“We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness…” ~Jefferson’s Original Draft of the Declaration
“All honor to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” ~Abraham Lincoln, letter to Henry L. Pierce and others, 1859
The ethicist Luke Bretherton describes our moment as a kind of hot tub. In most eras of political conflict, one side or the other feels existentially threatened — its world, its way of life, its very survival on the line. What is strange about now is that both sides feel that way at once. Everyone is in the water, and everyone is sure the temperature is being raised on them.[1] Amidst that scalding, anxious commons the Declaration of Independence arrives at 250, and lands awkwardly. A nation that cannot agree on whether it is being saved or destroyed is not obviously in a position to throw any sort of party for its founding. I’ve been thinking about this as I was considering what to write for my last Anxious Bench post before the Semiquincentennial.
I want to suggest a posture for the occasion, and I want to find it where I have spent most of a decade looking: among the people who had the least reason to celebrate the founding and refused, all the same, to surrender it. I want to intertwine two stories here. The first is about a document whose words outran the men who wrote them, and the readers who seized those words and meant them. The second reflects on a philosopher’s account of hope at the end of a world, and the Crow soldier who embodied it across rupture. Held together, they point past both the fireworks and the despair toward something more difficult and perhaps sturdier.
The document and its counter-readers
Throughout the Early Republic, Native nations and their evangelical allies did something that should strike us as strange. In the same decades that white Americans were sacralizing Washington and canonizing the founders, Indigenous thinkers appealed to that very founding—to the Revolution, to the Declaration, to the figure of Washington himself—turning its own symbols against the policies of the settler republic that claimed them.
Consider Hendrick Aupaumut, the Mahican sachem who had served as a captain in Washington’s Continental Army. Explaining in 1791 why he would undertake a dangerous peace mission for the new United States, he told the federal commissioner that he had no territory and no liberty to fight for, “for liberty I always possessed.” It is a small detonation. The Revolution, in Aupaumut’s telling, had not bestowed liberty on Indigenous peoples; it had encountered them as its prior possessors. The founding’s own language of natural right became, in his mouth, an indictment of the nation invoking it.[2]
The same move recurs across the coalition I write about. In an 1830 petition defending Cherokee rights in the face of Indian Removal, the citizens of Castine, Maine, did not merely cite the Declaration. “And believing that the performance of our solemn compacts, constitutionally made, is a duty paramount to every consideration of expediency, we may ‘appeal to the Supreme Judge of the world, for the rectitude of our intentions, when we solemnly declare,’ that the plighted faith of the nation shall be preserved inviolate, and may place ‘a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence,’ to preserve us from unhappy consequences.” The grammar is the argument. The Castine petitioners do not quote the Declaration about the Cherokee. They speak it as if signing it again, with the Cherokee cause as the new occasion of solemn declaration. White New Englanders in February 1831 stand in the rhetorical posture of Jefferson and the Continental Congress and apply that posture to their own government as the new tyranny against which a “firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence” must be placed.[3]
And in 1836, in Boston, the Pequot minister William Apess delivered his “Eulogy on King Philip.” Apess stages Metacom as the elder figure to whom Washington must be compared—Philip as “the greatest man that was ever in America”—and finds the comparison unflattering to Washington. The original American founding, in the Eulogy, is not 1776 but 1620. The Pilgrim landing at Plymouth is the doleful tragedy that inaugurates American history, and 1776 is the moment when that tragedy could have been repented of and was not.[4]
These were not naïve patriots, and they were not cynics. They performed a cross-grained reading of the founding, holding it to its own stated terms. This reading rested on a claim about the document itself, the very claim Lincoln would make decades later in this piece’s epigraph. The Declaration’s words outran the intentions of the men who wrote them. “All men are created equal” meant, in 1776, free men of property, and everyone knew it. But the sentence did not say that. Lincoln saw what Jefferson had done, perhaps without fully meaning to: created a rebuke (even to himself) timed unintentionally to detonate in every coming day. The distance between what the sentence said and what its authors meant became a standing invitation to everyone it was never meant to include.
The historian Vincent Brown, near the end of Ken Burns’s recent documentary on the Revolution, names this move in the present tense. The principle that government rests on the consent of the governed, he argues, was radical then and remains radical now; and as for the claim that all are created equal — Jefferson, a slaveholder, plainly did not take it seriously. “But I do.”[5] Two words, laying claim to a promise its author never meant to keep. That is precisely what Aupaumut and Apess and the Cherokee memorialists were doing a century and a half before him, and what Lincoln did between them: not inheriting the founders’ meaning but seizing the founders’ words and meaning them for themselves.
Radical hope and the war chief
The counter-readers were doing something with a text. To see the full weight of it, set it beside a devastation that struck not a document but a world. The philosopher Jonathan Lear builds his book Radical Hope around a single sentence from the Crow chief Plenty Coups, spoken near the end of his life: “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”[6]
Lear refuses to read those last four words as mere depression. He takes them literally. When the Crow were confined to a reservation where neither hunting nor war was possible, it was not simply that certain actions were forbidden. It was that the actions themselves had ceased to make sense—the way ordering dinner would lose its meaning in a world where restaurants, and the very word “ordering,” had vanished. That is the difference between a de facto impossibility and a radical one: the collapse not of an option but of the concepts that made any option meaningful. It was the threat Removal carried for the nations I study, too—not only the theft of land but the unmaking of a world in which their categories could still operate.
What Plenty Coups found on the far side of that collapse is what Lear calls radical hope: a hope directed toward a future good the hopeful cannot yet conceive, a goodness for which one does not yet possess the concepts. He counseled cooperation with the United States not from love or trust but because it was the only course that “might save our beautiful country for us,” and he sent young Crow to the universities on the same logic—with the white man’s knowledge he can oppress us, and only by learning it can we keep him from oppressing us again. This is hope with its eyes open, and it survived in a way Plenty Coups himself probably could not have guessed.[7]
Consider Joe Medicine Crow. Born in 1913 and raised in the warrior tradition on the Crow reservation—coming of age while Plenty Coups still served as principal chief—he was a living link to the last generation that remembered the buffalo. His grandfathers and the old men of the tribe raised him on the discipline of warriors who could no longer be warriors: they bathed him in icy rivers, drilled him in endurance, and told him the stories of his ancestors. To become a war chief in the old way, a Crow man had to accomplish four deeds: lead a successful war party, take an enemy’s weapon, steal an enemy’s horse, and touch a living enemy and come away unharmed (this last was to “count coup”). By the twentieth century no Crow had earned the title in recent memory; the conditions that gave the deeds their meaning had vanished with the buffalo, exactly as Plenty Coups had said.
Then Medicine Crow went to Europe as a soldier with the U.S. Army’s 103rd Infantry Division, and without setting out to do it, he completed all four. He led a war party. He crept into a German encampment at night and stampeded off some fifty horses, singing a Crow war song as he rode away under fire. And in an alley in a French village he came face to face with an enemy soldier, knocked the rifle from the man’s hands—and, having him at his mercy, let him live. He had touched a living enemy and walked away. He did not realize what he had done until he came home and told the elders, the same men who had trained him, who heard the four deeds in his account and recognized that he had become, in the middle of the twentieth century, a war chief of the Crow Nation.
This is radical hope made flesh, and it rhymes with the counter-reading of the Declaration — though it is not the same act, and the difference is worth holding onto. The counter-readers seized words that were never meant for them and turned a founding language against the nation that spoke it; theirs was an inheritance claimed against the will of those who left it. Medicine Crow did something closer to the opposite. He received what had always been his and carried it forward when the world that gave it meaning was gone — fidelity, not expropriation. And yet the two rhyme, because Plenty Coups could not have pictured a battlefield in France, an enemy in field-grey, or a coup counted in the wreckage of the Third Reich. That is the whole point. The concept survived the death of the world that first gave it meaning and reappeared in a form none of its mourners could have specified — carried across the rupture not by a document but by relationship, handed from elders to a boy who would reactivate it on ground they could never have imagined. Where Vincent Brown reactivates a sentence, Joe Medicine Crow reactivates a deed; the one lays hold of an inheritance written to exclude him, the other of one whose world had ended. Both are present-tense claims on something that should, by every reasonable measure, have been closed to them.
A Declaration worth resurrecting
So here are the two stories; one is a seizure and the other an inheritance, one turns a document against its authors and the other keeps faith with the dead — but they rhyme. A text whose words outran its authors, claimed by the very people it was written to exclude. A way of life whose central concept outran the world that birthed it, carried forward by an heir across the abyss. What rhymes is the shape of the thing: in both, a meaning that should have died with its origin instead outlived it and came back wearing a face nobody could have drawn in advance.
The counter-reading never stopped. Frederick Douglass asked in 1852 what the Fourth of July could mean to the slave, and then laid claim to it anyway. Chief Joseph carried the Declaration’s language into the pages of the North American Review. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the Mall in 1963 and called the founding promises a check returned for insufficient funds—and demanded payment all the same. Each seized a memory at a moment of danger. And the form of hope keeps finding new bodies: years later, in response to the first exhibition at Chicago’s Field Museum curated by a Crow woman, Nina Sanders, a tribal elder told her at the closing ceremony that she had counted coups that day. She had. The deed Removal was supposed to have ended for good had simply found another field.[8]
Which is why I want at this anniversary neither to discuss restoration nor amendment but resurrection—a word that carries, for those of us formed in the church, its whole freight. Resuscitation returns the same body unchanged. Resurrection returns the same body transfigured: continuous with what died and yet unrecognizable, its shape impossible to specify before it arrives. The Declaration that a teetering, hot-tub world needs is not the 1776 document scrubbed to an imagined purity, nor the 1776 document tinkered with at the margins. It is a Declaration resurrected — roomier, more faithful to the embalmed truth Lincoln saw in it than its authors ever managed to be, with space for the radical hopes of people they never imagined and a chaos unlike any they had to face. We cannot say now what it will look like. That is not the weakness of the hope. It is the hope.
Plenty Coups said that after the buffalo went away, nothing happened. He was telling the truth about a world that had ended—and he was wrong about the one that came after, because his own steadfastness, and his elders’ refusal to let the old words die, made it possible for a boy to count coup in France and a curator to count coup in Chicago. That is faith in the form the letter to the Hebrews names it: the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. To celebrate this turbid anniversary is not to pretend the founding was clean, or that the water is not rising. It is to stand in the scalding commons and insist, against the evidence and with a ragamuffin coalition of the unexpected, that after all this something still can happen. That is perhaps a birthday worth keeping.
[1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/6mLTltIedx1nv8ptQOCAsH?si=Lu6Ljb9cRjO8ij99FQP-BA
[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/30043308
[5] https://newlinesmag.com/review/a-remarkable-retelling-of-an-improbable-revolt/
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