As our nation marks this year the two hundred and fifty years of its founding ideals — I want to follow a current with you. This isn’t just a story about one man. It’s about what America has always asked of its people. And what its people have always been willing to give.
The Best of Times, The Worst of Times
Charles Dickens once opened a novel with these words: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” He was writing about Revolutionary France. But he could just as easily have been writing about America. By the mid-1700s, it was extraordinary. The eastern seaboard had been transformed from a brutal wilderness into a thriving civilization. The settlers who had arrived at Jamestown in 1607 with little more than muskets and hope had, within a few generations, built great cities, founded universities, established newspapers, and created trade routes connecting the New World to the old. Harvard College had been founded over a century earlier. The printing press was spreading ideas faster than any king could contain them. Literacy was rising. Possibility was in the air.
On the other hand — this same civilization had been built on conquest, on the forced labor of enslaved men and women, and on the displacement of indigenous peoples who had called this land home for millennia. The colonists remained subjects of a distant king who taxed them without their consent. The freedoms people dreamed of were not yet guaranteed to all. The gap between what America claimed to believe and what America actually practiced was wide and painful. The best of times. The worst of times. But here is what I want you to hold onto: it was precisely that tension — between what America was and what it could be — that lit a fire in young people like my famous ancestor Captain Jacob Milligan. He was one who fought the British at Sullivan’s Island in SC.
They were not naive. They saw the contradictions clearly. But they believed, with everything in them, that something better was worth building. Worth fighting for. Worth dying for. That belief didn’t spring from nowhere. It came from a current of thought that had been building for over two thousand years.
The Stream That Became a River
Historian John Franklin Jameson once described the American Revolution as a stream — one that, over time, outran its banks and grew into something bigger, broader, and faster than anyone had anticipated or planned. I think that’s exactly right. Because America’s founding was not a single dramatic moment. It wasn’t just one night in April 1775, or one document signed on a hot July afternoon in Philadelphia. It was a current of ideas gathering force across generations — building and building until it could no longer be held back. That stream begins more than two thousand years ago, with a Greek philosopher named Aristotle. Aristotle taught something he called natural law — the idea that human beings are born with certain instincts about justice and community and right and wrong that exist independent of any king’s decree or any court’s ruling. These instincts, he argued, are what make civilization possible in the first place.
Thomas Jefferson had read his Aristotle. And when he sat down to write the Declaration of Independence, he reached into that two-thousand-year stream and drew from it the words that changed the world: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Not complicated. Not abstract. Just the distillation of two millennia of human wisdom, written in plain English, for a new nation brave enough to build itself on that foundation. And two hundred and fifty years later, we are still standing on it.
Ideas Worth Dying For
But let me ask you something. Words on parchment don’t build nations. Philosophies in books don’t secure freedom. Someone has to be willing to put their body between those ideas and the forces that would destroy them. Someone has to be willing to die. Think about what it actually meant to sign the Declaration of Independence. These were not anonymous men shouting from the back of a crowd. These were men of standing — merchants, lawyers, doctors — who put their names on a document that the most powerful military force in the world considered an act of treason. They knew exactly what they were risking. Some lost their fortunes. Some lost their homes. Some lost their families. Some lost their lives. And they signed it anyway. Why? Because they had been formed by the same current that ran through young Jacob Milligan’s world. They had argued about natural law in coffeehouses and taverns from Philadelphia to Boston. They had come to believe — bone-deep, blood-deep — that the ideas of liberty, of consent, of human dignity, were not privileges for the lucky few. They were the birthright of every human soul. And they were worth dying for.
This is what our 250th Anniversary asks us to remember. We do not come here simply to grieve, though grief is right and good. We do not come simply to wave flags, though flags deserve to be waved. We come to reckon — honestly and humbly — with what the men and women we honor believed deeply enough to lay down their lives for. We come to look at the inheritance they purchased for us, at a cost we can never fully repay, and ask ourselves whether we are worthy of it. Every name on every memorial in this country represents a person who stood in that stream and said: it will not stop here. Not on my watch. Jacob Milligan understood that. And when his moment came, he proved it.
Writer James Truslow Adams, author of the book – THE EPIC OF AMERICA – gave us the phrase “the American Dream.” He described it as a dream of a life “better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” Jacob Milligan was that dream made flesh. Born the son of a Scottish immigrant doctor in a New World city, educated in a school that put the ancient philosophers – Aristotle and Plato in his hands, and shaped by a community of free people daring to build something the world had never seen — he chose, when the moment came, to defend it.
That is the American story. It has never been about the powerful. It has always been about the ordinary person who does something extraordinary when history taps them on the shoulder and says: it’s time. The 4th of July is all about that. Our sons and daughters putting on the uniform of this great country and setting aside their own personal dreams to stand beside their brothers and sisters and the STARS AND STRIPES because of a great dream by great men 250 years ago.
History is tapping again. But we’ll come back to that.
250 Years of the Same Current
Here is what takes my breath away about this particular moment in our nation’s history. Two hundred and fifty years have passed since Jefferson wrote those words. And in all that time, the stream has never stopped flowing. It flowed through the fields of Gettysburg, where young men in blue and gray — many of them barely old enough to shave — died in the heat and mud to determine whether a nation conceived in liberty could truly mean liberty for all. It flowed through the trenches of the Argonne Forest, where American soldiers fought in a war they had not started because they believed that freedom was not divisible — that what happened to people in distant countries eventually came home. It flowed through the beaches of Normandy, where on a single morning in June 1944, thousands of young Americans crossed a few hundred yards of sand and gave everything they had to push back the darkness threatening to consume the world. It flowed through Korea and Vietnam, through the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. It now flows across the mountains of Iran.
Different enemies. Different battlefields. Different questions. But the same answer, generation after generation. Men and women stepped forward. They put themselves between the stream of freedom and the forces that sought to stop it. They paid the price, many the ultimate price.
And now — two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration — we stand as their inheritors. The beneficiaries of every one of those sacrifices. Consider what that number means.
Not Athens. Not Rome. Not the republics of Europe that came and went like seasons. None of them lasted 250 years. This one — this imperfect, complicated, brilliant, striving, enduring American experiment — has lasted two and a half centuries. It has outlasted empires. It has survived civil war and world wars and crises that should have broken it. It has endured because ordinary people, in every generation, decided that it was worth more than their comfort. More than their safety. More than their lives. Two hundred and fifty years. The stream is still running. The question is – what do we do with it now.
For the belief — first planted by Aristotle, cultivated by Thomas Aquinas and John Locke, and set free in our Declaration by Thomas Jefferson — that every human being is born with inherent dignity and the right to live free. That governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. That when ordinary people are willing to do extraordinary things, the arc of history bends toward freedom. The men and women we honor today did not die for a flag alone. They died for the ideas behind the flag. That is our inheritance. And it is our responsibility. Two hundred and fifty years ago, a trickle of ideas became a stream, a stream became a river, and a river became a nation. The nation is ours now. So let the stream keep flowing. Let it flow through your choices, through your voice, through your civic courage. Through the way you raise your children and the way you treat your neighbors and the way you show up — for this community, and for this country. Let it flow as it has flowed through every generation of Americans before us.
Through every sailor who crossed every ocean and every beach and every soldier who took a mountain and every desert so that we could stand here today, in the open air, in freedom, and dare to believe that the next two hundred and fifty years will be even greater than the last.
That is the American promise. It is not behind us. It is ahead of us. God bless the fallen. God bless their families. And God bless the United States of America.
-Scott Gabrielson
Craig County
