As we approach America’s 250th anniversary, our national conversation has fallen victim to a quiet, insidious plague. It is a narrow historical context that infects both conservative and liberal circles, but it is far more pervasive in liberal critiques. A historical "telescoping" that views the flaws of our past through a vacuum, as if the United States invented the very atrocities it eventually split in two to destroy.
Just days before America's 250th birthday, former President Barack Obama stepped in to share what hes thinking about after 250 years of America #1. In a widely shared interview, he observed, with regard to our founder George Washingtons' relationship with slavery: "I think sometimes we get confused in thinking that these two stories are separate [the stories of slavery and America]. They're intertwined, right? Which is why it's possible for me to be a great admirer of George Washington, and also acknowledge he was a slaveholder."
With all due respect to the former president, and to the mainstream NPCs that nods along with this sentiment, you are missing the big picture.
This analysis hyper-focuses on the moral contradiction of Washington being a slaveholder. I would argue it is wrong to treat the founding of America as the beginning of an immoral story. We look at these men of yesterday and obsess over their perceived sins, judging them by modern standards as if they were infants in diapers who simply woke up in 1776 and decided to build an evil world, one that is to be brought down today by "peaceful protest."
But George Washington was not a wee lil baby. He and the Founding Fathers were men of decisive action, shaped by a deep understanding of history. The truth is, in my opinion, the dismantling of global slavery did not begin in Philadelphia in 1776. It began in 1517, in a small university town in Germany, when an obscure monk named Martin Luther walked up to the All Saints' Church door in Wittenberg and hammered down his 95 theological theses.
The Intellectual Spark: 1517 and the Fracture of Absolute Power
To understand why Washington acted the way he did, we have to look at the lineage of all human independence. The evolution of human liberty operates much like the evolution of the natural sciences, with breakthroughs building sequentially upon centuries of work. The concept of human liberty evolved in, similar stages.
Before Martin Luther, the Western world operated under a form of centralized spiritual and political authority. The Catholic Church and the monarchs of Europe held an absolute monopoly over truth, salvation, and human agency. When Luther posted his 95 Theses protesting the sale of indulgences, he wasn't just trying to reform church finances; he inadvertently lit a fuse under the entire structure of Western civilization.
The posting of the theses in 1517 triggered a seismic shift from blind obedience to individual conscience. By asserting that salvation was a matter of personal faith alone, a concept known as sola fide, and translating the Bible into the common German tongue, Luther stripped the ruling class of its monopoly on truth. This is a fight we still see today, as modern governments target free speech with labels like "hate speech" or "anti-science." This intellectual spark ignited decades of devastating religious wars across the European continent, but out of the ashes of the old world rose a permanent new reality: the realization that the individual mind possessed an inherent spiritual need for freedom that no king or pope could justly control.
From the Pulpit to the Battlefield: The English Civil War
The Protestant revolution did not stop in Germany. It crossed the channel and morphed into a political crisis known as the English Civil War, which raged from 1642 to 1651.
For centuries, kings ruled by "Divine Right," which was the idea that a monarch answered only to God, and that their subjects had no legal right to question them. King Charles I pushed this doctrine to its absolute limit by bypassing the English Parliament, levying unauthorized taxes, and tyrannizing those who opposed his rule.
The resulting war between the Royalists and Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarians shattered the divine status of kings. It ended in 1649 with a sight that terrified the monarchs of the world: the public execution of King Charles I. Cromwell established a "Commonwealth," a form of government adopted later by my beautiful home state of Pennsylvania. This new republic was formed with the intention to protect the rights of the people.
But Cromwell failed. Due in part to an unstable institutional framework, his republic degenerated into a strict military dictatorship, with Cromwell ruling as "Lord Protector." When he died, the British people were so exhausted by military rule that they restored the monarchy in 1660, returning the king's son from exile to rule alongside Parliament.
Still, the intellectual blueprint had been drawn. The English Civil War left the Western world with an hatred for standing armies, a fierce demand that taxes require popular representation, and the foundational proof that a tyrant and false divinity could be overthrown.
1776: The Offspring of Luther and Cromwell
This brings us back to America. The American Revolution was not a disconnected, spontaneous event. America was the direct ideological offspring of Martin Luther’s spiritual individualism and Oliver Cromwell’s political rebellion.
The men who gathered in Philadelphia were profoundly aware of the historical sins of their world, including the deeply entrenched evil of slavery. But they also knew that no civilization in human history had ever successfully maintained a large-scale republic without it collapsing into even more tyranny. They knew Cromwell had tried and failed, and they knew Rome had fallen.
What made Washington and the founders so extraordinary was not that they were perfect, sinless beings. It was that they were brilliant men of human knowledge, historians who responded to their moment with unparalleled civic virtue and honor.
This virtue was made real when Washington played out what historians call the Cincinnatus Ideal. In 1783, having achieved total military victory over the greatest empire on earth, George Washington could of held supreme power. He could have easily marched on the capital and declared himself a military ruler or an American king, as some of his officers suggested. This was the precise fatal trap that consumed Oliver Cromwell and failed the free and enslaved British people.
Instead, channeling Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the ancient Roman general for whom Cincinnati, Ohio is named, Washington voluntarily resigned his commission as President and Commander in Chief to civilian authorities and returned to a normal life. In doing so, he shattered the cycle of military dictatorships and permanently codified the principle that the law and the morality of the people reside over a rotation of rulers.
By learning from the actions and mistakes of men from over two millennia of history, Washington established a constitutional republic, giving the civilian government control over the military. The Revolution succeeded where others had failed precisely because these men knew their history, purposefully avoiding the historical traps of the past.
The Big Picture: We are Western History
The current era of "filtered history" insists on putting on a pair of bigoted, hyper-focused glasses. It zooms in exclusively on the profound failures of millions of excellent men, treating early America as if it were the only civilization on earth to tolerate the horrific atrocities of slavery.
But if we take off those glasses and view history, a very different picture emerges. We see that human liberty is constantly, organically expanding in unison, based on shared ideals and culture.
Consider the timeline of the abolition of the international slave trade:
1807: The British Empire bans the transatlantic slave trade.
1808: The United States Congress bans the importation of slaves at the very first constitutional moment it was legally permitted to do so.
This was not just American history being made; this was Western history. America is English, it is French, it is Dutch, Spanish, and Roman. Look closely around you, and you will see that this 500-year history is not locked away in dusty textbooks. It is standing directly in front of us, woven into the very fabric of our physical world. It is written plainly in the architecture of our courthouses and state capitols, which were built specifically to mirror the Roman Republic. A design that should be protected and required for all government buildings relating to law. It is alive in our legal systems, our concept of juries, our property rights, and the common law that we inherited from the English. Up and down the eastern seaboard of the US, from the Spanish-influenced architecture of Florida to the colonial Dutch and English brickwork of New York and Boston, the physical footprints of this multi-generational Western struggle are everywhere.
The Great Irony of History
For those who believe in a higher power, or at least possess an appreciation for historical irony, the ultimate fulfillment of Martin Luther’s 1517 protest did not arrive until centuries later. It arrived through a man who carried his exact name: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The dream of free, independent peoples living under a system of universal human dignity, judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, is in my opinion the finale of the Protestant and Western evolution of freedom. Dr. King did not reject the American Founding. He explicitly held America accountable to the "promissory note" written by Jefferson and Washington, using the language of Christian individualism, justice, and freedom to help America understand.
Today, we take these hard-won ideals entirely for granted. We forget that the non-Western world, including various African, Asian, and Mesoamerican nations, did not go through these specific, agonizing, 500-year Western values growing pains. Some of these countries today have slavery or a form of indentured servitude, where are the comparisons and complaints about that? They did not have a Martin Luther fracturing spiritual monopolies, religious monarchs, or Civil Wars to dismantle the divine right of rulers through bloody trial and error.
Throughout history, these universal ideals of individual rights were introduced to many of these cultures through the disruptive, often violent forces of Western global contact. It explains why so many nations historically struggled to adopt democratic institutions overnight, because their cultural histories are completely different, and they do not share the specific, centuries-long Protestant and Enlightenment foundations that silently guide the West.
Moving Forward: Address, Don't Regress
The next time someone in "power" wants to weaken the foundations of America or Western civilization by obsessing over its historical faults, feel free to find them pretty lame. They are attempting as if by a self-appointed divine right, to tell you how things are, to tell you their truth.
The Founding Fathers were not flawless saints, but they were men of immense action who built a legal and philosophical framework that allowed the ideals of Martin Luther to evolve and eventually free all men of the West. A fact much more interesting and optimistic to lean on.
The beautiful, free life we enjoy today is an inheritance. It was paid for with centuries of blood, war, and intellectual courage.
So to you, the reader, as we mark 250 years of this great American experiment: How will you continue being free? How will you take this amazing inheritance to the next step?
I at the very least, will be having a beer outside.
Cheers,
-james