Over this past year or so I have been reading about the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution. I have been enamored with it for some reason. As I watched the fireworks this year, I almost teared up as I recalled the sacrifices these men made to bring about the birth of a new nation. Did you remember that by writing and signing the Declaration of Independence they were making themselves known as traitors? They were committing an open act of treason against one of the longest running and most powerful empires in existence at that time. If any of them were caught they would have been hanged. Many of them lost their fortunes and their health as a result of their revolutionary endeavors to break away and form a government with roots in philosophical, "enlightenment" ideas many of them had been raised on and dreamed about. Sometimes I think we don't ponder these things enough.
Something to ponder. We may not like the "other party", whichever side that may be, but we should be thankful that we can have safe political dialogue. And elections, though sometimes the outcomes are highly contested or very disappointing, do not erupt in violence in the streets or even the threat of it. And not only should we be thankful, we should pray for those nations that do not enjoy the political freedoms that we do, that they will be ruled in peace and justice.
As a tribute to this holiday is an excerpt from the introduction of a book I am currently reading, Founding Brothers, by Joseph Ellis. It is very fitting for the recent celebration.
What distinguishes the American Revolutions from most, if not all, subsequent revolutions worthy of the name is that in the battle for supremacy, for the "true meaning" of the revolution, neither side completely triumphed. Here I do not just mean that the American Revoltuion did not "devour its own children" and lead to blood-soaked scenes at the guillotine or the firing-squad wall, though that is true enough. Instead, I mean that the revolutionary generation found a way to contain the explosive energies of the debate in the form of an ongoing argument or dialogue that was eventually institutionalized and rendered safe by the creation of political parties. The source of the disagreement... involv[es] conflicting attitudes toward government itself, competing versions of citizenship, differing postures toward the twin goals of freedom and equality.
But the key point is that the debate was not resolved so much as built into the fabric of the national identity... Why is it that there is a core of truth to the distinctive iconography of the American Revolution, which does not depict dramatic scenes of mass slaughter, but, instead, a gallery of well-dressed personalities in classical poses?
First, the achievement of the revolutionary generation was a collective enterprise that succeeded because of the diversity of personalities and ideologies present in the mix. [It is] not because any of them was perfect or infallible, but because their mutual imperfections and fallibilities, as well as their eccentricities and excesses, checked each other...
Second, they all knew one another personally, meaning they broke bread together, sat together at countless meetings, corresponded with one another about private as well as public matters. Politics...remained a face-to-face affair.
Third, they managed to take the most threatening and divisive issue off the political agenda. That issue, of course, was slavery, which was clearly incompatible with the principles of the American Revolution, no matter what version once championed. (Could they have tried to abolish slavery and manage to keep the nation? ) ... The revolutionary generation decided that the risks outweighed the prospects for succes; they quite self-consciously chose to defer the slavery question by placing any discussion of it out-of-bounds at both the national and federal level.
Fourth, they developed a keen sense of their historical significance even while they were making the history on which their reputations would rest...If they sometimes behaved like actors in a historical drama, that is often how they regarded themselves. ..We are the audience for which they were performing; knowing we would be watching helped to keep them on their best behavior.
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