250

The America of 1776 was losing badly. Their perseverance is worth celebrating.

Americans mark our 250th anniversary this weekend. I’ll be honest: I love this country deeply, but the joy I want for this moment has been hard to muster.

This was supposed to be a milestone. A moment of pride and revival. Of unity, and shared commitment to liberty, justice, and equality for all. A victorious celebration of the American experiment. Instead it arrives amid deep division, economic strain, and broken trust in our leaders.

At a moment when a would-be king enriches himself and his family at our expense, imposes crushing tariffs without our consent, and treats our God-given rights as things he can revoke on a whim, it’s easy to feel we haven’t come very far in two and a half centuries.

You can see that mood in our own capital. The state fair meant to mark America’s birthday has flopped. The national mall sits half empty, the sets already crumbling. Performers walked away from what became a partisan, Trumpian spectacle. A country that can’t quite bring itself to celebrate, made plain for all to see.

But I’ve been sitting with something that changed how I see this anniversary.

Last month I listened to David McCullough’s 1776. As the master historian narrated the story of America’s genesis, I was struck by how dire that year truly was. While we often celebrate the signatures in Philadelphia, we forget how quickly it all nearly came to an end.

As a mad king made war on his own colonies, Britain sent the largest force it had ever deployed abroad. They dominated the battlefield, and the British spent 1776 winning. Our forces spent it in retreat, beaten badly at Long Island and driven out of New York, pushed to the brink of collapse, unsure they would last the winter.

“The year 1776, celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too, they would never forget.”

They were losing badly. But McCullough makes clear: “Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.”

1776 was not a year of independence won, but of perseverance through failure.

That is the American story, and it has run from our founding to this day. Our darkest chapters have always given way to our finest but only when ordinary people kept faith in our ideals, especially when the hour was darkest.

Our founders could never have imagined how far their example of perseverance would carry us.

• A country that would tear itself apart over slavery and emerge with a promise that no American could ever own another.

• Women who marched and were jailed until the vote was theirs.

• A generation that crossed an ocean to defeat fascism, then held the line through a long Cold War until freedom won out.

• A people who would one day freely choose a Black man to lead them.

None of it came easy. Every step forward was won by those who refused to accept America as it was, because they could see what it might yet become.

I see that same faith today. In everyone who still believes a more perfect union is worth the trouble of organizing, of marching, of showing up. In friends and neighbors here in the Hudson Valley, putting their names on ballots for the first time, proving once again this vital region can shape the future of our nation. They are not so different from the farmers and shopkeepers who followed Washington across the Delaware on Christmas as a last-ditch, desperate gamble to change the nation’s fortune before that fateful year ran out.

Our founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the idea of America: to the rights of human equality rooted in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; to the right to self-governance; to the right to begin again. That pledge is ours to carry forward, but only if we give it everything they did.

So this is the call, 250 years on. Refuse despair. Show up. Organize. Run. Vote. Stand with your neighbor when their freedoms are threatened, because one day yours may be too.

We remember 1776 as the year America began. Remember, too, that it began by refusing to quit and by holding firm to our ideals as the path to a more perfect union. Let us be worthy of that perseverance for the next 250.