We need to rethink who our founders are

For reasons I have neither taken the time nor had the inclination to figure out, we date our nation’s founding not to the signing of our Constitution on September 17, 1787, but to the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, which makes this country 247 years old today, so happy birthday, United States of America.  In the immortal words of the Grateful Dead, what a long strange trip it’s been.

A friend with whom I served in the army wrote me this morning to remark on the fact that he and I have been around for nearly a third of our nation’s history, arrived at by dividing our ages by the nation’s, yielding, in our case, 30 percent.  That’s a good size chunk of our history to have witnessed.  I remember the country’s 200^th birthday, on this date in 1976, when a bunch of us gathered at a friend’s apartment in the Westbeth Artists’ Apartments on West Street in Manhattan overlooking the Hudson to watch the parade of the Tall Ships, as they moved in stately procession up and down the river with the city’s firefighting tugs spraying huge plumes of water into the air amongst them. 

July Fourth has a special resonance in my family because it is not only the date of the signing of the Declaration, written by one of our ancestors, but his birthday and the anniversary of his death, too.  One thing you can say about Thomas Jefferson, he was fond of this date on the calendar and certainly made the most of it.  I remember visiting his home, Monticello, as a boy on July Fourth with other descendants to lay flowers on his grave in the graveyard.  Here’s a photo of me and my brother Frank just after we had carried a wreath and laid it on his grave at the family gathering in 1952, attired, as was the custom with little boys at the time, in brown leather lace-up shoes and shorts and suit jackets with open-collared shirts.

It didn’t occur to me until some 45 years later that Monticello was anything other than the home of Thomas Jefferson.  But Monticello was also the home of his two families, one with his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, who had two daughters, one of whom I am descended from, and the other with his slave, Sally Hemings, who had six children with Jefferson whose births (although not paternity) were recorded in his records.  Monticello was also home to some 600 other slaves who worked there during Jefferson’s lifetime.

And right here we get into the matter of who we should consider as founders of this nation.  History taught us about only the Founding Fathers who are said to have birthed this country with their signatures on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  But what of our founding mothers?  Jefferson and the others didn’t sign those documents in a vacuum under a glass dome, sealed off from the rest of humanity.  They had wives, and children, and in the cases of many of them, including the Declaration’s author, enslaved people, all of whom made the “founders” lives possible.  Can you imagine yourself without your loved ones, wife or husband or partner, brothers and sisters, children?  I can’t.  Can you imagine yourself without those who educated you?  I can’t.  Can you imagine yourself without the books you read which helped to form your ideas and how you see the world and your place in it?  I can’t.

In the case of Mr. Jefferson, there would be no Monticello without the slaves who built it, felling every tree, sawing every board, forging every nail, hand-crafting and laying every brick, tilling its soil, cutting wood for its cooking fires and fireplaces to keep the place warm in winter, carrying water, growing vegetables for his dinner in his famous gardens, located a few feet away from the slave quarters along Mulberry Row, just down the hill from the house.  Slaves dug the graves where Jefferson buried his best friend, Dabney Carr, for whom he created the Monticello graveyard, and his five white children who died in childbirth, and his wife Martha, and after them his many descendants, among whom are my great grandmother and grandfather, and my father and mother, and my great aunts and uncles and my brother, Frank, who is buried maybe 100 feet away from where he stood atop Jefferson’s grave in the photo.  Legend has it that Sally Hemings is buried in the Monticello graveyard, too, in an unmarked grave.  Her headstone, a rock with her name engraved on its bottom, was overturned accidentally by gardeners mowing the graveyard in the 1950’s.  That fact and the rock was promptly buried, but not before a notation was made in a record kept of the graveyard’s landscaping that was uncovered in the early 2000’s during a review of records at Monticello.

So, who would be our Founding Mother, if we’re to have such a thing?  Martha Wayles Jefferson, who gave Jefferson two children, or her half-sister Sally Hemings, who gave him four who survived childbirth, and whom he freed in his will, along with Sally’s brothers?  Jefferson freed no slaves other than those with the last name Hemings.  What does that tell us?

And what of the slave women who worked Jefferson’s fields and served his meals and made his bed and cleaned his clothes and gave birth to slave children, who upon their births, became part of his estate, his wealth, the things of value he owned along with his land and his farm animals and his houses, including his summer house, Poplar Forest, also built by slaves?

It’s not just Thomas Jefferson who benefitted from the labor of slaves.  This country arguably would not have been founded without the slaves owned by landed gentry in the southern states.  At the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, there were twice as many slaves in Virginia and South Carolina than there were white people.  What does that tell you about who did what in those states, who built those states and fed their populations and made life possible there?  Every plantation house in the South was built by slaves, not just Monticello.  Every state capitol, including the Capitol in Washington D.C. and the White House, was built by slaves.  Every grave that was dug was dug by slaves.  Every road was built by slaves.  When Jefferson traveled back and forth from Monticello to Washington D.C. while he was president, he rode his horse or rode in a buggy on roads built by slaves. 

You see where I’m going with this:  who founded a country, a good portion of which would have starved without slaves?  Who founded a country whose government met in and was run in buildings built by slaves, not only in the nation’s capital, but in the capitals of nearly half its states? 

You can design a house, or a government, but unless you have someone to lay its foundation stones and make its bricks and cut and lay its limestone and put up its walls and build its roofs to keep its documents out of the rain – such as our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution -- what do you have?

We have Founding Fathers, all right, but we have Founding Mothers and Founding Educators and Founding Workers, and God help us, Founding Slaves, and all of them deserve celebrating and our thanks on this and every July Fourth.  We would not be here to argue amongst ourselves and to vote and to struggle to preserve our Democracy without them.