Our Sacred Honor: The Stories, Letters, Songs, Poems, Speeches, and Hymns that Gave Birth to Our Nation

"Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives."

JOHN ADAMS TO BENJAMIN RUSH, APRIL 18, 1808 As every American knows, the first part of the Declaration of Independence establishes the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nothing, it seems, could be more fundamental to Americans than the protection of these rights. We are all well aware of them, and these days not shy about asserting them. However, few Americans pay enough attention to the last line of the Declaration of Independence. There Jefferson wrote: "we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." These are not empty words; they are as important as the opening paragraphs of the Declaration. Rights are important. But just as we have a fair claim on our rights, so America's honor—our sacred honor—has a fair claim on us. The fifty-six men who signed the Declaration of Independence and the other leaders of the American Revolutionary War would either become glorious Founders of a new nation or they would swing from the gallows. As Benjamin Rush said, his fellow signers knew they were signing their own "death warrants."

Most of the signers of the Declaration as well as other Americans at the time suffered for their devotion to the cause of independence—many had to flee their homes; some lost their property and their fortunes, which they and their families never recovered. A few joined the Continental army. One of the sentiments that moved them to make these sacrifices was patriotism.

Patriotism means love of country, and it can call for great sacrifices and courage, perhaps even forthe sacrifice of one's own life. Most of us don't have as keen a sense of that now as did the Founders. Though the word patriotism, from the Latin pater for "father," implies a familial connection, love of country is in fact different from all other attachments. We have natural ties to our families, and sacrificing for loved ones is something each of us does every day. But sacrificing for our country requires a commitment to something more abstract and distant. It requires that we sacrifice our self-interest and private attachments for the sake of the common interest and public good for people we have never seen, for those who have gone before and for those who will come after us. And in America, what brings forth our patriotism—our greatest sacrifices—is our steadfast devotion to the ideals of freedom and equality. American patriotism, in short, is not based on tribe or family, but on principle, law, and liberty.

What makes the patriots of 1776 and 1787 so remarkable is that they were devoting themselves to something quite new—a new nation conceived in a new way and dedicated to a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. It was of course not easy, they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, to ignore the "ties of our common kindred"—their "British brethren." The bonds of "consanguinity" are strong, and most nations are held together by the ties of blood or common ethnicity alone. But these patriots had a new idea—a country tied together in loyalty to a principle. The universality of this principle caught fire and inspired a diverse group of men, women, Northerners, Southerners, even European nobility to make great sacrifices for the cause.

The founding was the product of "reflection" and "choice," as Alexander Hamilton would later put it. But it also took a long and grueling war to make independence a reality, a war led by the father of our country, George Washington. Our most prominent patriot, Washington once wrote that "when my country demands the sacrifice, personal ease must always be a secondary consideration." And he meant it and continued to serve his country despite his preference for private life. This chapter includes many accounts of Washington's unparalleled example of love of country and courage. It also includes accounts of some of our soldiers in action, such as Nathan Hale and Israel Putnam.

But other patriots, like James Madison, John Adams, or Thomas Jefferson, fought their battles with the pen, not the sword. These men, as has been said, were our Solon and Lycurgus—that is, our lawgivers. Madison himself saw the parallels—in Federalist 38 he wrote that the Constitution provides the possibility for "immortality, as Lycurgus gave to that of Sparta." They seized the opportunity to found a nation on a humane and just foundation. As John Adams put it in his Thoughts on Government:

You and I, my dear friend, have been sent into life at a time when the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live. How few of the human race have ever enjoyed an opportunity of making an election of government, more than of air, soil, or climate, for themselves or their children! When, before the present epocha, had three millions of people full power and a fair opportunity to form and establish the wisest and happiest government that human wisdom can contrive?

It must be said that the patriots of 1776 and 1787 were not acting completely out of a sense of disinterestedness. Their love of country, as the late historian Douglass Adair has shown, was buttressed, among other things, by what some may say is a more selfish passion—the love of fame and glory. This passion for fame or glory, in addition to their love of country, motivated the exertions of our patriots. In the Federalist 72 Hamilton wrote that "the love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds...prompt[s] a man to plan and undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit." These men acted with their eyes toward posterity, concerned with how they would be remembered and immortalized. These concerns and passions may have been selfish in origin, but they elevated and strengthened the Founders' sense of public duty and gave rise to the "noblest" actions as well. Their love of glory stirred great, not petty, ambitions—ambitions which shaped their character and directed them to the political and national stage.

Adams endured long separations from his wife and family to participate in the Second Continental Congress, where he successfully urged his fellow delegates to adopt the resolution for independence. In Congress, Adams worked fifteen-hour days; as he told Mercy Warren, his schedule was to work "from seven to ten in the morning in the committee; from ten to four in Congress, and from six to ten again in committee." Like Adams, Thomas Jefferson left behind his beloved wife, who was often in frail health, to serve in Congress, where he wrote the Declaration of Independence, the "sheet anchor" of our liberties as Lincoln would later put it. Adams and Jefferson were family men—Jefferson was practically a newlywed when he served in Congress—yet they balanced their love of the private with a noble love of the res publica—" public things." James Madison worked day and night to restructure America's political institutions on a more lasting foundation than the republics of old. Madison later confided to a friend that his efforts at the Constitutional Convention "nearly killed me."

Abigail Adams noted the particularly difficult requirements patriotism exacted from women. And she observed that the sacrifices of women are no less than the most heroic of men. She was a woman of courage, who held down a farm by herself and took care of four children through the roar of nearby gunfire and a plague of dysentery.

Times of war and crisis reveal the character of patriotism in high relief. But patriotism is an everyday virtue as well—a virtue that cannot be neglected or taken for granted. It requires education; it must be taught; and it must be, as Washington once said, supplemented by our self interest. How is it that sacrifice becomes mixed with self-interest? According to Washington, once we appreciate how our own well-being, prosperity, and liberties are all the products of living in this country, as opposed to any other, we will become natural patriots. Our defense of principle becomes a defense of hearth and home.

Let me close with the reflections of Washington to Jefferson, a decade after American independence was declared, recalling the veterans of 1776 who had recently died: "Thus some of the pillars of the revolution fall. Others are mouldering by insensible degrees. May our Country never want props to support the glorious fabrick!" That is not a bad fate for each of us to contemplate—to spend at least a little of our lives as a "prop" for the greatest country the world has ever seen.

Copyright © 1997 by William J. Bennett