Each Fourth of July, many progressives claim that America is not worth celebrating. Last year, that included members of the House of Representatives. Cori Bush (D., Mo.) argued that “this land is stolen and Black people still aren’t free” and Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) asserted that “they weren’t thinking about us” in 1776. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, some commentators are already arguing that “the Constitution will always be a hell of an excuse to oppress Black folks on behalf of white supremacy.” On the homepage today, I respond to a version of this perennial argument that the American Revolution was fundamentally flawed, or even a “mistake” altogether, because it defended slavery.
But I wanted to follow up here to emphasize that this is the wrong lens through which to view our Founding Fathers. The idea that they unanimously approved of slavery or had no intention of outlawing it is not true. Multiple northern states such as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts abolished the practice immediately after the Revolution, citing their newfound independence as reason for doing so. Still, the Founders’ failure to outlaw slavery completely from America’s inception should be the cause of great sorrow for us, but not sorrow so great that we renounce their entire legacy. Many activists, both ill- and well-intentioned, have made that mistake. But the greatest warriors for freedom, justice, and equality throughout American history were those who looked back to the Founding in their activism.
During the Civil War and the period leading up to it, the abolitionists challenged our country to live up to the promises of the Founding documents. They did so in the face of the Confederacy, whose supporters believed that the Constitution contained a right to slavery, which was, in the words of their predecessor, John C. Calhoun, “an essential element in the distribution of its powers among the States.” When his state of South Carolina seceded from the Union, it did so because its legislators believed that the efforts of anti-slavery politicians “ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.” One of the first to oppose them was William Lloyd Garrison, who, while he had a noble cause, did not always argue for it in the best way. In an 1854 speech on the Fourth of July, he called the Constitution “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell” and burned a copy of the document as he said it.
Many of his fellow abolitionists saw his attacks on the Founding as counterproductive. Among them was Frederick Douglass. Each Independence Day, progressives love to quote his “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” speech, in which he denounces the hypocrisy of a country celebrating freedom while keeping millions of souls in chains. No one today will counter Douglass on that argument, which he spends the first half of his speech outlining. Curiously, though, those who use the speech to bash the Founding usually do not quote the second half, in which Douglass calls the Constitution a “glorious liberty document.” He goes on to say that there is not “a single pro-slavery clause in it” and that “there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution.”
Douglass was joined in his love for the Founding by President Abraham Lincoln, who, in the days leading up to his presidency, called the Declaration’s promise of liberty to all an “apple of gold.” That principle was a treasure that needed proper adornment. That was supplied by the Constitution, the “picture of silver.” He carried that attitude with him into his presidency. In his Gettysburg Address, he told the crowd that America was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” calling upon them to give the nation a “new birth of freedom” by winning the Civil War and ending slavery. For Douglass and Lincoln, the Declaration and Constitution allowed the best parts of each other to shine forth and make the country a better place for its citizens. This belief allowed them to rise above their contemporaries, both friends and foes, and bring freedom to those who lacked it.
Unfortunately, the fight did not end at Appomattox, and black people in Southern states endured a century of inequality due to Jim Crow laws. Segregationists argued that their actions were in the tradition of the Founding. In his “Segregation Now, Segregation Forever” speech, Governor George Wallace of Alabama reminded his audience “that a Southerner, Thomas Jefferson, wrote the Declaration of Independence, that a Southerner, George Washington, is the Father of our country that a Southerner, James Madison, authored our Constitution.” It is not a coincidence that he only cited slave-owners. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Malcolm X was rightly horrified at the mistreatment of black people, but his solutions were not the most effective. In his pursuit of black nationalism, he argued that “the Constitution was written by whites for the benefit of whites. It was never written for the benefit of blacks.”
As the country learned almost a century before, however, the way to make America better is to recognize the goodness of its Founding. The person who stood out the most in the civil-rights movement was Martin Luther King Jr., who had an appreciation for the Constitution from an early age. He won a speech contest in high school, in which he called American slavery a “strange paradox,” given the country’s commitment to freedom. He knew that the Founding principles were antithetical to any form of racism, and he vowed to be “imbued with the spirit of Lincoln” to fight the vestiges of enslavement. It was that commitment that led him to declare in his “I Have a Dream” speech that “when the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” King saw himself in the tradition of Lincoln and Douglass, fulfilling the Founding promise through his cause, not remaking or renouncing it. He is the namesake of a national holiday because of it.
All these people succeeded because they drew their inspiration and philosophies from the great men who drafted the Declaration and the Constitution. Many of those statesmen were emboldened to begin erasing the stain of slavery in their own time, and their posterity made America live up ever more to its Founding promise. Independence Day is a celebration not only of our country’s founding, but also of the people who have improved it throughout the ages. These advances all stem from the documents that created our nation, and we should rejoice at the bravery of those who created and nurtured them.