The Founders’ Real Work Began on the 5th of July
On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted on a declaration from the thirteen united colonies of British North America informing George III that the now United States were newly free and independent. The statement was unanimous, yet not all of the thirteen colonies voted for independence. Political separation from the British Empire was still controversial enough in New York for that colony’s representatives to abstain from voting until they got more explicit instructions from their own colonial assembly. So New York respectfully abstained.
Two days later, the Continental Congress publicly promulgated its address. July 4 became “Independence Day.” Or did it?
When the men we call Founding Fathers woke up on July 5, 1776, they still had to do the hard work of governing, of making war, and of keeping some sort of order in a largely disunited society on the eastern two-fifths of a still wild and largely unknown continent. July Fourth was all well and good, but the hard work of real life and real government in the new American republic had to be lived out on July 5th, 1776, and every day afterward.
From that day forward, the political realism of the Founders was paramount.
Many call the United States an experiment and note that the creation of the American Republic was new to Western political life. On some level, the Founders thought they were making a novus ordo seclorum — a new order for the ages — but in many ways, they believed their experiment was less than revolutionary. They were not trying to overthrow the social order, religious foundations, or family structure of their society. They didn’t think they were doing much more than trading rule from London for rule from Eastern North America. Russell Kirk rightly noted that the new American Republic was an expression of the British political and social cultures that created the North American colonies. On July 5, the newly minted leaders of the independent American republic woke up very much just as they had on July 4. A war still raged, money problems still taxed the viability of the Continental Congress, and much of the populace across the thirteen states was indifferent at best to the idea of independence from Great Britain.
The war effort in particular worried Americans. Throughout the summer of 1776, the British army chased George Washington across New York and New Jersey. Washington did not see the United States as an experiment. He viewed it as his country that had to be fought for. Declarations of principle didn’t win wars, feed soldiers, or keep the populace from mutinying. Washington quickly learned that the type of idealized pitched battles that looked picturesque in books and sounded glorious in poems inevitably left his army defeated and dejected. He tossed aside concerns over whether his army looked brave and decided that opportunist small battles and running down the energy of the British Army were more likely to expand the chance of victory. British commentators screamed that the Americans weren’t fighting fair — or worse, fighting like Indians — but Washington nonetheless fought in ways considered devious. He also willingly admitted his army’s weaknesses, asking for help and finding it in 1781 when the French helped end the Revolutionary War. The American military was not able to impose its will because of magical powers emanating from its cause’s rightness. Realism, not ideology, determined the victory of the Continental Army. The ideology of July 4 wasn’t enough to win a war. The realism of July 5 and every day after was.
Likewise, the Continental Congress moved realistically regarding extending freedoms to groups that had not enjoyed full civil liberties before the American Revolution. July 4 promised freedom, but the actions of American statesmen on July 5 and afterward showed that they were not going to let the ideology of liberty get in the way of the necessities of government. This seems not so much driven by a commitment to retaining statist exclusions and more by realism. Societies, the Founders knew, could not experiment willy-nilly with the societal order if they wanted to maintain the commitments of historic English liberties Americans now believed they were fighting for. Liberty was good, but it had to be bounded. The Founders were not enacting an order where every generation, citizens renegotiated the essential metaphysical truths underpinning their liberties. If truths expressed in the Declaration were “self-evident,” they must ostensibly be timeless. If a generation no longer saw certain truths as self-evident — the necessity of religion, family, and societal order — the problem lay with that generation itself.
The United States of the 18th, 19th, and even much of the 20th Century maintained order — albeit imperfectly — in the face of charges of hypocrisy. To be sure, the United States has not always lived up to its ideals. But increasingly it seems that the hard reality of governing and maintaining ordered liberty is deemed hypocritical. Not every so-called group can or will have access to every so-called liberty. On the morning of July 5, the Founders still recognized that law, family, and religion formed the basis of ordered liberty in a republic, and they were realistic enough to provide legal provisions that protected each of those in the years that followed. They were right about that on July 5, 1776. They’re still right in 2023.
Miles Smith IV is an assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College.
