An Unwinnable War, Won

Reflections on a 248 year-old revolution in process

Two hundred and forty-eight years ago, 56 men met in the Pennsylvania State House (later named Independence Hall) in Philadelphia to commit treason against the most powerful empire on earth. Representing 13 colonies of that empire, these men—a mix of landowners, entrepreneurs, politicians, and others—had become enamored with a new set of ideas flowing from enlightenment thinkers and Christian teaching. They had become convinced people should have the right self-governance and that each person, possessed of inherent dignity, should stand equal before law. Those convictions led them to sacrifice their lives on the altar of their ideals and start a war no sane person believed they could win.

Remember what government looked like back then? We now live in the world those 56 men created—a world in which even dictatorships like North Korea cloak themselves in the language of “republic.” But in 1776, freedom, equality, and self-governance were nascent concepts espoused by philosophers like John Locke and adopted only incompletely in a few small enclaves. Democracy was non-existent. There were a few “republics” like the Netherlands, though they often looked more like oligarchy than republic. Switzerland was a confederacy. But the vast majority of countries in the world were hereditary monarchies and empires under which equal rights and individual liberty were not contemplated.

France, England, Spain, and Portugal were monarchies. Germany was divided into smaller principalities and remnants of the Holy Roman empire. The Qing dynasty ruled in China, and the Qianlong emperor had the power of life or death over every person in his 61-year reign. Japan suffered under the imperial rule of the Edo period. The continent of Africa was divided into a host of kingdoms and tribal groups. Catherine II ruled as empress of Russia after overthrowing her emperor husband. And South America was being colonized and looted by European powers. Most governments viewed people as inherently unequal. Most governments allocated legal rights on the basis of birth not common humanity. Innovation was bottled and throttled by oppression. Global GDP in the late 1700s was somewhere south of $1 trillion (in today’s currency), only four times what it had been a thousand years prior. And the lives of most people were as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes noted, “nasty, brutish, and short.”

Great Britain, meanwhile, was incredibly powerful. King George III ruled over the ever-expanding British domain and the world’s most powerful navy—a territorial occupation that by its peak in 1922 would be the largest empire in the history of the world, encompassing roughly 25% of the world’s population and land mass.

It was in this context that 56 men frustrated by the rule of a far-away monarch decided to do the unfathomable and declare independence from (and, by necessity, war on) George’s unconquerable colossus. Uniquely, the foundation for this wasn’t a coup by a rival monarch—an American king seeking his own power—but widespread, zealous passion for something entirely new. These rebel colonists didn’t want a king. They didn’t want to be kings. They wanted to articulate for the first time a set of principles by which people could assert their own “rights,” sovereignty, and dignity and come together to rule themselves. Building on the imperfect ideas of the old Greek democracies and the pre-imperial Roman Republic these colonists sought to redefine not just their own geographic territory but the terms by which all men and women related to government.

The members of the Second Continental Congress asked five men—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman with determining the terms of the independence they would like to declare from Great Britain. And that small committee largely tasked one man—Jefferson—with drafting the document that would become one of the most important in history.

Imagine how he must have felt. Jefferson secluded himself from June 11 to June 28 in a rented home on Market Street to draft the document. He was 33 years old at the time. A polymath, Jefferson (though flawed in many ways) was one of history’s great talents. And he was in love with the enlightenment ideals that tried to articulate why each human being deserved respect and freedom. In isolation in that rented townhome he drafted what I think is one of the most beautiful passages in history:

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.

Read it again. Read it as if you were living under a Spanish colony in South America or under the iron fist of the Qing dynasty in China. Read it as if you were a poor tenant farmer under the oppressive rule of King George in Virginia or an enslaved person in Georgia (whose freedom under the principles of the Declaration was still decades away). Read it as if you grew up in a system that assumed you were worth less than your neighbor by virtue of your social station, and your future was limited by the circumstances of your birth.

The Declaration was, in fact, a “revolutionary” statement articulating the ideological and factual basis for a coup against empire. But spiritually, it was more important than that. It was a revolution against history. It was a revolution against the idea that some men (and women) are worth more than others. It was a revolution for the idea of dignity, human rights, and equality before law.

And when Jefferson submitted his document to the Congress, and those 56 men signed it and shipped it off to King George and to others rulers around the world they ignited a war in the America colonies that would become a centuries long war to transform the world from tyranny to liberty.

War they got. Five of the signers were captured, tortured, and killed. Nine died from wounds or hardships fighting in the war. All were impacted—raked by violence, their homes and property ravaged, their children thrust into the violence they created. They starved. They lost battles. They must have wondered if it was worth it—these ideals that had caused them to plunge a nation into violence. And then, unexpectedly, they won.

The United States became the world’s most prominent republic. It took 13 more years to get the government right. It took the willpower of one man—George Washington—to resist calls to adopt a monarchy and adhere to the vision of a republic in which leaders served their fellow citizens rather than ruling over them. It took 144 years for women to become full participants in the Republic, and nearly 100 years (and the nation’s most violent conflict) for black Americans to get their first taste of the ideals in the Declaration. The nation was and is imperfect…and yet, that simple statement signed in 1776 lit a spark of freedom that would eventually rage to create the freest, most powerful country in the history of the world. It was and is a nation based not on a particular race, religion, or ethnicity but on common belief in and adherence to a set of philosophic beliefs about our government and one another.

And in creating America, those founding fathers reshaped history and humanity. You know what happened when other people read the Declaration of Independence? They, too, wanted freedom. You know what happened when the freedom of America unleashed human creativity and created the most vibrant and explosive economy and political culture in the world? Other countries took note and movements began—some slowly, some quickly—to reshape their societies. Eventually revolutionary movements for democracy would happen in places as far flung as India, South Africa, and France. People everywhere began to hunger for liberty and equality. And the ideology of the world was changed.

We now live in a world in which nearly half of countries are democracies. The combination of political freedom, free markets, and the technological innovation unleashed by those systems has lifted billions of people out of poverty—creating a world more than 100 times richer than the one that existed at the time of the Declaration of Independence. The dominant ideology now globally—though still lived so imperfectly—is the one articulated in the Declaration. And the revolution in America has become a revolution in human history.

However, as always, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Thirty-five percent of the world still live in authoritarian regimes, and in the last twenty years the world has grown less, rather than more, free. In the birthplace of the Declaration, politics has become fragmented and legal institutions eroded. Countries like Turkey and China that were trending towards freedom have reversed course. And ideologies that would stamp out the uniqueness and dignity of the individual in favor of collectivism and power run rampant.

Today in the United States we celebrate Independence Day. We celebrate 56 men who risked everything to embrace a new set of ideas and a new form of government to reflect them. We remember the tens of thousands who mounted an unwinnable war against an unshakeable empire to champion a new form of government. And we offer thanks that that unwinnable war was, in fact, won—and that the revolution kindled on our shores spread far and wide to transform the lives of billions of people.

But we also solemnly reflect on the charge of the Declaration and its authors. All people are created equal. We are all endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights. Each of us deserves life, liberty, and the ability to pursue our own unique paths to flourishing. But those rights, while inalienable, are not guaranteed. As our forebears sacrificed their lives for these ideals, we too are called to embrace and fight for them. Abraham Lincoln once noted that great men “thirst and burn for distinction” and will have it, “whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving free men.” And around the world the powers that oppose liberty, dignity, and opportunity fight ceaselessly to dominate others.

May we, on this Independence Day, fight back. May we have the audacity and conviction to oppose the enemies of liberty and to continue to fight for the promise of the Declaration and America’s spiritual foundation. May we do so out of love—for our neighbors and for the blessings of the Creator. And may we gain courage from the example of those 56 men, their hundreds of thousands of compatriots, and the unwinnable war they won. Happy Independence Day.