Our Troublesome Foundation - the Declaration of Independence

The sole purpose of our 1776 declaration -- to cut our ties with Great Britain and take our place among the independent nations of the world. 

Thanks to its famous preamble, however, the document quickly came to mean much more.  All men are created equal, with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- ideas of freedom and equality planted in the heart of the newborn nation.  

Was that our intent?  There's much that perhaps clouds the answer.

• The declaration was written by a slave owner and accepted by the 13 colonies, each of which allowed slavery.  
• It was written at a time when the transatlantic slave trade delivered 60,000 Africans per year to the new world.  
• We eventually fought an uncivil war among ourselves over the right to own slaves, and we killed 620,000 of us. 
• It was written when we were at war with native Americans who refused to cede their land.  By 1900, their population had been reduced by 80% or more.

None of this happened quickly.  Generation after generation, millions of men, women, and children faced cruelty and death.  They've not yet recovered.  Africa lost more than a century of population growth, and native Americans lost almost everything.  The cruelty and human suffering cannot be adequately described though there are thousands of individual accounts of the atrocities in historical records.

August update: White supremacists gather at the statue of Robert E. Lee, Charlottesville VA.

We've tried hard to live up to the declaration of equality,

to understand what it means to be the same, human,

but there's so much more that needs to change
in our collective understanding.  Today's
 polarization is similar to that at the
beginning of the civil war.  It is
 arguably ... identical.

Today, we treat that promise in the declaration as though it has always been the true heart of the nation, yet prejudice, discrimination, and inequality, all are intentionally maintained among us, and again we see supremacists rising up.

At the root of it all, we find the concept of self-supremacy or superiority, a corrupt heart that values self and some but not all.  

The root problem is broadly unacknowledged as public sentiment prefers to blame others rather than acknowledge any personal flaw.

Liberty and Equality
The principles are self-evident truths.
The task we face is difficult.
The solution is not in law but in living for something besides ourself; "love as I have loved you;" (just practical instruction.)  Such caring is expensive, and it changes things.

The founding fathers left us a difficult challenge that we've struggled with for more than two hundred years.

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How has it played out?

Racism is understood in every scientific venue ... race as biology is fiction; racism as a social construct is real and it rises exclusively from ignorance, selfishness, and fear.  Race isn't the root; it is self.

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Remembered ... 15 million men, women and children who were heartlessly torn from their homeland on the African continent.   They were forced to cross the Atlantic in slave ships; and they then lived and died under an inconceivably brutal system of slavery in the Americas.  UN Secretary-General's Remarks in General Assembly on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

War -- America was born fighting Indians.  Because a significant number of Indians consistently rebuffed demands that they cede their lands and because Americans were determined to acquire them anyway, the United States constantly pursued war against Indians.  

In 1779 the United States declared war on the Iroquois to punish them for raids they had undertaken to roll back colonial settlement.  The object, in George Washington’s words, was “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements.”  When the Continental Army invaded, the Iroquois decided not to risk the loss of life that would result from defending their towns and instead evacuated them. This allowed U.S. troops to burn dwellings and crops, but as Chief Old Smoke later explained, “we lost our Country it is true, but this was to secure our Women & Children.”(Ref)  The number of Iroquois directly killed by the American army was around two hundred (including some women and children), though as many as a thousand died from disease and starvation in refugee camps. Out of a population of 9,000, the death toll from all causes was probably around 15 percent. Had the Iroquois decided to defend their towns, it would almost certainly have been higher.

All told, from the late 1770s through 1815, U.S. forces burned hundreds of Indian towns in New York, western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, western Virginia, the western Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and western Florida.  In most instances, Indians’ intelligence-gathering systems alerted them to impending attacks and so U.S. forces found towns emptied of most inhabitants. 

Sometimes, however, U.S. forces managed to achieve surprise. When they did, they demonstrated little restraint. In an attack on the Indian town of Ouiatenon on the Wabash River in Indiana in 1791, for example, a Kentucky militia fired on Indians in five canoes who were trying to escape. The official report stated that militiamen “destroyed all the savages with which five canoes were crowded,” without stating the sex or age of the Indians. Almost certainly, many were noncombatants. 

In 1782 a Pennsylvania militia surprised a group of about one hundred Christian Indians at Gnadenhütten in eastern Ohio.  In a chilling example of what sociologist Michael Mann has termed the “dark side of democracy,” the militiamen voted on whether or not to kill their captives.  When the majority vote was tallied, the militiamen proceeded to slaughter men, women, and children alike.(Ref)  The militia tied the Indians, stunned them with mallet blows to the head, and killed them by scalping.  In all, the militia murdered and scalped 28 men, 29 women, and 39 children.  Two Indian boys, one of whom had been scalped, survived to tell of the massacre.  

In 1810, Tecumseh reminded future President William Henry Harrison, "You recall the time when the Jesus Indians of the Delawares lived near the Americans, and had confidence in their promises of friendship, and thought they were secure, yet the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus?"

After 1815, the United States intensified its efforts to expand. To do so, it adopted a policy, formally institutionalized through the Indian Removal Act of 1830, moving all Indians from east of the Mississippi River to Indian territories.

It hasn't played out well for many, and today we continue to struggle with the issue.  All are indeed created equal.