I wanted to be a Unitarian Universalist minister when I was in high school. I studied philosophy and humanities in college, and then I went of Crane Theological School at Tufts University. I arrived in Medford, Massachusetts having experienced Liberal Religious Youth and San Francisco State and the emerging peace and civil rights movements. The United States was escalating the war against the Vietnamese and I became more and more involved in creating a peace movement, and I made the decision to take a leave from my theological education so I could help end the war. Looking back now I realize that had taken the ideals of my Unitarian sunday school and home very seriously, and I was full of illusions about the United States. I didn't return to theological school for several decades. During the prolonged interim I was anti war organizer, a labor organizer, a college teacher, a community organizer, a political campaigner, and an organizer of a community school to teach activists some wisdom and some skills.
I taught history and my academic interests centered around social history, which means to do historical research by doing social analysis to understand the past. Most political and intellectual historians have documents, and while social historians have documents the documents are things like census reports, ship manifests, classified ads in the newspaper, bills of sales for slaves, or deeds to land. Social historians might look at folk art, and popular music, and others might read the diaries of ordinary people. The point of view of the social historian is do history from the bottom up rather than from the top down. A social historian will get excited about research revealing how poor Whites in Western New York responded to the Declaration of Independence, and less about another biography of Thomas Jefferson. During the 1970s social historians were finding ways to reconstruct histories of the family life of slave families, so we began to see books on Thomas Jefferson's other family.
The impact of the work of social historians working with political and intellectual historians is now reflected in our understanding of the American Revolution. The British had gone into debt fighting the French in the Seven Years War (1754 to 1763), and one of the lessons the British government learned from that conflict was that must maintain peace with the American native peoples or war would go on and on. That was not the kind of war the British wanted to fight, and they saw no advantage in conquering the wilderness west of the Appalachians. So they made a law forbidding settlement beyond the continental divide and they made treaties with the native people promising peace to all peoples west of the Eastern Mountains.
The American colonists were upset with a number of restrictions on their economic life imposed by the Empire, not the least of which was the restriction on land speculation west of the continental divide. How could young hustlers like George Washington make their fortune if they couldn't survey land out in some valley in Western Virginia and sell it to land hungry immigrants? Who cared if there were agreements with the native people, their fathers had broken agreements with the natives east of the Mountains. That is how the land was cleared, you make an agreement to keep "those savages" at bay, and then build up your forces and kill them at the first opportunity. The colonial gentry reasoned they didn't need the British Army to fight the Indians, they could arm the settlers, and let them form militias. (I ask you to think about the Second Amendment to the Constitution and its meaning in 1789.) There was a fortune to be made in selling off the West. If you made the laws it would be legal. Jefferson even invented a way to survey land that no surveyor had ever seen (ever wonder about the West's arbitrary grid system that assigns house numbers to mountain tops and ravines without regard to topography.)
There were other restrictions imposed on the colonies, and other enterprising men who found these restrictions a violation of their liberty. We should not forget that there were iron makers who wanted to build huge forges, silver smiths who could be making plate for ships,* and would be bankers who wanted to found banks.* There were the Yankee slave smugglers who longed to trade in human beings legally (at the time the British had a monopoly on this trade.) The coalition that gathered in Philadelphia in 1776 included idealists, ideologues, hustlers and entrepreneurs. The document they approved with all its rhetoric about human rights has inspired revolutions against colonization and movements for self determination of peoples as well as a continuing struggle for human rights around the world
I commemorate Independence Day, commemorate for me is a better word that celebrate given my understanding what the birth of the United States meant for human kind. I reflect on its lessons and its meaning. I dedicate myself to telling the truth about power and to helping to realize the ideals that articulated for by common people everywhere, even if the were not seriously intended by the author of that document.
*Paul Revere was the founder of American Biltrite, freed from mercantile restrictions he became a manufacturer of metal plate. He got his reward in the form of a contract to put the plate on "Old Ironsides" the U.S.S. Constitution. He did a good job. Thomas Paine was one of the founders of the First National Bank of Boston, one of the banks that consolidated to form the Fleet Financial Group. With his profits from getting that charter, he was able to go to France to help make another Revolution.
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