Daily Post contributor Louis Cannon shared a humor column yesterday, questioning whether the Declaration of Independence was actually a big mistake.
In spite of his (thoroughly documented?) research into the question, plus the fact that he quoted Lao Tzu… I suspect very few of our readers will agree with his perspective. But he got me thinking about the meaning of certain phrases in the Declaration.
In every stage of these Oppressions, We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
The Prince, here, is King George III, whom the Declaration signers labeled “a Tyrant”.
The Declaration listed 27 serious grievances that the King had purportedly failed to address. On that account, the Declaration’s authors judged the King to be unfit to be the ruler of a “free people.”
We can infer from this statement, and from the rest of the document, that the signers were not questioning the advisability of ‘government per se’. The signatories clearly felt that government is a necessary (if often troublesome) device. As they stated:
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…
It appears that at least some of the colonists were seeking a society where people were, in general, “free”… while also living under a government that could secure their God-given right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
At this particular time in history, much of the world , and most of Europe, lived under governments led by hereditary monarchs. Kings, and sultans, and emperors.
But not most of North America. If there were a continent where “freedom” — the right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness — reigned supreme, it may have been North America.
The colonists were, at this time in history, sharing a land that would eventually become the ‘United States of America’ with perhaps 250 independent indigenous nations, according to a map I came across on a website called AAANativeArts.com:
I know very little about most of these 250 independent nations. I was not expected to learn much about them, during my public school education. My parents rarely mentioned the existence of these nations, and certainly didn’t discuss them in any depth. I learned a bit about the tribes in Alaska, after marrying my wife Clarissa, an enrolled member of the Tlingit Indian tribe, and living in Alaska for 20 years… and I’ve learned something about the tribes of the American Southwest since moving to Pagosa Springs in 1993.
From what little I have heard, and read, and experienced, I believe the idea of “Liberty” could easily be applied to the way most of these nations treated their tribal members, while the modern concepts of “government” and “taxation” and “courts of justice” and “police” and “jails” were utterly foreign.
War was not a foreign concept, however, among the indigenous nations. It’s my understanding that, among certain tribes, the successful warrior was a high-status individual, and a young brave looked forward to the opportunity to prove himself in battle.
Among other tribes, the peacemaker was the more highly valued tribal member.
Slavery existed among certain tribes, as it did in the European colonies, but my sense of history tells me that, in general, our indigenous nations understood the concept of “Liberty” in a way that the colonists never grasped.
And maybe we still don’t fully grasp the meaning.
In March, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln met with a group of 14 tribal chiefs and, in the course of that meeting, Lincoln made the following comments:
“There is a great difference between the pale-faced people and their red brethren, both as to numbers and the way in which they live. We know not whether your own situation is best for your race, but this is what has made the difference in our way of living.
“The pale-faced people are numerous and prosperous because they cultivate the earth, produce bread, and depend upon the products of the earth rather than wild game for a subsistence.
“This is the chief reason of the difference; but there is another. Although we are now engaged in a great war between one another, we are not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren.”
Indeed, as Lincoln noted, the pale-faced people were engaged in a great war in 1863. Demographic historian Dr. David Hacker recently published his research into U.S. Census records from 1850 through 1870 to calculate the number of young men who disappeared from the Census rolls during the Civil War. He estimated that about 750,000 young men died from war injuries or war-caused disease between 1861 and 1865.
From a History.com article about Dr. Hacker’s estimate:
The data further suggest that 22.6 percent of Southern men who were between the ages of 20 and 24 in 1860 lost their lives because of the war.
Lost their lives… in the name of “Liberty”?
I would suggest that both sides, in that terrible war, were fighting for ‘Freedom’. The Southern army was fighting for the freedom to establish an independent government, and the freedom to keep slaves. The Northern army was fighting to prevent the South from freely leaving the Union and thereby continuing the practice of slave-owning.
In other words, both sides were fighting, to the death, to continue some form of oppression.
Makes me wonder what we even mean by the word “Freedom”.
In a sense, the Civil War is not over. Black Americans — although no longer enslaved — continue to be treated, by certain ‘pale-faced brethren’, as second-class citizens.
Nor are the Indian Wars over. Even today, in 2023, the U.S. government, and our individual state governments, don’t always honor the treaties signed a century ago, as evidenced by (for example) the recent Supreme Court decision concerning Navajo water rights.
Nor is the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) over, it would appear.
Nor is the Culture War over.
Some people are fighting desperately to limit what can be taught in schools, what books can appear in libraries, who is allowed to vote, whom a person can love, who can and cannot cross a national border, and what a woman’s options should be when she finds herself pregnant.
What do we really mean, when we celebrate “Freedom”? In 2023, it’s clear we have very different ideas about the word.
And by “we”, I am including all my brethren.