changed for the worse and women and children were on their own. The final stage of most wars is the destruction of property, mass burning of towns and ports, rape and pillage. In numerous cases it was official military policy to burn ports and cities along the coast for the purpose of punishing the rebels and destroying ports. One other thing running through all these reactions to the war: the Revolutionary War was a civil war. It divided families as well as neighbors. One of the sons of Benjamin Franklin remained a loyalist. One cannot imagine any restoration between the two sides except for the British evacuation. It is not surprising that many loyalists felt constrained to go to Canada or Nova Scotia or return to England.
One thing which caught my eye was the rigid stratification of people. The colonies were ruled by governors answerable to King, Parliament, and trading companies, supported by a ruling class of white men owning property. Then came the ranks of those not owning land but secure in their life as merchants, craftsmen, farmers and laborers. Women were of course part of all these classes, but dependent on men by marriage and family.
There were two other groups in this colonial world of great importance. One was the native people of North America, who were continually pushed westward toward the wilderness as white settlements expanded. This produced a sad and violent history. In the recent War with the French, some tribes sided with the French but in the new war for Independence, some sided with the British against the colonies. The western regions were terrorized by violence which included killing, torture and scalping. The killing of whites in upstate New York and Pennsylvania was so brutal that Washington sent an army to the region for the purpose of destroying Indian villages, food supplies and crops. Reading these parts gives one the impression that a basic pattern was set: either native Americans were to accept western expansion and occupation of their land or die.
The other group was black Africans. It is estimated that there were 500,000 black Africans in the colonies in 1776, with roughly 450,000 enslaved. While the majority were in the southern colonies, (e.g., Maryland had about 63,000 and Virginia had about 163,000), there were about 4,700 in Massachusetts, 19,000 in New York and 5,500 in Pennsylvania. In other words, all the colonies participated in the practice of slavery.
What we have then in each colony is a rather volatile set of social, economic and political relations. The idyllic perspective of Europeans coming to America for the freedom to forge their identity and fortune, or even coming for religious freedom, tends to obscure the tensions. In actuality the colonists of 1776 were subject to the demands of trading companies, Parliament and King. The increase in taxes (dare I use the word tariffs) and the desire for more profits by the trading companies increased the demand for more workers (white settlers or slaves). This in turn implied more land, which in turn triggered more troubles with native Americans. The King in turn needed more money to pay for the military to keep peace on the frontiers and to deal with ancient hostilities between Great Britain, France and Spain. When the navy could not recruit sailors, men were pressed into service by force. So, we have the strange contradiction: the founders began talking of equality of all people when everyone knew that was not the case: slaves were not free and serious divisions existed between landowners and common people as well as men and women. It was not a good time to either raise taxes or talk about taxation without representation.
As one works one’s way through two volumes (a third is yet to come), one begins to sense that the real problem between the rebels and the Crown was that the majority of the colonists were English. To be sure, they did not live in London or Birmingham, but they thought they were subjects of King George and ought to be treated as citizens equal to their relatives throughout Great Britain. When you read the list of charges against the King and his government in the Declaration of Independence, one gets the sense of profound disappointment and even betrayal. These practices are not things you do to English citizens. But the King, Parliament and Trading Companies saw very little wrong in treating colonies that way. They thought colonists were different. Being colonists changed their status and created a world where many things were permitted, not just repression of indigenous peoples and designation of Africans as slaves.
In this sense the war was about freedom from oppressive colonial structures. This is not new or surprising, since we have been told this since grade school. But here is something to think about: the irony of the American Revolution is that while it threw off allegiance to an oppressive King, the founders basically maintained far too many aspects of the colonial world view and structures, thereby determining that the new nation would in fact be a colonial nation in law and spirit.
How so? Well, let’s take the most obvious example, slavery. There has always been agreement on the great achievement of the founders, but in my lifetime we have gone from a begrudging admission that slavery compromised that achievement to a full acceptance that slavery was an outright contradiction and regrettably laid the basis for a century of conflict. This is very difficult to deal with and is usually treated as some sort of enigma or paradox at the personal level (e.g., Jefferson) or a political compromise to gain votes for the union (e.g., Adams). In both cases they appeared to know their achievement was flawed but were unable to avoid it. It should be noted that we are now confronted with an administration which wishes to reject all that talk of compromise and the history of injustice involved before and after the Civil War, all for the sake of a more positive view of our history.
A second obvious example where the colonial world view persisted was the acquisition of land. Recall that England, like its European neighbors, assumed that each nation could claim land by force or purchase. And I must admit that it was often justified for religious reasons. Called colonies, such lands were expected to produce natural resources, manufactured products for trading companies and function as military outposts for political interests. Apparently the ability to do this was part of the divine right of kings and was somehow transferred to the newly formed government. So, Jefferson’s approval of the Louisianna Purchase in 1803 ushered in over a century of land acquisition by war or purchase of Florida, the large southwestern region from Spain and the northwest region from England, Alaska in 1867, then an attempt to gain and hold Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines from Spain, and the annexation of Hawaii in 1889 and the Virgin Islands in 1917. How does a nation wishing to loosen the bonds of colonial structures take over so many territories and lands, all with indigenous peoples?
Just as theories about land acquisition extended into the 20th century, the colonial mindset regarding cheap labor also extended to the present time. Black slavery arose to meet this need and was justified by all sorts of theories. In theory, emancipation was supposed to change that, but Jim Crow laws, segregation and election laws worked to make movement toward freedom a slow process, especially since it was vigorously opposed by white supremacists and actual law.
Another important but limited example of bringing into the country low cost workers was the reliance on Chinese workers to build the trans-continental railroad in the 1860’s. Then came waves of European immigrants who met the need of cheap labor, but in most cases did not become a permanent under-class.
The long history of immigrants from Hispanic countries to the south presents a very different and complex history. Most of the immigrants came to America for asylum, work or opportunity for new life. The Pew Research Center estimated that there were 14 million immigrants without legal status in the US in 2023. They have found work in major sectors of the economy: construction, agriculture, food processing, manufacturing and the service sector. This creates an unusual development: since their work is essential to the total economy and there does not appear to be replacements, governments at local and state levels have not been quick to send them home. But since they do not have legal status, they are in no position to object to their living conditions. The result is that they have become a permanent underclass offering cheap labor, which means there is not much incentive for governments to improve their situation.
Many are of the view that the solution must involve a path to citizenship, for the sake of these long-suffering people as well as the restoration of the principle of equality and the hope tied to the American dream of welcoming immigrants. That makes sense since the vast majority of these people came for political asylum, work and a way to improve their lives. Citizenship would break with the colonial past of subordinating some as a sub-class of cheap labor. But it would require extending to these immigrants fair housing, education and health programs, which in the current political climate is a major challenge
In recent years the compromise of the principles of liberty and equality over slavery has been called our original sin. As a theologian, I find this comment insightful. Original sin, in the logic of Christian doctrine, refers to an act and a state of being. The act was the decision to enslave and transport humans from Africa to the colonies. But this became a policy as well as the acceptance by the majority of people in the colonies to live with this inhumane practice. In other words, slavery consisted of a specific act but it soon became embedded in the culture and laws of the land. Moreover, by 1776 it was so out of control that the founders had to compromise their understanding of equality of all people in order to gain support for the new Constitution.
In this essay I am asking that you expand your understanding of that original sin. Slavery was part of something much larger, namely, colonialism. This was the original sin: that the King and trading companies and colonists could take the land by force, dispel by force indigenous peoples, bring over slaves, and use the land with one thought in mind, namely return on investments. It is frightening to consider how the Founders rejected the idea that King and aristocrats possessed the entitlement to arbitrarily rule over others, but then to find that the Founders transferred such entitlements to themselves, claiming the right to take other people’s land or enslave people. While the Civil War finally rejected this idea, holding people in a subordinate status was then recast as segregation and written into all sorts of laws denying liberty and equality. That willingness to deny the humanity of people reappears in the creation of a permanent underclass of immigrants providing cheap labor. It also continues to appear in the exclusion and subordination of women—another group excluded from full equality in the founding documents.
Running through our history is the question: Who belongs? If the answer is not certain people defined by race, religion or class, it would appear that the answer is those who love liberty and equality. But history shows many answers have been given, some being the source of great pride in our nation, but others revealing great sorrow. Apparently we are continually tempted to forsake liberty and equality. It may well be that some, like white nationalists, never made such a commitment.
It is absolutely necessary that our re-telling of our history include the acknowledgement of those original sins, not to wound or make people feel bad, but because allegiance to America involves repentance as well as loyalty. No one expressed this better than Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address. What happened at Gettysburg was a call to re-commit to the original ideal: a national founded on liberty and equality. But now we are confronted with those who refuse to speak of the contradictions, or how very destructive ideas like colonialism have impacted our history. Prohibiting certain speech and banning books are openly affirmed. But you cannot cover up or deny the truth of our history. Any attempt to do that only makes things worse, since in such a case you compound the original problem by proposing that we tell what is not true. We can only affirm the greatness of our history by accepting the whole truth. One can only get to the truth by going through the hard truths in our history. That is very challenging work but it is the only way to overcome the things which would destroy us. If you want a text to understand this, then remember that only the truth can set us free.