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There is a habit of mind that built this country: the willingness to risk everything for what you will not live to see. That is the central lesson of the founding. The founders called it virtue, and they staked their lives on it — pledging their sacred honor with a firm reliance on divine Providence. Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of men put their names to a declaration that could have been their death warrant, because they believed people could govern themselves and that no king held a birthright to rule them.
Arrayed against the colonies stood the greatest empire on earth — a professional army of more than 50,000 British regulars and hired Hessians, hundreds of cannons, and the most powerful navy in the world. Against it: a ragged Continental Army of farmers and tradesmen, no more than ten to fifteen thousand men, poorly trained, with a fraction of the artillery and no fleet to meet the Royal Navy. That they might defeat this machine was, by any measure, absurd. Yet Washington — never more so than the night he crossed the ice-choked Delaware to strike at Trenton — proved the point: not numbers, but genius and indomitable will, carried the day.
We remember Washington. We should also remember those beside him, all but forgotten. Among them was Billy Lee, an enslaved Black man who was far more than a valet. He rode with Washington into the thick of battle and became one of his most trusted confidants, at his side through every campaign of the war, from the crossing of the Delaware to Yorktown.
AMERICA’S NEXT 250 YEARS DEPEND ON PASSING FAITH AND FREEDOM TO OUR CHILDREN
Washington was himself a slaveholder; yet, alone among our founding presidents, he freed the people he enslaved in his will — freeing Lee at once, with a lifetime pension. Though free to leave, Lee chose to live out his days at Mount Vernon, a measure of how close the two men had become. That the first President’s closest companion was a man he had once enslaved is one of the most extraordinary truths of our founding, and it survives as barely a footnote in our textbooks.
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This nation was born of extraordinary courage, and like everything built by human hands, it has been imperfect. But it has never stopped striving. At Gettysburg, with the country nearly torn in two over the horror of slavery, Lincoln called a bloodied nation back to its original proposition — that all men are created equal — and to the work of living up to it. The republic has weathered far darker hours than these and endured. With Washington and Lincoln as our models, we march forward toward greater progress, equality, and the pursuit of happiness for all.
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So, this Fourth of July, whatever your party or ancestry, remember those who risked everything so that we might govern ourselves rather than be ruled by kings. Remember what it cost. Resolve to be worthy of the inheritance — its flaws, its greatness, and the unfinished work it leaves us. That is the inheritance we write together, a father and his son, and it passes from one generation to the next.
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Joseph Bennett is a Marine Corps veteran, and Principal at Fabius Group, a strategic advisory firm in the defense sector. He lives in Washington DC and is a graduate of Princeton University.
