Celebrating Our Unique Country's Origins

From Professor Gordon Wood, at NYDN, "What Independence Day really means: Our unique country’s origins":

The Fourth of July, Independence Day, is not just a time for barbecues and fireworks. It is also a time for us to reflect on the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. That declaration is the most important document in our history, even more important than the Constitution. It sums up the principles by which the nation lives. Indeed, it is what holds us together as a nation.

We are a very unusual country, and were unusual even at the time of independence. Lacking a common ancestry, we have never been able to take our nationhood for granted. In America, said John Adams, the country’s second president, there was nothing like “the Patria of the Romans, the Fatherland of the Dutch, or the Patrie of the French.”

Even at the outset, Adams wondered whether a people composed of so many religious denominations and so many ethnicities could hold together as a nation. In 1813, he counted 19 different religious sects in the country. “We are such an Hotch potch of people,” he concluded, “such an omnium gatherum of English, Irish, German, Dutch, Sweedes, French &c. that it is difficult to give a name to the Country, characteristic of the people.”

No wonder then that at the end of the Declaration of Independence, the members of the Continental Congress could only “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” There was nothing else but themselves that they could dedicate themselves to: no patria, no fatherland, no nation as yet.

n comparison with the nearly two-and-a-half-centuries-old United States, many countries in the world today are new, some of them created in the relatively recent past. Yet many of these states, new as they may be, are undergirded by peoples who had a pre-existing sense of their common ancestry, their tribal and blood connections, by which they meant their nationhood.

In the case of the United States the process was reversed. In some sense we have never become a nation, and today, with people from all over the world gathered within our borders, we can never be a nation in any traditional meaning of the term.

In the present this peculiarity of American nationhood, this lack of a common ethnicity, may be our saving grace. It may turn out to be an advantage in the 21st century, dominated as it is by mass immigration from the south to the north and east to west. It certainly enables the United States to be more capable than other countries of accepting and absorbing immigrants.

Of course, America has its own recent problems with immigrants, but these problems pale in comparison with the problems of immigration the European nations are facing and will continue to face.

Because we are not a traditional nation and have no ethnic base, the Declaration of Independence with its ringing affirmation that all men are created equal has become the sacred document holding us together. On the eve of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln came to realize how important the Declaration was in defining the nationhood of the United States, how it had become the adhesive for a diverse people.

Half the American people, Lincoln said in 1858, had no direct blood connection to the founders of the nation. These German, Irish, French and Scandinavian citizens had either come from Europe themselves or their ancestors had, and “finding themselves our equals in all things,” had settled in America. Although these different ethnicities may have had no actual connection in blood with the revolutionary generation, they had, said Lincoln, “that old Declaration of Independence” with its expression of the moral principle of equality to draw upon...

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