Why I Am Patriotic

I was once ignorant about the Founding Fathers. After all, I was young and what could I want to know about a bunch of old men who had lived 150 years before me? That was before I learned how much they restricted their own power in constructing a new nation. Many owned slaves but the documents upon which the nation was founded would eventually lead to freedom for the million or, at least, the hundreds of thousands held in slavery at the time.

Even though they likely figured they would be the ones to hold power after the Revolution, they sought to limit the government's power. Just the Revolution alone was unprecedented at the time. To attempt to break away from the superpower of the day was an incredible concept. Their cause was probably helped by the Crown also thinking a revolt in the colonies was doomed to defeat.

What is really remarkable is that the Founding Fathers wrote that document (the Constitution) some 12 years after the revolt began and some four years after its success. They could have made themselves royalty, they could have made themselves into an aristocracy but they didn't. Perhaps because they thought the populace would not stand for it after 8 years of war against an aristocracy or because, in order to raise an army to fight the Crown, they had to tap into the concept of liberty for all (minus the slaves, of course). They knew their livelihoods (and the livelihoods of many of those who wielded power in the Colonies before the Revolution) depended upon the continuation of slavery. Or maybe they just thought slavery would endure. Still, they sowed the seeds of freedom from slavery in that Constitution.

England professed to be free while it maintained its traditional caste society. If you were not of a noble family, you were not free. The birth of the American nation likely had to turn the idea that the masses were lesser people on its head.


The history of America is one of a nation struggling to live up to its own lofty ideas. And we have old, dead, white men to thank for it. Perhaps revolutions do not end... if successful.