GAZETTE COLUMN: The myth of a nation by John P. Flannery

America as David

(Photos/Collage by John Flannery)

Our colonies were like a young David facing Goliath in 1776.

If you’ve seen the Michelangelo statue and considered the pose, the artist was capturing that instant before David, resolute and poised to act, hurled the stone at the head of Goliath at the risk of his life. 

When Thomas Jefferson wrote in his famed Declaration of Independence of these “United States,” our continental congress was resolute, and poised to begin a new nation – if we could defeat that distant despot, George the III, our “Goliath.”

This declaration asserted our independence, but it also explained by its conception of liberty and listed grievances, that justified the revolution, our fundamental theory of self-governance – of a democratic republic.

Jefferson’s famous trinity of declared unalienable rights owed a nation’s citizens was “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  Jefferson invoked in part what John Locke, the 17^th century British political philosopher, said was the necessary prerequisite for a government, the people’s rights to “life, liberty and property.”  Purposefully, Jefferson supplanted Locke’s third element, “property,” with the “pursuit of happiness.” 

I believe Jefferson was invoking, with precision, what the ancient Greeks meant by “happiness” – “eudaimonia” – tied to another greek concept, “arête,” meaning virtue or excellence.

Jefferson wrote William Short on October 31, 1819 confirming his meaning - that “virtue was the foundation of happiness.”

By Jefferson’s conception every individual who consents to be governed, retains autonomy as to these unalienable rights, and they cannot be taken away or suspended. 

We err in this nation when we think these rights are only American; they are universal or they are not unalienable.

We learn what right governance is by what Jefferson condemned about Great Britain’s imperial rule.

The facts that Jefferson “submitted to a candid world” in his declaration were, in almost every aspect, concerned with any people’s right to self-determination.

Jefferson’s “Summary View of the Rights of British America,” written in 1774, is the long form explanation of what became the grievances in Jefferson’s declaration.

Great Britain placed a standing army in our midst (“armed men of another country, and another spirit”), and compromised our free trade with other nations, limited what we could manufacture (even prohibiting making our own hats), imposed confiscatory duties, imposed a monopoly of its products on the colonies, suspended colonial legislatures, transported criminal cases from the colony to Great Britain for trial (inconvenient to witnesses and the accused, separated from his peers, “without money, without counsel, without friends, without exculpatory proof,… [and] tried before judges predetermined to condemn”), exempted the military from local criminal law, making the civil law subordinate to the military, all in what Jefferson described as “a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery” by “a body of men foreign to our constitutions, and unacknowledged by our laws.”

We declared our independence from such despotic governance.

If this declaration was our original intent, then we should be ashamed for what we’ve lost of virtue, for now we mimic some of the worst practices that we once abhorred, both at home and abroad.