THE AMERICAN STORY, from its beginning on the empty stage of a New World until now, is entirely improbable. Every attempt to account for it rationally leaves you with a feeling that something important, perhaps the most important thing of all, has been left out.
The school book myth is that what the New England colonists had in common was a passionate love of liberty. No doubt the seed of liberty was there, even from the beginning, but it was latent and the plant was a long time coming up. They did not understand liberty. They did not know that liberty itself must be free. They tried to imprison it. Having fled from persecution and kingly tyranny in England, the Puritans set up in Massachusetts a tyranny of their own, that is to say, a theocracy. The church and state were one. Only members of the church could take part in government. The church elders laid down all the rules of life—moral, esthetic and economic. Disobedience was dealt with severely. Some Quakers came and were cast out. If they returned, as they often did in a spirit of defiance, they were mutilated, their ears might be cut off, and some of both sexes were hanged.
The Declaration of Independence said: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal... Morally it was a fiction because it left out the Negro slave.
The American Revolution was exemplary. It did not devour its own children, as most revolutions do, but made them fathers of the Republic. Most remarkable of all, considering what the opportunities were, no false patriot attempted to seize power from the hands of the weak Continental Congress and make himself dictator.
You may think you may know what kind of person you are. Indeed, you must be pretty sure of it, else you will fall apart for want of a soul center. Yet if your entire life could be unrolled before your eyes as on a movie film, at a speed of one year per minute, giving you time only to verify the naked facts and no time to hide any of them, again, you would almost certainly cry out, “No. I am not that kind of person.” Of course you are not. But neither are you quite the person you think you are. Which means this—that there is a truth beyond the facts, a truth to which facts pertain but which is not itself the simple sum of facts.
If this may be true of the life of an individual, what can one hope to do with the life of a nation? There can be no history without facts, yet facts alone are not history.
[The US Constitution] became the most famous political document in the world. Never before had a people, by an original act, created for themselves the kind of government they wanted, not upon the sills of an old one but from the very footing up, and bound it in writing. It had to be like that because when the revolution had been won there was no existing national government to seize or take over or build upon.
Implicit in the Constitution is this proposition: If the few rule they will oppress the many. If the many rule they will oppress the few. Therefore both the few and the many must be restrained as to things which neither shall ever do to the other.
It was written in the book of irony that among civilized men he (the US) would be the last to abolish slavery, and that to do it he would be obliged to turn his sword against himself.
Yet one must consider the fact that slavery was not a sin until people began to think it was. Nowhere in Christendom for nearly 1,800 years had anybody regarded it as a sin. The Puritans of New England, who would have enslaved the Indians if the Indians had been tame, could not have thought of it as a sin, since they lived by the Bible and nowhere in the Bible was slavery forbidden. It was at first a labor problem in the immemorial design.
Greek colonists going forth to settle the Mediterranean world were instructed to seek three things: fertile land, good water and tame slaves. More than 2,000 years later in the New World the Spaniards found in Mexico and South America people who could be made to work; and that was one reason why Mexico City grew to be rich and splendid while the English colonists were still hacking away at the North American forests and had no fine cities at all.