A Nation Like No Other Read Online Free PDF Page A

equality—“All men are created equal.” There would be no hereditary monarch ruling over his subjects, nor would the people be made subservient to a privileged aristocracy. First expressed in the Mayflower Compact more than 150 years earlier, the concept of legal equality was the only logical outcome of the Declaration’s proclamation of liberty, unalienable rights, and government being rooted in the consent of the governed. The perpetuation of slavery blatantly violated both the letter and the spirit of our founding document.
    The great American nation that arose from our forefathers’ revolution was ripped asunder by the Civil War. The war initially centered around constitutional questions, but two years into that terrible conflict, on the field at Gettysburg, Lincoln fundamentally redefined the struggle by harkening back to the Declaration at the beginning of his historic address: “Four Score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent
a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Lincoln was saying the war was no longer being fought over a narrow disagreement over constitutional interpretation, but had become a far more fundamental dispute over the nature of human freedom and equality.
    Indeed, America is perhaps the only nation on earth to fight a civil war over the nature of equality. Lincoln understood the wider ramifications of this struggle, repeatedly declaring that the United States was the “last best hope of earth,” and warning that the entire world would suffer if we failed to hold together a Union based on freedom.
    During the twentieth century, America emerged triumphant from terrible struggles in which we spent trillions of dollars and lost hundreds of thousands of lives. Recall our various enemies: Germany under both the Kaiser and Hitler, Imperial Japan, worldwide Communism, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and currently, radical Islamism. Now consider this: did any of our foes engage in war to secure equality and individual rights? They might declare the superiority of their race or social class, or demand that all must submit to their religion. But never did one of our foes fight for the simple, self-evident truth that all men are created equal. It was for this principle that so many Americans made the ultimate sacrifice. And it is our duty to honor and remember them—and the ideals for which they fought.

AMERICAN CITIZENS OF BRITISH LIBERTY
    The Declaration encapsulated the Founders’ ideas about politics, history, and philosophy, all of which were highly influenced by British thinkers. Most of the Founders were born in Britain’s North American colonies, though a few hailed from Britain itself or its other colonies. They considered themselves British, but emphasized their status as free and equal citizens and as beneficiaries of a British tradition of liberty, rather than as subjects of monarchical authority. As Bernard Bailyn writes, “The colonists’ attitude to the whole world of politics and government was fundamentally shaped by the root assumption that they, as Britishers, shared in a unique inheritance of liberty.”, 2

    This inheritance was a special source of pride for most Englishmen, as historian Gordon Wood observes:
    Englishmen everywhere of every social rank and of every political persuasion could not celebrate [the British Constitution] enough. Every cause, even repression itself, was wrapped in the language of English liberty. No people in the history of the world had ever made so much of it. Unlike the poor enslaved French, the English had no standing army, no lettres de cachet; they had their habeas corpus, their trials by jury, their freedom of speech and conscience, and their right to trade and travel; they were free from arbitrary arrest and punishment; their homes were their castles. 3
    The “liberties of Englishmen” were bedrock for the