240 Year Experiment

These imperfectly United States of America started hurtling into history 240 years ago this coming July 4, 2016, but they did not become a nation immediately. In fact the nation was not really any sort of political moiety until it ratified a constitution in 1789, and some would argue, not until the Bill of Rights was added. 

And, of course, there was the matter of the fatal flaw contained in Article One, Section 2 which enshrined slavery with that oblique but clear phrase, "three fifths of all other persons," those all other persons were not "Indians," nor were they "free persons" or "those bound to service for a term of years," thereby distinguishing different classes of personhood:  at the top free persons, followed by indentured servants (semi free, or projected to one day be free) followed by "Indians" followed by "other persons" who could only be...slaves. 

Abigail Adams, speaking with Thomas Jefferson in Paris,--Jefferson, you remember, was bedding his slave woman, Sally Hemmings-- and Abigail challenged him about slavery, which she found repugnant. She managed her Massachusetts farm without slaves. Why did a man as enlightened, engaging, charming as Jefferson embrace the anathema of slavery, human bondage?

The founding fathers left that ticking time bomb in the Constitution and launched  the nation with it still ticking,  which was left to Abraham Lincoln to face, in the second American revolution. Some have argued the United States did not become a real, unified nation until the Civil War, when "these United States" plural became, "the United States," singular.

We cannot know what Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Adams, Burr or Madison were really like. We cannot know what Donald Trump or Barack Obama are really like and we have a lot more data on these modern figures. But really, for most Americans, all we have is television images.  Even if we press their flesh briefly, we do not know these men.

We can read the letters of our founding fathers, and in that sense we, those few of us who can actually hold these fragile papers in hand, can know these men better than we can know people from television. But we can only imagine what their real passions actually were. The men who wrote those letters in the 18th century knew they would likely be read by others beyond the addressee.  These are men who we know from fragments. We have not dined with them ourselves, gone hiking with them, spoken with them ourselves. They are images, perceptions, imaginings. 

One thing the musical "Hamilton" has allowed us to do is dream about what these men might have actually struggled with.  George Washington, for my part, comes alive in a way I had never imagined, torn, doubting, frustrated, but essentially decent in many ways. 

About George, however, I can never get over my visit to Mount Vernon, where I saw his marble crypt and down a dirt path, the graves of his slaves.

But the experience of imagining these men, and the nation they tried to forge, goes back to "Dead Poets Society" as Robin Williams and his students gaze through glass cases at old photographs of former students,  and try to imagine what passions lived in their breasts when they were young men.

All we can know is ourselves. 

In these dark days of Trump, we can know how imperfect and confused even our greatest men were, and that means we are not doing much worse today, in our confusion, in our inability to look through the mists which shroud the future. We can only be bold, move forward into the fog of the future, determined to live lives we will not be ashamed of when we think back on them, as we lie waiting to  die in some unknown future time.