What do you call the year a nation turns 250? It’s a semiquincentennial. This Wednesday isn’t just New Year’s Eve; it’s Semiquincentennial Eve. We’ll need a special toast.
When I was a kid, my mother used to send New Year’s cards with an excerpt from a 1758 Boston almanack essay written during the French-Indian War. The author wrote about America—past, present, and future. As to the last, he imagined incredible cultural and technological innovation and growth. “Shall not then those vast Quarries, that teem with mechanic Stone,—those for Structure be piled into great Cities,—and those for Sculpture into Statues to perpetuate the Honor of renowned Heroes; even those who shall NOW save their Country.” He then concluded by directly addressing us:
O! Ye unborn Inhabitants of America! Should this Page escape its destin’d Conflagration at the Year’s End, and these Alphabetical Letters remain legible, —when your Eyes behold the Sun after he has rolled the Seasons round for two or three Centuries more, you will know that in Anno Domini 1758, we dream’d of your Times.
The sun that shines on us shone on him. Two hundred and fifty cycles of seasons lie between his cold Boston winter without central heat and our great cities and warming planet. Are these times what he dreamed?
I’ve been writing a biography of Charles Lennox, the 3rd Duke of Richmond—the first British Lord to recommend recognizing American independence—so I’ve been dwelling in the twists and turns that led to the Declaration of Independence. Everyone was studying “the Americans,” trying to understand who they were and what they might become.
Richmond joined figures like Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine—once allies despite their later split over the French Revolution—in launching radical newspaper essays under the pen name Junius into the maelstrom of British politics in the late 1760s. They castigated the King and his government from every direction—decrying the debt-burdened economy and corruption, but also the mistreatment of the Americans.
Who were these creatures on the other side of the Atlantic, and what did they care about? “Divided as they are into a thousand forms of policy and religion, …all agree—they equally detest the pageantry of a King,” wrote Junius in December 1769.
Now, 250 years and change later, we Americans are still split into a thousand ways of life and faiths. Our many worlds form an archipelago of democracy. But do we all still equally detest the pageantry of a King? I’d say this isn’t clear. Our current President is testing that assumption with the gilded presence chamber into which he has converted the Oval Office, the plan to stamp his face on a 250th-anniversary coin, and the constant naming of public projects after himself.
If we no longer all detest the pageantry of a King, then we must ask whether the love of freedom and self-government—the pride of the citizen—still endures at full strength. The two rise and fall together.
That love and pride are not easily claimed, and never were. Two hundred and fifty years ago this month, Parliament passed the Prohibitory Act—a severe measure cutting off all trade with the colonies, declaring them enemies, and authorizing the seizure of their ships, effectively an act of economic war. King George III signed it into law on December 22, 1775.
Under the law of nations, a trade embargo is an act of war. Consequently, the Bill amounted to a declaration of war against the Thirteen Colonies and treated them—though they had not yet done so themselves—as a foreign nation. In the House of Lords, Richmond objected in his characteristically strenuous rhetoric: “I think it a most unjust, oppressive, and tyrannical measure… a formal denunciation of war against the colonies.”
In Massachusetts, John Adams also recognized the Bill for what it was. After news arrived in Philadelphia, he wrote with his own prediction for America’s future:
I know not whether you have seen the Act of Parliament call’d the restraining Act, or prohibitory Act, or piratical Act, or plundering Act, or Act of Independency… I think the most apposite is the Act of Independency, for King Lords and Commons have united in Sundering this Country and that I think forever.
Adams was confident separation would be permanent. Parliament’s action did not shock him; they had already closed Boston Harbor. What surprised him was his fellow Americans, who still hesitated to claim the independence being forced upon them.
“It may be fortunate that the Act of Independency should come from the British Parliament… But it is very odd that Americans should hesitate at accepting Such a Gift from them.”
He had a hypothesis. Freedom is scary. “Independency is an Hobgoblin, of So frightful Mein, that it would throw a delicate Person into Fits to look it in the Face.” The first six months of 1776 were spent steeling themselves for what freedom would require.
Freedom did not mean being left alone. It meant taking up the empowered—and empowering—work of self-government. Adams continued: “The success of this War depends upon a Skillfull Steerage of the political Vessell… forming Constitutions for particular Colonies, and a Continental Constitution for the whole.”
In other words, independence would be won politically, not militarily. Could the colonies govern themselves—each and together? The year 1776 was devoted almost entirely to answering that question.
Do we still detest the pageantry of a king? How we steer our political vessel in coming years will answer that. The difficulty lies in reclaiming self-government—municipally first, then at the state level—so we can nourish a culture of freedom capable of sustaining constitutional democracy. The powers lining up against freedom—money, technology, and a maximalist unitary executive—can feel overwhelming. But so too did the British army. “Independency is an Hobgoblin, of So frightful Mein.” We must claim it by choosing self-government.
Do we dare to dream of Americans 300 years from now? I see a world where Americans still have a thousand forms of policy and religion, yet once again detest the pageantry of kings; a world where property rights have been fashioned for data, blocking emergence of new feudal dependencies and averting crony capitalism; where we are building homes, roads, bridges, and shared air and space infrastructure aplenty. I see new tools, powered by wind, sun, and fusion, that the people govern and use to secure their own safety and happiness.
My toast: We dream’d of your Times!
For the almanac text: https://www.americanheritage.com/seasons-greetings-us-1758
For the Adams letter: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0023
Danielle, thank you for your lovely, insightful words and thoughts! In the same spirit, I propose another toast (to them and to you):
May we dream of those people and their times. Truly, they were our greatest generations and our greatest inspirations. They inherited a government of mere men and not of laws. With great wisdom, extreme devotion, sheer will and hard work, those mere men and women lifted the massive, unbearable weight of the pyramid of power and turned it on its apex to bequeath us "a government of laws and not of men."
In the first and last words of their Declaration of 1776 (our Declaration of 1776), they pledged and they asked us to "mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" to secure what We the People declared for ourselves: "one People" would "assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature" (the "Truths" that "We" (the People) "hold" for ourselves "to be self-evident") "entitle them.” Those men and women together were the literal "Creator" of the "unalienable Rights" including "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" with which they "endowed" us, "the People."
The first and last words of their Constitution (written and ratified between 1787 and 1791) emphasized the radical (revolutionary) new rule of law that they secured for us and which we must secure for ourselves:
“We the People of the United States” acted as the supreme legislative body to “ordain and establish [our] Constitution for the United States of America” to "establish Justice" for ourselves and “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves.” “We the People of the United States” established “the supreme Law of the Land.” We the People "by [our] Constitution" expressly “reserved” to “the people” our sovereign "powers." We "by [our] Constitution" only "delegated" some limited "powers" to our public servants in the "United States" government, we “prohibited by it to the States” some “powers;” and other "powers" we “reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
May we dream of those people and their times to fulfill their dreams for us and our time.
Please cancel my subscription to the Renovator. Thank you.