Benjamin Banneker built a clock out of wood.

He was a free Black farmer in Baltimore County, Maryland, born in 1731. Sometime in his early twenties he borrowed a pocket watch, took it apart, studied the gears, and carved a larger version of it out of wood, all by hand. It struck the hours. By most accounts it kept time for decades.

He had almost no formal schooling. His grandmother, an Englishwoman who had come to Maryland as an indentured servant and married a freed African, is traditionally credited with teaching him to read. The rest he taught himself.

In middle age he took up astronomy, working from books and instruments lent by his neighbors, the Ellicott family, who were building mills along the Patapsco River. He taught himself enough mathematics to calculate the positions of the sun, moon, and planets and to predict eclipses. That is the hard arithmetic behind an almanac, and in many early American farmhouses the almanac was the only book on the shelf besides the Bible.

In early 1791, at fifty-nine, he joined Andrew Ellicott’s survey of the boundaries of the new federal district on the Potomac. He kept the astronomical clock and made the nightly observations that fixed the survey’s position. After a few months he went home to his farm.

You may have heard that Banneker later reconstructed the entire plan of Washington from memory after Pierre L’Enfant quit and took his drawings with him. It is a good story. The record does not support it. What he actually did is more interesting.

That August he wrote to the Secretary of State.

Thomas Jefferson had published, a few years earlier in his Notes on the State of Virginia, a passage speculating that Black people were inferior to whites in reason and imagination. He offered it as a suspicion only. It was widely read.

Banneker enclosed a manuscript copy of his almanac, every calculation done by his own hand, and let it answer the suspicion for him. But the letter went further.

He reminded Jefferson of a time, not long past, when the colonists had considered themselves enslaved by the British Crown. And he quoted Jefferson’s own words back to him: that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.

Then he drew the conclusion Jefferson would not. “How pitiable it was,” Banneker wrote, “that a man so convinced of the benevolence of the Father of Mankind should at the same time detain so many of his brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, and be found guilty of the very act he had so loudly condemned in others.”

He did not ask Jefferson for anything. He simply held up a mirror.

Jefferson answered eleven days later, on August 30, 1791. Nobody, he wrote, wished more than he did to see such proofs as Banneker exhibited that nature had given Black Americans talents equal to those of other men. He told Banneker he was sending the almanac to the Marquis de Condorcet, secretary of the Academy of Sciences in Paris.

It was a gracious reply. It was not a change of conduct. Jefferson held people in slavery until he died, and years later, in a private letter, he wondered aloud whether one of the Ellicotts had helped Banneker with the math.

Banneker had the whole exchange printed. His almanacs ran every year from 1792 through 1797 and sold across the mid-Atlantic, carrying the name of a man the Secretary of State had privately doubted.

He died in October 1806. By most accounts, his house caught fire during his funeral and burned with nearly everything in it, including the wooden clock.

But here is what the letter teaches.

Banneker did not argue against the founding. He argued from it. He took the Declaration more seriously than its author did, and he used it as a standard Jefferson could not escape because Jefferson had written it.

That is the power of a written principle. It outlives the convenience of the men who wrote it. It can be quoted back to them.

And it is why the founders insisted on writing things down: rights in declarations, powers in constitutions, limits in plain language. A government bound by text can be held to the text. A government run on discretion or a series of suggestions answers to no one, because there is nothing to quote back.

Banneker had no vote, no office, and no army. He had the author’s own words and he mailed them home.

If you enjoyed this article, you’ll love the documentary.

Thread of Liberty follows the entire thread of the American experiment — from ancient Rome and the Puritans, through the Revolution and the Constitution, to Tocqueville, Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, and the modern Administrative State.

Watch the full feature documentary at ThreadofLiberty.com

He taught himself to read out of a schoolbook of speeches.

Frederick Bailey was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, around 1818. Sent to Baltimore as a boy, he was started on the alphabet by his owner’s wife until her husband stopped it, on the grounds — which the child overheard — that learning would make a slave unmanageable and unfit to be a slave.

Douglass wrote later that this was the first clear explanation anyone had given him of the mechanism by which he was held, and that from that moment he understood the pathway from slavery to freedom ran through reading.

He finished the job by trading bread to poor white boys in the street for lessons, and by buying, at about twelve, a copy of The Columbian Orator — a popular schoolbook of speeches and dialogues. It contained a dialogue between a master and a slave in which the slave argues his own case and wins, and it contained speeches on liberty from the parliamentary tradition.

Let that sink in: one of the greatest orators of nineteenth-century America learned rhetoric from a textbook while enslaved.

In September of 1838 he escaped by train and steamboat to New York, in something under twenty-four hours, wearing a sailor’s clothes and carrying seaman’s protection papers borrowed from a free Black sailor whose description did not particularly match his own. He changed his surname to Douglass and went to New Bedford.

Three years later he spoke at an antislavery meeting on Nantucket and William Lloyd Garrison heard him.

What followed is the part of the Douglass story most Americans know: the lecture circuit, the 1845 Narrative that was so well written critics claimed no former slave could have produced it, the flight to Britain to avoid recapture after the book identified him, and the return with his freedom purchased by British supporters.

The part that belongs in a publication about American constitutionalism is what happened next, and it cost him nearly everyone he knew.

Garrison’s abolitionism held that the Constitution was a proslavery document — “a covenant with death,” in his phrase — and that the North should therefore dissolve the Union rather than be complicit in it. Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution in public. Douglass, as a Garrisonian, argued this position for years.

Then he changed his mind, and he changed it by reading the text for himself.

His argument, worked out through the late 1840s and stated fully afterward, ran roughly like this: Look at the document itself, not at what the framers privately intended or what the Supreme Court had lately said about it. The word slave does not appear in it. The word slavery does not appear in it. The compromises that protected the institution are written in evasions — persons held to service, other persons — because the men who wrote them were ashamed to name the thing in the charter of a free government.

A document that refuses to name slavery cannot be said to guarantee it. And read plainly, its preamble, its guarantees of due process, its ban on bills of attainder, its provisions for habeas corpus and jury trial and a republican form of government in every state, are all hostile to human bondage.

Douglass concluded that the Constitution, interpreted as it stands, is a glorious liberty document, and that abolitionists who conceded it to the slaveholders had surrendered the strongest ground they had.

Garrison never forgave him. The friendship ended. The movement split.

But Douglass was right about the practical question, which is why this matters beyond the intramural history of abolitionism. His position — that the founding documents belong to everyone and can be used against the injustices they compromised on — became the argumentative foundation of the antislavery constitutionalism that Lincoln practiced, of the Reconstruction amendments, and eventually of the civil rights movement a century later.

None of which made him soft about the country.

On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, invited to give an Independence Day address, he gave the speech that is now called What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

He spent the first half praising the founders sincerely and at length — their courage, their reasoning, the risk they ran. Then he turned, and asked what the Fourth of July meant to an American slave, and answered his own question: a day that revealed to him, more than any other in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he was a constant victim.

He told an audience of sympathetic white reformers that the celebration was, to the enslaved, an offense, and that there was no nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than the people of the United States at that hour.

And then, having said that, he told them he did not despair, because the arguments the founders had put into circulation, that all men were created equal, could not be confined to the men who first made them.

That is the whole Douglass method, and it is worth naming precisely because both American factions tend to want half of it.

He held that the country was guilty and yet, more importantly, that the country’s founding principles were true; the second fact was the reason the first one could be indicted. He did not have to choose, and he thought anyone who insisted he choose was making a mistake — the Garrisonians by throwing away the charter, and the slaveholders by pretending it was theirs.

On the morning of March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson walked from his boardinghouse in Washington DC to the unfinished Capitol and took the oath of office.

John Adams was not there. He had left Washington before dawn.

It was an awkward morning. It was also one of the most important mornings in the history of self-government.

For the first time under the Constitution, power passed from one faction to its bitter rival. The campaign had been vicious. The two men on the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence had stopped speaking.

And yet no army moved. No one was arrested. The losing side packed its bags and went home.

Jefferson would later call it the revolution of 1800 — as real a revolution in the principles of government as 1776 had been in its form.

The difference was the weapon. In 1776 it was the musket. In 1800 it was the ballot.

The Primary Control

The men who wrote the Constitution did not trust power. We have spent a great deal of time on that here — Montesquieu, the Scots and their enlightenment, Madison’s machine of competing ambitions.

But every machine needs a power source.

Madison named it plainly in Federalist 51. A dependence on the people, he wrote, is no doubt the primary control on the government. The separation of powers, the checks and balances, the whole elaborate architecture — he called those “auxiliary precautions.”

Auxiliary. Backup.

The first line of defense in the American system was never the courts or the Senate. It was always the virtuous and educated citizen who played an active role in the upkeep of the Republic.

That is why the House of Representatives stands for election every two years. In Federalist 52, Madison argued that the House must have an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people — and that frequent elections were the only way to secure it. The framers wanted representatives looking over their shoulders constantly.

They built the republic on the assumption that someone would be looking back.

The Founders’ Bet

The Founders also knew that a ballot by itself guarantees nothing.

Madison said it at the Virginia ratifying convention in June 1788: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.”

John Adams, writing to the Massachusetts militia ten years later, put it more bluntly. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Which by the way, the religion that dominated the newly independent United States at the time was in fact traditional Christianity.

But this reliance on the people was essentially THE bet for the future of the Republic. Not on a wise king. Not on a class of credentialed managers. On ordinary, virtuous people, informed and engaged, governing themselves.

Jefferson made the bet explicit in an 1820 letter. He knew of no safe repository for the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves. And if the people were not enlightened enough to exercise that control wisely, the remedy was not to take power from them. It was to help inform and reform their indiscretion and allow them to repair their faults.

Read that again. The answer to an uninformed citizenry was never fewer citizens. It was better ones.

Where Liberty Is Learned

When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in 1831, he went looking for the secret of the thing. He found it in the New England township.

Town meetings, he wrote, are to liberty what primary schools are to science. They bring it within the people’s reach and teach them how to use it.

Self-government was not something Americans received. It was something they practiced — in the town meeting, on the jury, in the vestry, on the school committee. The Constitution assumed those habits already existed. It did not create them.

Now look at where we are.

The offices with the most direct power over your daily life — the school board, the county commission, the city council, the sheriff, and in many states the judges — are routinely decided by a small fraction of eligible voters. In many cities, municipal elections draw a fifth of the electorate or less.

The national race has all the “sizzle” and gets the attention. The local race decides what your children read, what your property is worth, and whether your streets are safe.

What Leviathan Needs

Here is the uncomfortable part.

No one votes for a federal agency. The rules that govern your business, your land, your health care, and your children’s schools are increasingly written by people whose names you will never know and whom you can never remove.

The Founders did not design that system. But they did leave us the tool to answer it. The only officials with the authority to rein in the administrative state — to write the laws, control the purse, and confirm the appointments — are the ones you elect.

When citizens disengage, the elected branches quietly hand their power to the unelected ones. Congress delegates. The agencies fill the vacuum. And because no one is watching, no one notices.

Leviathan does not need to defeat the voter. It only needs the voter to be quiet and stay home.

What Showing Up Looks Like

The cure is not outrage. Outrage is cheap and it fades. The cure is attendance.

• Vote in every election, not only the ones on television. Primaries and local races most of all.

• Know who represents you at every level, by name.

• Attend at least one public meeting a year — the school board, the county commission, the city council.

• Serve when you are called. Jury duty is self-government in its purest form.

• Teach your children that citizenship is something you do, not something you have.

None of this is glamorous. None of it was glamorous in 1776 either. Most of the Revolution was farmers walking to meetings or Washington grinding it out to stay alive; most of the Revolution is the antithesis of glamorous.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

Look back at Philadelphia, September of 1787. The Constitutional Convention closed on September 17th. As Franklin left the State House, a woman in reportedly asked him what kind of government the delegates had made. His answer, as one delegate recorded it, has become the most quoted line of the founding.

A republic, if you can keep it.

The Founders handed us the machinery. They could not hand us the habit of running it. That part was always ours.

Liberty was won with muskets. It is kept with ballots — or it is not kept at all.

]If you enjoyed this article, you’ll love the documentary.

Thread of Liberty follows the entire thread of the American experiment — from ancient Rome and the Puritans, through the Revolution and the Constitution, to Tocqueville, Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, and the modern Administrative State.

Watch the full feature documentary at ThreadofLiberty.com

His father was Henry Laurens of Charleston: president of the Continental Congress, American commissioner to the Netherlands, and for a period of time, the largest slave trader in North America.

The firm of Austin and Laurens handled the sale of thousands of human beings through Charleston harbor. Henry Laurens later expressed misgivings, in the manner of many men of his class and generation, yet continued to sell and hold people in bondage.

His son concluded that the whole thing was indefensible and said so out loud, repeatedly, in public, during a war.

John Laurens was educated in Geneva, Switzerland and then read law in London, which meant he spent his formative years outside the American South in circles where the moral case against slavery was being argued seriously. He came home in 1777 with a wife left behind in England, along a small child he would barely know, and a determination to get into the war.

He joined Washington’s military family as an aide-de-camp, unpaid and as a volunteer.

The staff he joined included Alexander Hamilton, and the two became extraordinarily close. Their correspondence is famous and the modern argument about how to characterize it is not one this publication needs to settle. What is beyond dispute is that Hamilton wrote to him with an intimacy he showed almost no one else, and that when Laurens died Hamilton wrote that he felt the loss of a friend he had truly and most tenderly loved, and that he would never again allow himself to feel that way about anyone.

Laurens was reckless in combat to a degree that alarmed everyone around him. He was wounded at Germantown carrying a torch toward the fortified Chew House, a moment in the battle that proved to be the undoing of the Americans that day. With the Americans unable to take the house, Laurens took it upon himself to try and burn the British out, managing to open the front door while under heavy fire before throwing in a burning brand. He was shot in the shoulder for his troubles.

He was in the thick of Monmouth. He fought a duel with General Charles Lee over Lee’s public abuse of Washington. With Hamilton acting as his second, Laurens narrowly missed killing Lee, who was in fact a skilled duelist: Lee missed but Laurens put a shot into Lee’s right side, a wound that would prove to be non-fatal.

But the thing Laurens really cared about was his idea of a freed regiment.

By the winter of 1778 the southern states were badly short of troops and the British were about to move south in force. Laurens proposed a solution that was, in his mind, both military and moral: raise three thousand men from among the enslaved population of South Carolina and Georgia, arm them, pay their owners compensation, and grant every man his freedom at the end of his service.

He argued it to his father, who was initially appalled and then partially persuaded. He argued it to Washington, who was skeptical about the consequences but did not block it. Hamilton wrote to Congress supporting it and made an argument that is worth remembering: that the objection people would raise — that these men lacked the capacity to be soldiers — was an excuse dressed up as an observation, and that their natural faculties were probably as good as anyone else’s.

In March of 1779, the Continental Congress recommended the plan to South Carolina and Georgia.

South Carolina rejected it overwhelmingly. Laurens brought it back to the legislature after Charleston fell and the state was under occupation, when the military argument was as strong as it could possibly be. It was rejected again by a crushing margin. One observer reported that the proposal was received with horror by persons who would sooner lose the war than arm the men they owned.

Laurens went to France instead, as a special envoy in 1781, and came back with money and supplies that materially helped the Yorktown campaign. He served at Yorktown and was one of the two officers who negotiated the articles of Cornwallis’s surrender.

And then, on August 27, 1782, ten months after Yorktown, with peace negotiations already underway in Paris and the war effectively decided, he rode out with a small detachment against a British foraging party on the Combahee River in South Carolina.

He rode into an ambush and was shot dead almost immediately. He was twenty-seven. The engagement had no strategic purpose whatsoever. It is one of the last actions of the war, and it accomplished nothing.

Washington’s letters afterward carry more grief than he usually permitted himself. Greene wrote that Laurens had too much of what he called the spirit of enterprise, which is a general’s way of saying he could not be kept out of danger.

Two things are worth holding onto.

The first is that Laurens is the counterargument to the claim that nobody at the founding could have known better. He was from the deepest part of the slaveholding South, from the family that had profited most directly, and he knew it was wrong and he said so. He tried to do something concrete about it in the middle of a war when it was actively dangerous to his position and his family’s.

The moral knowledge was available in 1779. James Otis had it in 1764. Some men acted on it. Most did not.

The second is what South Carolina’s refusal actually reveals. Offered a plan that might have saved the state militarily, the legislature chose the risk of losing the war over the risk of the precedent. That decision tells you something exact about the strength of the interest the founding generation left in place, and about why it eventually took nearly seven hundred thousand dead to remove it.

If you enjoyed this article, you’ll love the documentary.

Thread of Liberty follows the entire thread of the American experiment — from ancient Rome and the Puritans, through the Revolution and the Constitution, to Tocqueville, Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, and the modern Administrative State.

Watch the full feature documentary at ThreadofLiberty.com

On January 6, 1810, a free Black woman named Jenny Wisher signed a contract in Baltimore binding her daughter to another woman’s household for six years.

Grace Wisher was about ten years old. The terms specified that she would learn what the document called “the art and mystery of housework and plain sewing.” Reading and writing were not mentioned, which was normal and which is the reason we have nothing from her in her own hand.

Indenture contracts were customarily signed by a child’s father. Grace’s was signed by her mother. Historians who have looked at the record point out that most free Black families in Baltimore at that time had recently come out of rural slavery, and that Jenny Wisher’s husband may have still been enslaved somewhere else, or dead, or otherwise unable to sign. There is no way to know.

The household she entered belonged to Mary Pickersgill, a thirty-something widow who made flags, something that Pickersgill was very good at it. She had learned the trade from her mother, Rebecca Young, who had made flags during the Revolution, and she supplied ships’ colors and signal flags to the merchant and naval traffic in one of the busiest ports in America.

In the summer of 1813, with a British fleet operating in the Chesapeake Bay and Baltimore expecting an attack, she took a commission from the officers responsible for the defense of Fort McHenry.

They wanted two flags. A storm flag, seventeen by twenty-five feet, for bad weather. And a garrison flag, thirty feet by forty-two — big enough, as the story around the order goes, that the British would have no difficulty seeing it from a distance.

Consider the scale of that object. Roughly twelve hundred and sixty square feet of wool bunting. Fifteen stars, each two feet across, cut from cotton and sewn on. Fifteen stripes, each nearly two feet wide. Every stitch by hand.

No reasonable person would expect that to be made, by hand, in seven weeks.

The flag was made by a room full of women and girls. Mary Pickersgill, her daughter Caroline, thirteen; her nieces Eliza Young, thirteen, and Margaret Young, fifteen. Her elderly mother, probably. An enslaved woman in the household whose name was never written down and is lost.

And Grace Wisher, thirteen years old, five years into her indenture, working the same needle as the daughter of the house.

The flag was so large it would not fit in the Pickersgill home. The final assembly was done on the floor of a nearby brewery, at night, after the malt house had closed. Mary Pickersgill and her team finished the flag on August 19, 1814 in seven weeks’ time.

Less than a month later, on the morning of September 14, after twenty-five hours of bombardment, that very flag went up over Fort McHenry, and a Baltimore lawyer named Francis Scott Key, watching from a truce ship in the harbor, wrote a poem about seeing it there.

Grace Wisher’s indenture would have ended around 1815 or 1816, when she reached the age of majority.

After that, the record stops. We do not know where she went, whether she married, whether she had children, when or where she died. There is no portrait and no description of her appearance. Everything we have about her life is one contract and an inference about a flag.

There is a painting at the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House in Baltimore, made in 1962, showing the Pickersgill household at work on the flag. Grace Wisher is not in it. In 2014, rather than alter the painting, the museum traced a figure of her onto the plexiglass covering it — a transparent outline, sitting and sewing, in the room where she actually was.

That is an unusually honest piece of curation. It does not pretend she was always remembered. It shows exactly what was done to the record and then corrects it in a way that leaves the correction visible.

Two things should be said plainly.

The first is that this is not a story about a symbol being tainted. It is the opposite. The flag was made by a working widow, three teenage girls, an elderly woman, an enslaved woman, and an indentured Black child, in a rented malt house, on a deadline, for money. That is a more American origin story than anything a committee could have imagined.

The second is harder and should not be dodged. The song Key wrote has a third verse, rarely sung, containing a line about the hireling and the slave finding no refuge. Scholars disagree about who he was referring to — whether it points at the Colonial Marines, the formerly enslaved men who had escaped to the British and fought against the United States, or whether it is generic period abuse of mercenary troops. The argument is genuine and unresolved.

What is not ambiguous is that a thirteen-year-old Black girl helped sew the flag in question, and that at that moment the country the flag belonged to would not have counted her fully as one of its own.

Both facts are true at once. Holding them together is not a concession to anybody’s politics. It is just the actual history of the thing, and this publication has argued from the beginning that the founding does not need to be improved — it needs to be read and appreciated.

The American Revolution began as a defense of local self-government and became an attempt to build a republic on universal rights.

Paul A. Rahe, a historian at Hillsdale College, explains that their task was to create governments that could protect liberty and survive the pressures that had destroyed earlier experiments.

Ancient republics offered both encouragement and warnings. Greek communities practiced forms of self-government, though they excluded women, enslaved people, and foreigners, and some restricted power to an oligarchy. Athens built a maritime empire but pushed its ambitions too far. Sparta also struggled with expansion. Their experience raised a difficult question: Could a republic grow more powerful without undermining the institutions that sustained it?

Rome survived for centuries before expansion strained its military system. Citizen militias gave way to armies whose soldiers spent long periods away from home. Those soldiers became increasingly dependent on their generals, who used their armies to fight for political control. Civil wars eventually ended in imperial rule under Augustus.

Later republics had their own problems. Venice combined longevity with narrow oligarchic government, while Florence suffered repeated political turmoil.

Much of the political thought the founders read grew out of these failures. Thucydides examined Athens’ disastrous war. Plato wrote about Socrates, whom the Athenians executed. Machiavelli produced his major works after the fall of the Florentine Republic he had served. Hobbes and Locke also experienced exile.

Political theory often began with people trying to understand what had gone wrong in their own countries. The founders approached earlier republics with that same mixture of admiration and caution.

Before the Revolution, this reading was largely an intellectual pursuit. Colonial leaders studied ancient history and European political thought, including Montesquieu’s work. Conflict with Britain forced them to put those ideas to use. Starting in 1776, they had to create state governments; by 1787, they were working on a national constitution. Americans tested arrangements and revised constitutions that proved unsatisfactory. Building a republic required practical experience as well as books.

The colonies already had considerable experience governing themselves. Their assemblies made laws and raised taxes. Although Britain appointed many governors, those officials often depended on the assemblies for their pay. Local representatives could use that dependence to influence governors who possessed substantial authority on paper. Connecticut and Rhode Island elected their own governors. The colonies also differed culturally and had little enthusiasm for surrendering their separate authority.

British taxation threatened these arrangements. Opposition to the Stamp Act of 1765 rested on the belief that colonial assemblies should tax their own people. Control over revenue also affected control over government. Officials paid independently of the assemblies would have less reason to answer to them. London’s efforts to assert authority threatened powers the colonists had long exercised and considered their own.

Britain’s response to Massachusetts made that threat harder to dismiss. The Massachusetts Government Act of 1774 revoked important charter provisions and strengthened royal control. Other colonies could imagine the same happening to them. Their first appeals relied on British legal traditions and charter rights. They believed established practices entitled them to particular liberties, and they sought to preserve those liberties within the empire.

These charter rights had roots in medieval corporate law and older Roman practices. Charters recognized a community’s authority to manage its affairs and placed limits on outside rulers. That history helps explain the distinction between “liberties,” meaning particular rights protected by established arrangements, and liberty understood as a right belonging to everyone. The colonists began by defending liberties they believed Britain had already recognized.

Independence required another argument. Once Americans rejected British rule, British custom could no longer supply the foundation for their governments. They turned to natural rights, drawing on Locke. Rights belonging to human beings could justify their decision to establish a new political order, regardless of what a monarch or Parliament had granted.

The Declaration of Independence made protecting rights the purpose of government and grounded legitimate power in the consent of the governed. Its promise of the pursuit of happiness allowed for material independence and freedom of conscience. Jefferson’s work on the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom expressed the view that religious freedom was a natural right.

The founders hoped a successful republic would encourage others to claim self-government. They expected other peoples to learn from the American example. Jefferson still expressed this hope in his 1826 letter to Roger C. Weightman, anticipating that the Declaration would encourage people beyond America to seek their freedom.

Slavery exposed the contradiction within that argument. If liberty belonged to every human being, how could Americans justify denying it to enslaved people? Independence left slavery intact, but the principles used to reject British rule also challenged it. Americans had established governments on the promise of natural rights while continuing to deny those rights to people they held in bondage. Ending British rule left that conflict for Americans themselves to confront.

I released The Thread of Liberty: Keeping Our Republic on the Fourth of July, as America marked its 250th birthday. I wanted to examine the ideas that shaped the founding and the responsibility each generation inherits with them.

Now, we’ve made the film available through Amazon for rent or purchase.

Get "The Thread of Liberty" on Amazon

I’m joined by eleven historians and constitutional scholars, including Victor Davis Hanson, Larry Arnn, Wilfred McClay, Paul Rahe, and Roger Kimball. We discuss the achievements of the constitutional framework, the nation’s failures, and the work of preserving self-government.

Franklin’s familiar challenge, “A republic, if you can keep it,” runs throughout the film.

It’s the perfect film to celebrate the 250th anniversary, and we need to keep the messages of liberty at the forefront of our society’s mind, rather than letting it fade away within months of our 250th Independence Day.

Almost everything we know about what the Revolution felt like from the ranks comes from one book, written by one man, published anonymously in Maine in 1830, and largely ignored for a century.

Joseph Plumb Martin was born in 1760 in western Massachusetts and raised by his grandparents in Connecticut. He enlisted in 1776 at fifteen, over their objections, mostly because he wanted to see something happen.

He saw all of it.

He was on Long Island in August 1776 and in the defensive works at Brooklyn. He was at Kip’s Bay when the militia ran and Washington rode among them with his hat in his hand trying to stop them. He was at Harlem Heights and White Plains. He was at Fort Mifflin during the siege in 1777, which he described as the worst thing he endured in eight years, under a bombardment so heavy that men were being killed faster than they could be replaced at the guns.

He was at Valley Forge. He was at Monmouth in the heat. He was at Yorktown with the Corps of Sappers and Miners, cutting the abatis in front of Redoubt No. 10 in the dark ahead of the assault.

And what he mostly writes about is being hungry.

This is the thing that makes his book unlike the memoirs of officers. Generals write about decisions. Martin writes about food and shoes and cold and the specific quality of exhaustion that comes from marching all night on nothing.

He describes going days without provisions of any kind. He describes the army roasting shoes. He describes standing on a frozen road with rags on his feet and doing the arithmetic on whether he could get home. He describes, at Valley Forge, the men in the huts chanting for meat until the officers made them stop.

There is no self-pity in it, which is what gives it its authority. He is frequently funny. He is sardonic about officers, contemptuous of contractors, and unsentimental about the civilians who would not sell food to a starving army except at a price it could not pay. He notes without much heat that the country seemed to expect its soldiers to fight for nothing and be grateful for the opportunity.

In 1780 the Connecticut Line mutinied over exactly this — no pay in months, no meat in days. Martin was there. He describes the officers talking the men down, and he does not pretend he was on the officers’ side.

He served, by his own reckoning, until the end. He was discharged in 1783 with a certificate for back pay that, like everyone else’s, was worth a fraction of its face value and which most soldiers sold to speculators for whatever they could get.

Then the country he had fought for gave him a lesson in how these things usually end.

Martin went to Maine, settled in the town of Prospect on the Penobscot River, married, had five children, farmed poor ground and held minor town offices. And the land he had settled turned out to fall inside an enormous tract claimed by the heirs of a Massachusetts proprietor — a claim that passed to Henry Knox.

Knox had been Washington’s chief of artillery. He had commanded the guns at Trenton. He had been Secretary of War. He had also acquired, through his wife’s family and his own speculation, a vast holding in Maine, and he pursued the settlers on it for payment.

Martin wrote to him. The letter survives and it is painful to read: an old soldier explaining that he had a family, that he was poor, that he had served through the war, and asking for terms.

He eventually paid Knox a reduced sum for a fraction of what he had cleared. He spent the rest of his life poor. In 1818, when Congress finally established pensions for Revolutionary veterans in need, he applied, and swore in the required statement that he owned essentially nothing — a few tools, some worn furniture, no land worth listing.

He published the narrative in 1830, anonymously, through a small Maine printer. It sold badly. He died in 1850, at ninety, and was buried in Sandy Point.

The book was rediscovered in the twentieth century and is now the single most quoted enlisted account of the Revolution. Nearly every serious history of the war leans on it, because there is nothing else like it.

Here is why he belongs in a series about the founding rather than in a footnote to it.

This Substack has spent a good deal of time on ideas — on Rutherford and Coke and Montesquieu and Madison, on the architecture of divided power and the theory of consent. That work is real and it matters.

But the architecture was built on top of eight years in which a few thousand men stayed in the field without pay, without shoes, and without any reasonable expectation of winning. Martin is the record of what that cost, kept by someone who paid it.

He does not end his book with a flourish about liberty. He ends it closer to an accounting — that the country got what it wanted from men like him and then, when the danger passed, found it convenient to forget the terms.

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The first casualty list of the American Revolution was printed as a broadside and circulated through the colonies within days.

Under the heading for the wounded of Lexington, among the names of farmers and tradesmen, is an entry that reads, in the spelling of the day, Prince Easterbrooks — a Negro man.

He was about thirty-five years old. He had been born around 1740, most likely in Lexington, probably the son of an enslaved man named Tony. He was the property of Benjamin Estabrook, from whom he took his surname, and he had been the property of that family his entire life.

Massachusetts provincial law barred what it called Indians and Negroes from training in the militia.

It also required them to turn out armed in an emergency.

Sit with that pair of rules for a moment, because they describe the entire American contradiction in two clauses of colonial statute. You may not be a soldier but if needed you must fight.

Prince Estabrook was on the muster rolls of the Lexington militia anyway. Local practice on this question was looser than the statute, and by all accounts the men of Captain John Parker’s company knew him and stood with him.

On the night of April 18, 1775, the alarm came that British regulars were marching out of Boston.

The Lexington company assembled on the green in the dark, waited, and was dismissed to Buckman Tavern across the road when the regulars did not appear. Around dawn, word came that they were close, and the drum beat again. Roughly seventy-seven men formed up on the common as several hundred British light infantry came down the road.

Parker’s instruction to his men, as tradition has it, was that they should not fire unless fired upon — but if they meant to have a war, let it begin here.

Somebody fired. Nobody has ever established who.

In the volleys that followed, eight Lexington men were killed and nine wounded before the British officers regained control of their troops. Prince Estabrook took a musket ball in the left shoulder.

He was carried to the Estabrook house — the house of the man who owned him — and treated there by Dr. Joseph Fiske along with the other wounded.

He was the first Black casualty of the Revolutionary War.

He recovered in about two months and went back. That is the part that changes the story from an anecdote into a life.

His service record runs, in pieces, across nearly the whole war. Captain Parker’s company in 1775. Colonel Jonathan Reed’s regiment. Colonel Eleazer Brooks’s regiment. The Continental Army in 1780 and 1781, in the 3rd Massachusetts. Colonel John Greaton’s regiment in 1782. Colonel Michael Jackson’s in 1783.

Eight years, on and off, from the first shots to the last.

Historians note honestly that we cannot always tell whether he enlisted on his own initiative or was serving as a substitute for a white man — a common arrangement, and one in which an enslaved man’s service was somebody else’s asset. The record does not say.

What the record does say is that he was eventually freed, and that the mechanism was almost certainly the war itself. Massachusetts abolished slavery in the 1780s through a series of court decisions built on the state constitution’s declaration that all men are born free and equal, and military service was a common route to emancipation before that.

He moved to Ashby, a small town to the west, and lived there with Nathan Estabrook, the son of his former owner. He died around 1830, close to ninety years old, and is buried in the old burial ground there. A headstone placed in 1930 identifies him by unit.

Nothing else about his private life survives. No wife or children are recorded. No account in his own words exists.

There is a temptation to tell this story as an uncomplicated one about patriotism, and an opposite temptation to tell it as an indictment. Neither is honest.

The accurate version is harder. Roughly five thousand Black men served in the Revolution on the American side. Many were enslaved. Some were freed for it and some were not. They fought for a country that had just declared all men created equal and was not prepared to mean it. But they fought anyway and their presence at the founding is a fact and not a footnote.

James Otis had written, eleven years before Lexington, that the colonists were entitled to their rights as men, and that this was as true of Black men as white ones, and that nothing was clearer than that all men are by nature free.

In April of 1775 a man who was not free bled on the common at Lexington to make Otis’s argument stick. When the Lexington monument went up in 1949 listing the minutemen who stood there, it named him with the rest and said nothing about the rest of it. A separate marker went up in 2008 to say the rest of it.

She was James Otis’s sister, and she had the same mind and none of his opportunities.

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