[To follow
up Monday’s Patriot’s Day post, I’m going to steal my title from Glenn Greenwald’s great book and
briefly highlight five genuinely and impressively patriotic past Americans, one
per post-contact century. Please nominate your own choices to contribute to a
collectively patriotic weekend post!]
Today’s
genuinely patriotic American is Quock
Walker.
I wrote a
lot about the Revolutionary period’s African
American slave petitions for freedom, of which Quock Walker’s is one of the most famous, in the
blog post linked at his name above, and won’t repeat all those specifics, or my
sense of why those petitions embody the best of what the Revolution and its
ideas and ideals meant and have continued to mean in American culture and
identity, here.
But I will
take things one step further, and ask this: what if we thought of Walker, and
his fellow petitioners, as among the Founding Fathers (and Mothers)? After all,
the Declaration
and Constitution were (as we’ve long acknowledged) based on existing ideas and
writings, given new American form. And that’s exactly what Walker and his
peers and supporters did with their petitions, taking the Declaration’s and
Revolution’s language and ideas and bringing them to powerful, eloquent,
vitally American life.
Walker’s case
is credited with helping end slavery in Massachusetts (a complicated question
as they always are, but it contributed for sure). Using the Declaration to end
part of the
national tragedy with which it was intertwined? That’d
be plenty patriotic enough on its own terms. But if we go bigger, if we see
Walker and his peers as true Founders, among the most genuinely and
impressively Revolutionary Americans, then our whole legacy of patriotism has a
different, and even more inspiring, point of origin. Works for me.
Next
nominee tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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