America 243
With all the hubbub about America 250, I’ve wondered how old my new nation is. But it’s been a struggle to choose a date.
Independence from Spain in 1648 makes the most sense to me, since that was the birth of nationhood as a concept, though one could look back to declaring independence in 1581 or forming the Republic in 1588. But there’s also the liberation from Napoleon in 1813 and subsequent adoption of the modern Constitution in 1815.
My natural-born Dutch friends are of no help; as befits their relationship with a complex and sometimes opaque cultural history, they only celebrate May 5th, when we escaped fascist occupation in 1945. I give up trying to assign an age to the Netherlands, but it does leave me very curious about how we determine a nation’s age.
As a good citizen of the heartland, I of course grew up celebrating the 4th of July. Sometimes we called it Independence Day. But Only recently have I heard it often referred to as “America’s birthday”.
So now I’m wondering if I am comfortable calling the Declaration of Independence’s semiquincentennial the 250th birthday of the United States. Maybe it’s reasonable, as Indonesia celebrates their proclamation of independence from the Netherlands.
But it seems odd to me to celebrate signing a statement of intention (agreement on which had been reached by vote two days before the signing ritual). If we’re going to focus on the struggle for independence, we should look to when the war broke out at the Bloody Angle more than a year prior on April 19th, 1775.
Or we could recognize our new nation became real when it was seen by another. So Benjamin Franklin’s success securing an alliance with France on February 6th, 1778 makes a lot of sense to me. Celebrating these beginnings is rare among the countries of the world, though.
Many celebrate victory,[^victory] so maybe we should commemorate October 19th, 1781, when the last British forces surrendered to colonial and French forces at Yorktown. A lot of those are rather more authoritarian than the US was established to be; our fellow republics often mark the establishment of their government. For this we could celebrate March 4th, 1789, when the Constitution went into effect and the first session of Congress took place in New York City.
But most former British colonies celebrate the end of British authority. For the US, this would be the Treaty of Paris on September 3rd, 1783, when Great Britain formally gave up fighting the Dutch, French, Spanish, and the rebels in North America. I find this meaningful and it aligns with other post-colonial democracies, so this is the United States birthday that makes sense to me. Happy 243rd, fellow Americans!