July 4, 2026 will mark the 250th anniversary of the revolt against British rule by some of the settlers situated in the thirteen colonies clustered along the Atlantic Ocean. It’s not a minute too soon to start preparing for the orgy of self-congratulation and remythologizing that is about to befall us. Replete of course with gallons of there-is-still-a-lot-of-work-to-be-doneism.
Better still, as the rate of decline into chaos and confusion accelerates, it’s a perfect time to consider what can get us out of this mess. By mess I mean what 1776 hath wrought. A good place to begin that appraisal is with the document the Founders created to justify the project in the first place. The Declaration of Independence has been misconstrued for a very long time. It’s taken me decades to penetrate the fog and I still have lots to learn.
The Declaration is a manifesto. Its purpose was to explain and justify violent opposition to British “occupation.” By 1776 gendered and racialized violence was already deeply ingrained within the white settlers. It was the product of what it took from 1619/20 forward to seize and hold territory, to enslave and keep enslaved at least 500,000 Black people and to control deviant white settlers. (For context as to the latter, the Salem Witch trials were in 1692/93.)
Accordingly, picking a fight with the British Army did not require creating a violent or militarized culture from scratch. For that matter, since at least the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, violent conflict with British troops was already well underway.
In the first paragraph of this essay, I used the word project. I find it a useful lens or frame to view the arc of U.S. history. By way of illustration, I thought the movie Oppenheimer did an excellent job at depicting the creation, testing, deployment and afterlife of the atomic bomb as a big project. Putting a man on the moon was another big, fast USA national undertaking.
The 1960s partial dismantling of the Jim Crow system in the South can also be viewed as a project—an especially important and difficult one. There are plenty of other examples, but within the U.S. all are subprojects of the gigantic, relentlessly violent work of creating and maintaining the modern nation state known as the United States of America.
Territorial conquest for natural resources and/or land for settlement is at the core of colonialism and thus also at the core of the very being of the USA. What makes understanding the Declaration so useful is what it reveals about why some of the settlers took matters into their own hands.
That it was only some of the settlers is relevant because had there been a referendum on the matter, most would have voted to remain a British colony. (Similarly, there was never a majority for ending slavery either.) Those who had a different idea were a quite small group of white, male property owners with a vision. And how comfortable they were using violence to achieve it.
For a long time, I accepted the canard that we are a nation of laws. We aren’t. Since Day One we have remained first and foremost a nation characterized and defined by violence. The veneer of law comes separately. Usually after the fact but sometimes before or concurrently.The Declaration is itself a good example. THE BLOODSHED WAS ALREADY UNDEDRWAY when it was adopted.
As a sidenote, most accept the myth that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution ended racialized chattel slavery. No. Seven hundred thousand people killing each other came first. Or to put it another way, had the laws been capable of resolving the conflict over slavery there wouldn’t have been a Civil War in the first place.
Where does the Declaration fit in the organic evolution of the whole arrangement? Even though newspapers have run July 4 full page ads of the whole dang thing for years, going as far back when people still read newspapers, most U.S. Americans think the Preamble is the Declaration in its entirety. It’s where the frequently quoted “…all men are created equal” occur. Those words, however, are also profoundly misunderstood.
Ex post facto they are invoked to imply an aspiration among the Founders to equality among all humans or at least male humans. Strategically understandable perhaps. It’s as though we want to believe the Drafters and Signers were just hypocrites. They weren’t. They genuinely did not consider Indians or Black people to be human.
When they said all men were created equal, they meant themselves, the British and other Europeans. Or, to put it another way, they were asserting that they were equal to their colonial masters. White supremacy was already deeply implanted in their worldview. (Doesn’t matter, some may say, they let the “created equal” genie out of the bottle even if they did so by accident. We’ll come back to that later.)
Most of the Declaration isn’t the preamble. It’s a long list of grievances. There are 27 in all. Taken together they present a recipe for what I would call transactional democracy. Meaning that the British were making decisions contrary to the wishes of the Founders. It wasn’t that the British were making the decisions per se. Rather it was that British decisions were at odds with what the white, property-owning men wanted to do. This idea is so far from the idealized myth we have been taught it’s not easy to grasp. So, I’ll say it again another way. The Independence being sought was NOT for the purpose or reason of overcoming opposition to visionary and previously unimagined ideas of freedom and democracy.
Here’s how Britannica addresses this in their backgrounder on the Declaration. “It can be said, as Adams did, that the declaration contained nothing really novel in its political philosophy, which was derived from John Locke, Algernon Sidney, and other English theorists.” So, some old governing ideas were put into new bottles partly to seek support from a population mostly inclined to go along with British rule, not overthrow it.
What did the white, property-owning men really, really want to do? Several things one of which was territorial expansion on their terms. It’s as though the Declaration is its own Doctrine of Discovery, its own license to kill, conquer and steal. Its essence was to justify replacing British colonialism with U.S. based settler colonialism.
He [referring to the King] has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
Sure enough, the very first legislation passed after the revolution succeeded was the Northwest Ordinance. (Thanks to Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz’s essential AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, for first making me aware of this timeline.)
Following the principles outlined by Thomas Jefferson in the Ordinance of 1784, the authors of the Northwest Ordinance (probably Nathan Dane and Rufus King) spelled out a plan that was subsequently used as the country expanded to the Pacific. (Northwest Ordinance of 1787 at archives.gov)
Frank Joyce is a lifelong Detroit based activist and writer. He is a former Communications Director of the UAW. He and Karin Aguilar-San Juan co-edited, The People Make the Peace: Lessons from the Vietnam Anti-War Movement.
