Why Celebrate July 4th?
America is always both what it claims to be and what it actually is. The Fourth of July, then, marks our aspirations—and also our shortcomings.
In 1852, in Rochester, New York, the brilliant abolitionist and formerly enslaved Frederick Douglass delivered his justly famous speech, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? Douglass had been invited to speak on July 4th, but he deliberately chose to deliver his remarks on July 5th—a choice we’ll return to shortly.
The question I explore here is far less urgent than the one Douglass posed, yet still worth asking: Why do we celebrate July 4th at all?
At first glance, this may sound subversive, but I don’t mean it that way. Having a national day to celebrate our country is a splendid idea. My question is more specific: Why this day? There were other possibilities. Allow me to suggest a few.
Alternative Possibilities
Let’s begin with September 17th, the day in 1787 when the U.S. Constitution was signed in Philadelphia. Given how proudly Americans speak of the Constitution—even if few actually read it—it seems a fitting candidate. And while it is recognized as Constitution Day, it’s not our national holiday.
Perhaps that’s because the Constitution wasn’t America’s first governing charter. We could turn instead to March 1st, 1781, the date the Articles of Confederation were ratified. For the first time, the colonies had a formal union under a shared framework. That’s historically significant—yet not nationally celebrated.
Both dates mark the beginnings of American government, not independence. So let’s consider alternatives tied more directly to our political separation from Britain.
What about September 3rd, 1783, when Britain formally recognized U.S. independence by signing the Treaty of Paris? This was the moment our borders were drawn and our sovereignty acknowledged. Yet hardly anyone remembers it, perhaps because it formalized what had already been won through war.
If we prefer to celebrate a military turning point, we might consider October 19th, 1781, the day British General Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown. The war was, for all practical purposes, over.
But again, this is not our national holiday.
So perhaps the proper focus is the beginning of the revolution. In that case, April 19th, 1775, is a worthy candidate—the day of the “shot heard ’round the world” at Lexington and Concord.
Or maybe we should consider May 15th, 1776, when the Continental Congress instructed the colonies to form new governments. John Adams called this moment “the real revolution.” This was not just resistance to British overreach—it was a positive turn toward new political principles. The colonies, acting through their representatives, shed royal authority and began to govern by “the authority of the people.”
By July 1776, then, the situation looked like this:
- We had been at war with Britain for over a year.
- Royal authority had been formally rejected.
- The colonies had established new, self-governing systems.
All that remained was a formal declaration, an unequivocal statement severing all political ties with Britain.
Which brings us, at last, to July 2nd, 1776.
The Day We Declared Independence
Many readers may already know that it was on July 2nd that the Continental Congress unanimously approved Richard Henry Lee’s resolution: “Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States…”
John Adams certainly believed July 2nd would be the day future Americans would commemorate. Writing to his wife Abigail on July 3rd, he predicted: “I am apt to believe that {July 2nd} will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
His prediction was both eerily prescient and profoundly mistaken.
So why do we celebrate July 4th rather than July 2nd?
Because that’s the day Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. Not the day we made the decision, but the day we explained it. Thomas Jefferson, with a little help from Adams and Franklin, gave our cause its voice. He gave our identity its creed, and in articulating our creed he gave us our identity.
The Declaration was more than a political break-up letter. It was a proclamation of who we are.
Our Creed and Identity
Most nations take pride in shared traditions—language, ancestry, religion, cuisine, great military victories, and folklore. And these are deeply meaningful. But for many Americans, national identity rests less on shared heritage or geography and more on shared ideals—what we often call the American Creed.
These ideals, drawn largely from the Declaration of Independence, include the following propositions:
- All people are created equal.
- Government exists to secure unalienable rights.
- Legitimate authority derives from the consent of the governed.
- Rulers are bound by law—not charisma, ancestry, or force.
Other nations have embraced these principles, and some may have lived them out more fully. But for Americans, these ideals are foundational. Celebrating July 4th isn’t merely a commemoration of not being British, it’s a celebration of what it means to be American.
The Two Faces of America
This dual identity means America is always two things at once: its aspirations or ideals and its actual practices, both political and non-political. Political philosopher Joseph Cropsey described these as distinct yet overlapping and interconnected regimes.
First, there is the Parchment Regime: our founding documents—the Declaration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights—which express our highest political principles in universal, liberal terms.
Then there is the Private Regime: the lived experience of Americans, shaped by language, religion, customs, communities, and regional ways of life. These are the things we mean when we call something “as American as baseball or apple pie.”
The relationship between these two regimes is fraught and exceedingly complex. Americans disagree not only about the ideals themselves—what “equality” means, or what rights should be protected—but also about which ways of life are truly “American.” The tension between our aspirational creed and our pluralistic realities generates both vitality and conflict.
For example, we argue over whether America is, at heart, a Christian nation. Not officially—not according to the Parchment Regime—but perhaps culturally, in the Private Regime. Would America still be America if it became predominantly Islamic? Or secular? Americans disagree deeply and intensely. Much of the tension in today’s culture wars stems from this duality. We want our values and our lifestyles to align with the American identity—but that identity is contested and complicated.
Falling Short of Our Ideals
America is always both what it claims to be and what it actually is. The Fourth of July, then, marks our aspirations—and also our shortcomings. By choosing to celebrate July 4th instead of July 2nd, we signal that what defines us is not merely the moment of separation but the vision of who we ought to be. It’s a holiday of principles—principles we have never fully realized.
The day should inspire celebration, yes—but also reflection. Many of our ideals remain endangered. Due process, freedom of the press, and individual liberty face renewed threats. To ignore these violations—or excuse them when they affect others—is to betray our identity. Jefferson wrote in the Declaration that when a government shows “a design to reduce [the people] under absolute despotism,” it is not only their right, but their duty, to resist.
Back to Frederick Douglass
So why celebrate July 4th?
Because it is the one day—more than April 19th, July 2nd, or September 17th—on which we declare what we believe and who we strive to be.
And this brings us back to Frederick Douglass. He revered the ideals of the Declaration, even as he exposed America’s betrayal of them. In 1852, he said: “To the American slave, your 4th of July is a day that reveals… the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” Accordingly, Douglass chose to give his speech on July 5th rather than July 4th because he believed in the ideals of the Declaration but did not feel it fitting to participate in the 4th’s attendant revelries. Douglass did not reject American ideals. He demanded that we live up to them. His speech was not a condemnation of America—it was an act of profound patriotism. He held up a mirror and asked the nation to reckon with its hypocrisy.
Douglass’s example suggests that to commemorate July 4th rightly we ought to honor both our creed and the distance we still must travel. If the American creed we celebrate is to mean anything—if it is to be hallowed and not hollow—it must continue to regulate our actions and to serve as an engine for betterment.
Great post, man.
Thank you for this post, it is succinct and informative.
Excellent post. Thank you, Michael.
Very nice post, Michael.
The gap between what we believe we are, our ideals, and what we are, is so wide we’ve been able to drive truck loads of bad behavior through it. The land of the free and also the land of slavery. We use the ideals as propaganda, as cover for what we are. So we can extend the blessings of liberty and civilization into the West by killing everyone who got in our way. We keep the hemisphere safe from European tyrants and prop up tyrants of our own choosing. We uphold the ideal of self-determination by stealing half of Mexico and all of Hawaii, and trying to steal all of Cuba and the Philippines, imposing our will through violence. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
We’ve been lying to ourselves and the world from the very start of the country. Check the history of the Indians of New England and the Atlantic states to see whether it was the British or the Americans who were the oppressors. One of the reasons I get impatient with critics of Israel talking about them as an occupying force is that at worst the Israelis stole a sliver of Mediterranean coastline while we stole most of a continent and dominate what we didn’t steal outright. People living on stolen land who have no intention of returning it are on shaky ground – bank robbers tut-tutting at shoplifters.
It shows the power of story that much of the world is willing to overlook the evil we’ve done and buy into the narrative. Trump has now killed that story. No one now believes that we are the home of the brave and the land of the free. Trump has ripped off the mask and revealed a country as venal, dishonest and cruel as he is himself. The story gave us outsized power and influence. Without the story we’re just the latest overbearing empire.
Amen to that.
Among other things, July 4th functions as a ritual of emotional synchronization. From a social neuroscience perspective, rituals like these aren’t really about memory but rather regulation. They help manage collective affect — the discomfort of ambivalence, the unease that comes from the gap between our stated ideals and our actual practices.
There’s deep dissonance in celebrating “freedom” while knowing it was born in exclusion and inequality. But not to worry, our brains are damn good at resolving that dissonance by narrating coherence, even when it’s, um, incomplete. National myths help sustain a shared identity and reinforce in-group cohesion (credit/blame to the vmPFC).
So along with asking why we celebrate July 4th, maybe it’s also worth asking what it says about us that we need to celebrate it the way we do. How does this ritual help us manage the psychological work of being American? Then again, perhaps it doesn’t.
Terrific post.
@Michael Reynolds:
“We’ve just created the greatest democracy on Earth, you low-life commoner!”
@Michael Reynolds: I agree with all of this. So what next? What can we do to right these wrongs? Do we give the land back to the native Americans, or make other reparations? Do we at least loudly say “what we did was wrong and make sure we don’t make the same mistake again? Do we allow the situation in Israel/Palestine to run the same course because we have done so in the past ourselves, or do we learn from our mistakes and, as part of that learning, highlight our own errors to serve as a warning to others? Or do we double and triple down by aiding and abetting others to make those same mistakes? Maybe it will help us feel less bad if “everyone is doing it?”
Excellent post. Appreciate the time and effort put into it.
As an aside, I just grouchily chastised my Congressman on Facebook for making Independence Day another celebration of the military. Told him that we should be celebrating the independence and if any person needs to be celebrated it is the Founding Fathers and the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
The OP got me thinking about originalism. I’m not sure how it all connects yet, but the kernel is that, compared to what the language of the time meant, it is at least as important that Founders told us what they meant to mean.
Agreed in full with the essay.
I was born in 1960 and came of age as the wave of postwar liberalism and prosperity was cresting.
All the things we read about the Revolution, about slavery and the Civil War, about the various incarnations of the Klan, about Fascism, about Communism- It all seemed far away and long ago.
But of course it wasn’t long ago, it wasn’t even past. I walked by and brushed shoulders with Japanese people who had been in the internment camps, with Mexican people were were part of Operation Wetback, Black people were second class citizens, Hollywood blacklist only ended and Stonewall happened all when I was in elementary school; My mother couldn’t open a bank account in her own name until I was a teenager.
The point is, many of the things we are seeing now- the bigotry, the racism and ugly misogyny were all staple fixtures of American life within living memory. For those who are too young to personally remember, this all seems freakishly new and aberrant but it isn’t.
Which is to say, we have faced these demons before and managed to drive them back. Maybe its something we need to face and defeat with each generation as the old one fades away.
@Michael Reynolds:
Christ, you’re such a coward. You grab at anything to justify the fact that you’re deliberately looking away.
Do you want to employ the same strategy domestically? We’re not to mitigate Jim Crow or Native American genocide after the fact because – fuck it – we’re bad anyway?
You want to throw away the good in the Declaration of Independence because 18th-century people didn’t live up to its ideals?
This isn’t savvy cynicism, it’s moral cowardice.
Interesting and well-crafted statement, Dr. Bailey. Thank you.
@Michael Reynolds: My gut reaction to your post is that I reject your binary. It’s not all good. It’s not all bad. The ideals are terrific. It’s a really good idea to celebrate them. It’s a really good idea to celebrate people who exemplified those ideals. Every person is flawed, and this means every human institution is flawed, and frankly, I don’t see a lot of “ignoring” of those flaws from commenters here on this blog at least.
Honestly, I think pretty much every one in America understand that we kind of screwed Native peoples over multiple times. At the time, “right of conquest” was a thing we believed in, and so did they, actually. It’s the breaking of our word that’s the nasty part.
Meanwhile, I know some Native people, and they are not smoldering with resentment. They remember the wrongs, too, of course. But they seem ok with being part of the United States now. Of course, this isn’t a binary either. Nothing is perfect, and few things are completely evil, too.
We are in a bad spot now. Trump intends, I’m thinking, of using the 250 years celebration to try to paint Democrats as traitors. I’m thinking we can coopt him completely with patriotic displays of founding principles, such as “No Kings”, and “All Men Are Created Equal”. Also “freedom of religion”. Let’s not be outpatrioted by those Pharisees, grifters and troublemakers.
@drj:
It’d be so great if people responded to what I actually wrote. I mean, I’m used to it, but it does get tiresome. Point out the part where I said that I or anyone else should ‘look away’ from Gaza or any other horror in the world. Although Americans are doing a pretty good job of ‘looking away’ from Sudan, to pick one example. Do you even know what’s happening in Sudan? Do you GAF?
What I’m asking for is more awareness of history and context, more awareness of our own national sins as we climb up on our soapboxes to denounce others, because no, contra @Jay L Gischer: Americans do not remotely understand our past actions. Not remotely. Go out on any street and ask random American about the Mexican-American war, or the seizure of Hawaii, or the betrayals of Cuba and the Philippines after the Spanish-American war. You’ll get blank looks.
And I’m sorry if you think it’s moral cowardice to point out the selective outrage of people like you (and me), living on stolen land you sure as hell are not going to give back, while talking ‘from the river to the sea.’ Just because your land was stolen 200 years ago rather than 77 years ago, it doesn’t make it any less stolen. How about we start chanting ‘from the Pacific to the Atlantic? I mean, you’re all about moral bravery, aren;’t you?
The difference between us is that you only see Gaza and your heart bleeds. Where is Sudan in your thoughts? Or Myanmar? Or the DRC? Or Ukraine? Or the endless brutal repression of nations like Egypt which, coincidentally, also locks Gazans in and is complicit with Israel? You are determined to single Israel out as the sole malefactor in a world hip-deep in shitty governments doing shitty things. But all you see is Israel and anyone who sees a larger picture is a moral coward for also taking a moment to condemn the UAE and Russia and Iran and and and ad infinitum.
You’re not some moral paragon because you’ve noticed that Israel is behaving horribly toward Gaza. Everyone has noticed that. The difference between us is that I have a broader focus and frankly a deeper understanding and I know something of the past as well as the present.
@Jay L Gischer:
I agree that touting patriotism is a smart political move, I’ve suggested it many times myself. But – and I know this will shock some people – there’s what is smart politically and there is what’s true, and they are not always the same thing. In reality as opposed to politics we use our touted ideals not as guides but as cover. We congratulate ourselves for what we say we believe, while ignoring or subverting those same ideals.
Here’s a personal mea culpa example. I voted to raise taxes in California on people like me because homelessness and health care and schools and so on. Then I moved to Nevada to avoid those same taxes. Do I get credit for my professed ideals, to whit that the rich should pay more? Should I celebrate the ideals I hypocritically ignore?
@Jay L Gischer: I didn’t think the article painted our history as all bad.
An excellent post.
Both as a statement of political ideals, which after all was the basis of the US Declaration (if not necessarily of the origins of the independence movement).
That’s why the US War of Independence is generally, and rightly, called a revolution, not just a rebellion.
Also, for its illuminating historical analysis.
As something of a intermittent sudent of American history, I knew most of those facts.
But had never connected them in that context; this why in history interpretation is central to understanding.
One point I’d add:
in many way the American Revolution was the culmination, and logical conclusion, of the preceding English Revolutions.
Which is why my particualr hero, Tom Paine, was so ardent a supporter.
And why the US is, rather uniquely, a “propsitional nation”.
Because it went beyond the traditionally based “Rights of Englishmen” to the more ideological/idealistic “Rights of Men”.
And this basis is also why slavery was a foundational reality so incompatible with its foundatioanl principles, as Douglass (one of the greatest Americans, imho) so eloquently expressed.
Which required Lincoln, and Civil War, to resolve.
And even then, not fully: because the legacy of slavery was the inability for the descendants of the slavers and their supporters to admit thay had been wrong.
And therefore to vindicate it ex post facto by racialist assumptions and thus Jim Crow, and so on.
This tension between foundational ideals, grubbier reality, and the assumptions that try to reconcile them, seems to still be a active aspect of US politics even now.
On balance, though, the establishment of the US was massive net gain for humanity, both in political philosophy and its practical establishment, and in historical contingency.
The “modern West” that embraces the Americas, Europe, Japan, South Korea, etc etc is largely the creation of both the appeal and power of the US.
Which was perhaps, in both appeal and potential, derived from the founding of the US.
As the UK saw: the British were prepared to fight to the death to avert the ascendancy of German absolutism.
But to accept, if somewhat grumpily, the hegemony of the US.
(At least, that has been the case: if the US abandons its founding principles, that may perforce change.)
(P.S.: I still think poor old George III got traduced a bit unfairly. He was hardly a tyrant on his own account.)
@Michael Reynolds:
Once you realize that the “men” in “all men are created equal” specifically refers to white men of means, this gap shrinks to almost nothing.
We are not currently blowing the ever-loving shit out of Indian reservations, displacing the population and starving them. Or shooting aid workers. And the terrible things we are doing is getting some resistance — from largely the same people who are opposed to Israel’s actions I might add.
Should we have helped Germany commit genocide? I mean, we did — or at least many American companies did — until Pearl Harbor or so, but should we have?
Israel wants to pretend to be a modern, western democracy in the Middle East. It invites being held to that higher standard.
@Gustopher:
A key factor about Israeli politics: a majority of Israelis now are of Middle Eastern descent, and frequently don’t give a tuppeny damn about being held to the standards of “western democracy”.
They came up in a harder school.
(Though, so also did the “survivors”: the lesson of power being better for preservation than good wishes)
That neither damns nor absolves them; but it’s impossible to understand Israel as it is now, without understanding it’s NOT, now, a “western” state and or colony (depending on prferences and assumptions) in “alien lands”.
I suspect this is a default view of many both inclined to uphold and to criticise Israel.
It ceased to be the case, insofar as it ever was, many decades past.
@Michael Reynolds: When are we going to acknowledge that almost every nation on earth today is living on ground an ancestor took from the indigenous people? That includes the “Native” Americans, who are not native at all, when viewing a larger chunk of time. The concept of Stolen Land on the scale of nation-states is delusion.
Nation states exist on a different scale than individuals in a society. The rules are different. There are no property” rights” the way we understand them between our neighbors and governments. Land possession is solely subject to that civilization’s ability to possess and defend their ground. Period.
I find it contradictory that people who believe in evolution also believe all the primate tendencies in humans have somehow evolved away.
I am also amazed at people believing communities of flawed humans can somehow cash a check written for “liberty and justice for all.” This goal, although aspirational is neither feasible nor achievable. The USA has and will never live up to such a principle. One can take that fact and transmute it into either cynicism or motivation. The cynical route liberals take has led to a divestment of all things patriotic and nationalistic–the very space the popular psyche is in. Which means the MAGA is dominating there–defining what liberty and justice means so yet another generation loses the imperative and motivation to be “more perfect” despite the impossible goal of universal liberty and freedom.
Why impossible? Because 1 person’s freedom will also be the self-interested person’s grievance. And grievance metastisizes into a host of other emotions that enslave people. Think about it–are the real MAGAs free? They are but slaves to the whim of one man–a senile narcissist. A pitiful state to find oneself in.
@Gustopher:
Indeed!
@JohnSF:
On “propositional nations”:
French Republican tradition is also somewhat in that line.
Most other nations/countries are not so; or if they were, the “proposition” was generally directed to “natioanality”, in various conceptions and variations of that.
See the European revolutions of 1848.
They were often “liberal” and (arguably) democratic, but generally founded on national-ethnic bases.
The US was not, at least in theory.
In practice, it seems to have often had a default to certain “ethnic” assumptions.
But that those asummptions were not explicit was important.
It helped to enable the US to integrate massive extra-ethnic immigration in the 19th/early 20th centuries.
And thus to undermine ethnic nationalism as a basic proposition.
Another thought: the US propostion was not predicated on ethnicity.
The French was partially so.
Most of the liberal/nationalist and conservative nationalist projects of the 19th and 20th centuries have been.
And so were some pre-extant “ethnic national” states, eg in very diffrent ways Japan and Sweden.
But there have also been “non-propositional” states that were not really “ethnic” in their basis at all, insofar as all were “entitled” to be subjects; in their various ways.
See eg the UK and Ottoman Turkey, Austria-Hungary, even perhaps Russia.
The unique feature of the US was to combine the proposition of “liberty” and “democracy” without an explicit ethnically exclusive basis.
Though there was, of course, an implicit exclusion: of African-Americans and Native Americans.
But the fact that it was not stated enabled the actual exclusion to come to be seen as contradicting the basis of the polity, and therfore to eventaully be challenged to include the de facto excluded.
The point being: the US Decalration formulation, deriving from British “liberal” traditions, logically ended with a universally extended concept of human liberty and rights, which no other country was foundationally comitted to.
And which has profoundly influenced the influence of such basic positions across the world, especially given the post-1917 rise of the US to global Power.
Ironically, the only other such globally influential “equalitarian” tradition, in its origins, was that of socialism, or to be more precise, Communism. Given European liberalism quite readily made its peace with imperialism.
Which unfortunately rapidly collapsed into a project of elite seizure and monoploy of power.
On reflection, Fukuyama may well have been right: the “end of history” was that US-mode of “liberal democracy” was the “last man standing” after the alternative universal or particualrist projects failed, or became, and remain, sterile dead-ends.
Europe today has largely been remade after the US pattern, in respect of basic assumptions.
It would be a tragic irony if the US was now to cast aside its own ideological and material ascendancy out of a short-sighted and incoherent mixture of boredom, resentment, and legacies of disdain.
@Jim X 32:
This is profoundly true historically.
England is founded upon the conquest and subjugation of the Romano-Britons aka the Welsh, or, as they/we may prefer, the Cymry.
Modern Turkey includes much of what was the heartland of ancient and “early modern” Greece: Ionia and Constaninople.
etc etc
But the lesson of modern history is that while it may, indeed must, be necessary to accept the “verdict of history” in regard to putting up with “unjust” outcomes based on power and conquest, that cannot and must not be accepted as a justification for challenging the current position.
Such “rectification” was the basis of the Nazi project in the 1930’s.
And seems also to be fundamental to the views of some Russian revanchists today.
The post-ww2 and post-Cold War settlements were founded upon “no border adjustments by force”, because anything else opens the door to endless war.
This is the basic reason why Europe and Russia are now fundamentally opposed.
Europe cannot, on the basis of its fundamental concepts and interests, accept the Russian position that a “revived Power” may subjugate its neighbours to correct “historic injustice”.
Love the post. Thanks much.
However I thinks, just maybe, that some argument should be made for the 4th, and mine is that until the rebellion was framed by Jefferson’s DOI it had only been a rebellion. It was the DOI that made it a quest for a new form of government, not just a new government.
@dazedandconfused:
Perhaps; but iirc there was some opinion in favour of an “American monarchy” up until the Constitution of 1787?
The point being, that the Declaration did not necessarily and inevitably rule out monarchy, as it was in many respects based on the same premises as the English revolutions of the 1640s/50s and 1688.
Hence Franklin: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
@JohnSF:
There are two eps of Sliders with an American monarchy. In one, Britain still rules North America (if memory serves, our own estimable @wr wrote it). In the other, the US is independent but has a reigning monarch. I forget if a mere figurehead or an actual ruler. There’s also one, the pilot, with a Soviet America.
The last two don’t seem as outlandish as they did back then…
@Kathy:
It’s an arguable point that if France and the “League of Armed Neutrality” had not stepped in, the UK could have strangled the rebellion.
Also, there was a major political movement in the UK for a compromise solution with the 13 colonies (see Burke)
A “dominion status” US was an obvious possible outcome.
Similar to later UK arrangemnts re Canada, Australia, etc.
One major question would be: slavery.
The anti-slavery party in the UK became increasingly ascendant in the late 18th century.
Woulkd they if the American colonies were a “federated dominion”?
And if they did, would that have resulted in a UK/North vs South conflict?
Other contingencies: would the Louisiana Purchase have happened?
Would the putative “British America” been confined to east of the Mississippi?
Or even short of the “Old Mid West” given the British inclination to not fight the Native Americans in that region?
That’s the problem with “alternative history”: the possible contingent decision tree beomes almost arbitrary very rapidly.
@JohnSF:
I would suggest it was even more than I had previously stated. Up until the DOI it had been unclear if the rebellion had the intention of breaking away from Britain or if it was a protest against certain policies.
@JohnSF:
Alternate history gave conniptions to the Computers of Eternity.
Seriously, there being so many pathways open, pretty much any guess for a given point of departure is as valid as any other, absent clear impossibilities.
@dazedandconfused:
Agreed.
But even a full breach did not necessarily entail a republican democracy.
There was the option of an “American monarchy”.
And of, perhaps no refrence to political ideals at all.
We must consider: why DID the American revolutionaries eventually come to the position of a republican democracy founded on inherent human rights of self-determination?
The English revolutionaries of the 17th century had, in the end, refused to take that leap.
(And sidedled up to it in the next 200 years).
The obvious conclusion is, that being the rather legalistic bunch they were, they could find no reasonable basis for revolt, and subsequent independence, short of a theory based on general and universal rights.
And the logical conclusion of that was: no American monarchy.
But the corollary of that was, as Douglass pointed out: no slavery.
Hence the the US being a paradox from Independence to Civil War.
@Kathy:
This is why historians HATE alternative history.
Yet love it.
The sado-masochism of the “what if?”
lol
It’s a fundamental problem of historical analysis: was the outcome determined or contingent?
If “contingent”, you rapidly get lost in the forest of the contingent decision-trees.
If “determined” you are prey to “it was inevitable” when it was obviously not.
That’s why most historians tend to focus on WHAT happened and WHY that happened.
As opposed to “what iffery” or “inevitability”.
This thread may be the most interesting one I have read on this site, and because I was having a hard time reconciling what I think of as my American “heritage” with the harsher realities of America in 2025, I found that this helped me deal with the profound sadness I feel.