David Konig is Emeritus Professor of History and Law. He is a leading authority on Thomas Jefferson and the development of law in colonial, Revolutionary, and early national America. Here, he argues that the U.S. Bicentennial’s celebratory view of 1776 overlooked the nation’s enduring contradictions—especially slavery—and warns that history suggests democracies risk decline when they ignore those unresolved flaws.
Fifty years ago celebration of the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of American independence was marked by an unprecedented outpouring of visual commemoration. Some images were simply silly, like the smiling face of a young soldier wearing a tricorn hat and a military tunic—but a RED uniform, which struck me at the time as an irresistible opportunity for humorous irony. The artist who created it was unknown but the message of a juvenile redcoat might have provided a serious message for the cultural historian, whether British or American. Far more common than cartoonish images were memorabilia adorned with a wordless but self-congratulatory message—“1776-1976”–that needed no comment but served to celebrate the two hundred years of independence, a triumphant backward glance at the bequest of one generation to another. But the historian’s task is to analyze and take the measure of change over time. The more puckishly inclined historians among us might ask, more in good humor than in mean spirit, a serious question: “What, exactly, have they bequeathed to us?”
Those who have paid attention cannot ignore how historians have approached independence as a deeply contradictory process, one which included the establishment, protection, and glorification of human enslavement. In that revisionist telling, the “course of human events” after 1776 has transformed the American War for Independence into a reactionary secessionist movement to preserve and extend slavery. For slaveholders abolitionism was not an idle fear. Chattel slavery had existed long before 1776, and racial inequality has continued after 1976. It endures as a remnant of centuries-old belief in an unbreakable cycle of history. Its inevitable periodic reappearance within a national narrative built on an entrenched conventional wisdom and nostalgia continues to embolden its followers to exhume it as a path to restore national greatness. It is an embrace that has shown itself to be as seductive as it is self-destructive.
Blocking Revolutionary reform were powerful cultural barriers beyond politics in deeply powerful literary and popular forms. Lord Byron’s poetic “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” in the 1810s rode the crest of literary Romanticism and became a sensation in the United States, inspiring painters to bring it to visual life for decades. Among them, Thomas Cole’s “The Course of Empire” distilled American national growth into a series of five paintings whose ominous titles remain a cautionary parallel tale, beginning with ”The Savage State, or the Commencement of Empire” and moving through “The Pastoral State” to “The Consummation of Empire” (with its “Decadence” on full view), then to “Destruction” and, finally, to ”Desolation.”
As Byron himself put it,
There is the moral of all human tales;
‘Tis but the same rehearsal of the past.
First freedom and then Glory – when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption – barbarism at last.
And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page…
Should we ask, did the dates 1776-1976 contain another and more serious premonitory image of inevitable national decline?