Who Gets to Claim 1776?

(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Shutterstock)

MOST REPUBLICS FAIL by 300 years. For the United States to survive another 250, Americans must care about our revolutionary inheritance and what it actually means. This July Fourth offers an opportunity to encourage Americans to see themselves in the revolutionary story, to embrace the founding legacy, and to launch a civic renaissance.

We are the only nation in the world based on an idea. There was no roadmap to follow without the shared ethnic, racial, or religious base underpinning other nations. Americans have, from the beginning, debated what the idea means and squabbled over how best to pursue it.

The founding generation declared independence, drafted the Articles of Confederation, threw them out a few years later when they failed, adopted a new Constitution, passed a bill of rights when the Constitution was found lacking, and ratified additional amendments in the first two decades to close legal loopholes. Their legacy is not one of perfection but rather of innovation, experimentation, and reform.

Subsequent generations picked up that mantle. They embraced the challenge to make the nation just a bit more perfect. We have not achieved perfection, and never will; it is not attainable, but the founding generation inspired our predecessors to inch toward it. Only recently has that legacy of innovation, and the history of our revolutionary origins, fallen by the wayside.

A poll conducted this past spring found that just 48 percent of American voters planned to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday. Even more troubling, the numbers split along partisan lines: 65 percent of Republicans reported having plans to celebrate while only 37 percent of Democrats said they did. Another survey, conducted in 2024, found low support for democracy among young Americans, with 31 percent of the 18-to-29-year-old respondents saying they don’t believe in democracy, while just 36 percent said they believe democracy can address the issues currently facing the country.

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SOME OF THIS DISAFFECTION reflects general despair about the nation’s future (and indeed, the latter poll was likely skewed somewhat by being conducted just days after the last presidential election). But it is far more likely that many Americans won’t celebrate July Fourth because they don’t see themselves in the Revolution, because its legacy feels irrelevant to them in the twenty-first century. Few women have found themselves in the chunky history books released just in time for Father’s Day. People of color have felt excluded by “the Founders,” a phrase that conjures a club of dead white men. Recent immigrants often see little connection to Americans who lived centuries ago.

All of which is ironic, since women, people of color, and immigrants were essential to the Revolution’s success.

Women experienced every facet of it. They wrote, cooked, nursed, fundraised, and marched. In 1772, Mercy Otis Warren published a blistering satire in the Massachusetts Spy attacking royal authority and stirring Patriot sentiment. Over the following four years, she composed additional plays and other writings that built support for the cause. After Lexington and Concord in April 1775, women served the Continental Army as laundresses, cooks, seamstresses, and nurses, one authorized for every ten soldiers and paid $2 a month.

Elite women played vital roles in sustaining morale. Martha Washington and other officers’ wives wintered at military headquarters, enduring hardship alongside their husbands, organizing gatherings, comforting homesick soldiers, and helping transform rough encampments into functioning communities. In the spring of 1780, the women of Philadelphia formed the Philadelphia Ladies Association, raising $300,000 in Continental dollars, purchasing linen, and sewing over two thousand shirts for the army.

Immigrants like Alexander Hamilton and Baron von Steuben fought for both the ideals of the Revolution and the possibility of a better life for themselves. Their patriotism was not produced by the location of their birth but rather was born of a commitment to the future United States.

For black soldiers, individual liberties and those of the nation were irrevocably intertwined. Some historians estimate that some regiments of the Continental Army were 25 percent black. They fought with incredible valor for their own freedom and for the country, and changed how some of their commanders, including George Washington, thought about slavery. Black volunteer regiments from Saint-Domingue willingly joined the war alongside white militias in Savannah to fight for the Patriot cause against the British.

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DISCUSSING THESE ASPECTS of the story of the founding era does not replace, challenge, or diminish the glorious success of the ragtag Continental Army, the leadership of George Washington, the bravery of the delegates of the Continental Congress, or the rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson. Instead, the contributions of women, immigrants, and people of color bolstered and empowered leading white men. Their stories are deeply intertwined, just as ours are today. The Revolution belongs to all Americans and is the product of sacrifices, bloodshed, and lives wagered on this radical idea by Americans of all stripes.

Telling this story is not about checking a “DEI” box or complying with a political litmus test. It is about the future of the nation. If we want our republic to survive another 250 years, we need all Americans to know our origin story and believe it is worthy of fighting to preserve.

If we fail to uphold the founding legacy, if we stop trying to make the nation more perfect, our institutions will calcify, public trust will plummet further, and the republic will fail. Republics aren’t enforced with military might or hereditary succession. They depend on citizens upholding institutions, norms, and customs that form our civic tapestry. We need more than 40 percent of Americans to be committed to this cause.

July Fourth gives us a chance to inspire, engage, and recommit. Enjoy the barbecue, watch the fireworks, spend time with the people you love. But what if this year is not a peak but a starting point? What if 2026 launches a decade of civic renaissance? As we observe the revolutionary anniversaries leading up to the Constitution’s 250th birthday in 2037, how might the founding legacy of innovation challenge and inspire us? What steps can we take to leave the nation a little more perfect?

In 1776, Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Perhaps in 2026 we should say, we have it in our power to forge a more perfect union.

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Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a presidential historian and executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. She is the author of Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic and The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution. Substack: Imperfect Union. Social media: X, Bluesky, Threads.