The USA At 250. Great. Imperfect. Redemptive.

In April of 2010 an undated photo of two slave children was found at a moving sale in Charlotte, North Carolina, accompanied by a document detailing the 1854 purchase of “John” for $1,150. John is presumably one of the children. (The photo was sold to a collector for $30,000). Although debates over its authenticity remain, what the photo represents was all too real. The two forlorn children in this image stare back at us through the chasm of time. They are the ghosts of an ugly national past…the victims of a monstrous injustice that would take the violent deaths of 700,000 Americans to rectify.
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Still, as we celebrate the 250th year of American independence, I am struck by the breathtakingly steep arc of moral ascendancy we have seen in this great country since the blood-lettings that began at Lexington & Concord through eight long years until its culmination at Yorktown won for us our rightful place among nations. That we have evolved from a country in which African-Americans were once kept as slaves literally in chains and shackles to one that elects a man of African descent to the highest and most powerful office in the land speaks volumes about who we are as a people.
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There will be those on the fringe who will predictably use the Independence Day holiday to highlight the apparent hypocrisy of the Declaration we celebrate. They will mock the document of a slave nation drafted by a slave owner that had the brazenness to announce to the world our vision of a better country founded on the proposition that “all men are created equal.”

Undated slave children photo…though some doubt its authenticity, the history it conveys was quite real.

But these embittered cynics will miss the point.
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The American experiment had to start somewhere. And without that incredibly courageous initial push of the flywheel, the great events that followed which over time would lead to the emancipation of millions from slavery, not just on this continent but throughout the globe where our American presence has been felt, may never have happened. In the late eighteenth century, where tsars and kings ruled Europe, shoguns and emperors the Far East, and slavery was universally practiced across the planet by all races and cultures, our upending of the regal order in favor of popular sovereignty was stunning in its audacity—and quite dangerous to the despots and lords who ruled the world.
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Ours was not an uprising of the lows against the highs as was seen in bloody France in the 1790s, but rather it was initiated by the elites of colonial society. Unique in the annals of history, the American Revolution that broke our allegiance to the British Crown was one prosecuted by learned, wealthy men who certainly had the most to lose should their treason be crushed. Indeed, many of these gentlemen revolutionaries would ultimately suffer privation and ruin, and some even death, in the mayhem of a long, drawn-out war even though a final victory was won.

A revolution led by great minds and true patriots: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson review a document that would change the world for centuries thereafter.

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At its heart, the American Revolution was a movement to advance an idea that our basic human rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness originate from a higher power than ourselves: Divine Providence. And since they are God-given, governments are constructed by the people to protect these rights. Thus it is the prerogative, even duty, of free citizens to throw off the yoke of any oppressive regime that seeks to deny us these rights. That governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed is the essence of the classical American mindset and seems self-evident. It is almost impossible for us to imagine how very radical this notion was at the time.
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And so our nation’s inception was as celestial as it was commercial—and that distinctive enlightened quality has been the source of strength behind its durability through many trials and tests over the past two-and-a-half centuries. It also has been the key to our development as a people who can identify an injustice as inconsistent with our founding ideals and rectify it—violently if need be.
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As the haunting photograph of the two slave children drives home to us, the Revolution of 1776 was incomplete and fatally flawed in that equality in their day only applied to whites. For the four million blacks living in slavery in the United States before the Thirteenth Amendment, it was “all midnight forever.” As an ex-slave once reflected, her elderly voice pressed on a crackly vinyl recording: “You know what I’d do if I ever had to be a slave again? I’d take a gun and end it. ‘Cause you ain’t nothin’ but a dog.”
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But that was then. This nation has rolled over and been remade many times since the dark days of the Atlantic slave trade. As any visitor to Gettysburg will attest, many Americans paid the ultimate price to wash away our original sin. Today, we citizens of the United States, all 340 million of us, can look back with pride at our Independence Day which relays the story of a new birth of dignity for mankind and the first courageous step taken in the long road to freedom on behalf of generations to come.

A harvast of death. Eighty-seven years to the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, these Union soldiers gave the ultimate sacrifice to advance the cause of freedom it announced to the world…and wash away the stain of slavery that impeded us from fulfilling our ideals.

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I wish more of my countrymen and women could understand just how positive a force the signers of the Declaration of Independence unleashed upon the world. Today, where we must endure an almost fetishized rejection of our core Western values in favor of cultural relativism nonsense at home—not to mention a rabid anti-Americanism abroad—it sometimes takes an outsider to see us as I wish more of us would view ourselves.
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Former British P.M Tony Blair once astutely observed:
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“I am not surprised by anti-Americanism; but it is a foolish indulgence. For all their faults—and all nations have them—the US are a force for good; they have liberal and democratic traditions of which any nation can be proud. I sometimes think it is a good rule of thumb to ask of a country: are people trying to get into it or out of it? It’s not a bad guide for what sort of country it is.”
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In 1776 the US population was less than three million. Today it is over one hundred times that. That says much for the nation the brave delegates to the Second Continental Congress created on our behalf. And even for those not fortunate enough to reside here, hundreds of millions live in liberty in foreign lands as direct beneficiaries of the ideals that our Founding Fathers so confidently and defiantly announced to the world as moral truths…even while a massive armada of 400 British warships ferrying the largest expeditionary force yet sent overseas by the Crown was anchored off Staten Island. While these brave men committed the crime of treason—for which hanging would have been merciful considering the usual punishments inflicted upon traitors—some 31,000 of His Majesty’s soldiers were being offloaded and made ready to crush their impertinent rebellion of citizen-soldiers led by a Virginia planter.
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While the delegates in Independence Hall committed treason, barely eighty miles away a British invasion flotilla of 400 ships was unloading a combined 31,000 British and Hessian troops hell-bent on crushing their impudent rebellion and bringing the Crown’s justice down upon the usurpers.

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We who dwell in this shining city on a hill on this day in 2026 are the beneficent custodians of the principles handed down to us by extraordinary people from many walks of life and successful in their fields of endeavor in the New World. These were educated and farsighted individuals who at the right place and right time came together to overcome their personal fears and sectional differences to launch a revolution of ideas that continues to inspire the world two and a half centuries after the fact: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and many others whose names are lesser known but no less deserving of our gratitude. Indeed, as Adams wrote to Abigail after the break was made:
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”I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
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“You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. -- I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. -- Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction.”
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For our parts, we are tasked with carrying a reminder, as seen through the eyes of those two slave children who have long since passed into history of what can still happen to our liberties should we abandon those founding principles that made us the great country we are today.
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HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!
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Brad is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, The Daily Wire, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three books. His latest book, A War For Half The World: Why the Real Battle for the Future was Fought in the Pacific, will be released in February 2027.

Conintental Army soldiers try in vain to hold back the British advance at the Battle of Long Island (aka Battle of Brooklyn) in August 1776, just one month after declaring independence. It would be a long and bloody road to national sovereignty. By war’s end some 25,000 Americans would die…the equivalent 2.8 million American dead today.