On 2 July 1776, in the City of Brotherly Love, delegates from 12 of the 13 colonies who met at the Second Continental Congress voted in favor of the Declaration of Independence. Two days later, on July 4th, the document was officially adopted; another 29 days after that, on 2 August, most signers put their hands to it. Just eight of those signers were immigrants: three from Ireland, two from England, two from Scotland and another from Wales. Another 10 were immigrants’ sons. Every signer to a man had ancestors who’d crossed over from the British Isles.
They knew from experience, and many had written about, the importance of being an immigrant.
Some came from humble beginnings. Josiah Bartlett was the son of a cobbler; George Walton had been apprenticed to a carpenter; Abraham Clark started out as a surveyor; William Whipple was a merchant’s apprentice. Benjamin Franklin’s father made soap.
But all of them had made their way. A dozen were merchants, and another dozen were prominent landowners; one was a minister, one was a musician; four were practicing doctors; 23 had become lawyers; and the vast majority had held political offices—in local councils or assemblies, as judges or justices of the peace.
A committee of five delegates was appointed to draft the Declaration. Roger Sherman, the Connecticut lawyer, and Robert Livingston, the New York judge, offered their thoughts. John Adams, the prolific writer from Boston with a classical education, and Benjamin Franklin, the Pennsylvania printer, edited the manuscript. And Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia planter, wrote most of it. As his Autobiography summed up: “I consented; I drew it; but before I reported it to the committee, I communicated it separately to Dr Franklin and Mr Adams, requesting their corrections.”
All three of those drafters knew that political freedom needs freedom to move.
John Adams, a 5th-generation descendant of English immigrants who studied at Harvard, was hopeful, if skeptical, that public and private virtue would be enough to establish good government: “Liberty must at all hazards be supported.”
Ben Franklin, one of 17 children born to a first-generation immigrant from England, who had “emerg’d from the Poverty & Obscurity in which I was born & bred,” was more optimistic. As he put it in his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, as early as 1751: “So vast is the Territory of North-America, that it will require many Ages to settle it fully; and till it is fully settled, Labour will never be cheap here, where no Man continues long a Labourer for others, but gets a Plantation of his own, no Man continues long a journeyman to a Trade, but goes among those new Settlers and sets up shop for himself.” And as he argued in 1784, just after the Treaty of Paris was signed: “According to these Opinions of the Americans, one of them would think himself more oblig’d to a Genealogist, who could prove for him that his Ancestors & Relations for ten Generations had been Ploughmen, Smiths, Carpenters, Turners, Weavers, Tanners, or even Shoemakers, & consequently that they were useful Members of Society; than if he could only prove that they were Gentlemen, doing nothing of value, but living idly on the Labour of others.”
They lived in a country where land was cheap, with vast forests not likely to be occupied anytime soon. That made birth a poor commodity to carry across the Pond: “People do not enquire concerning a Stranger, What IS he? but What can he DO?”
Jefferson, one of the 10 children of a Virginia surveyor and planter, and a fourth-generation descendant of an immigrant from Wales, was the most prolific, and the most pragmatic, about needing room to move. In his Summary View of the Rights of British America, written a couple of years before the Declaration was finished, he argued: “Our ancestors possessed a right which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies.” As President, he acted on that: In the spring of 1803, the Louisiana Purchase roughly doubled the size of the US. “The fertility of the country, its climate and extent, promise in due season important aids to our treasury, an ample provision for our posterity, & a wide-spread field for the blessings of freedom and equal laws.” In the spring of 1804, he sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on an expedition across the Continental Divide to survey the Pacific Northwest:
“The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri River, and such principal streams of it, as, by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregan, Colrado, or any other river, may offer the most direct and practicable water-communication across the continent, for the purposes of commerce.”
As Jefferson had laid out in his First Inaugural Address, set apart by a wide ocean from the havoc of the lands of their ancestors, with room enough for their descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation, under a wise and frugal government, Americans should have equal rights to the fruits of their own hard work. “What more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people?”
In their great book on the Superorganism, the eminent entomologists Bert Hölldobler and Ed Wilson summed up the difference between social and solitary ants:
“In the most general terms, social insects control the center of the land environment, while solitary insects predominate in the margins. Where social insects take territorial possession of the larger and more enduring spaces of the vegetation and ground, the solitary forms occupy the peripheral twigs, leaf surfaces, mudflats, and wet or very dry and crumbling portions of dead wood. In short, solitary forms tend to prevail over social insects only in the more remote and transient of living spaces.”
Most of those colonies are monarchies, built and defended by sterile castes with no way out.
So, as it turns out, are snapping shrimp trapped on coral reefs, and naked mole-rats stuck under the East African desert.
And so, to an unsettling extent, were ancient civilizations from Egypt to India to China to Iran to Iraq.
Happy Independence Day!
And may we always be free to vote with our feet.