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American Freedom: The Truth of 1619 vs. the Lie of 1776 [1]
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Date: 2025-06-04
“America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.” Frederick Douglass
America’s national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, immortalizes the phrase “land of the free”—a vision that drew many Europeans to the New World in search of deliverance from monarchs, state churches, rigid class hierarchies, inherited constraints, and abject poverty. They came seeking something unimaginable in Europe: opportunity, mobility, and the possibility of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
This vision fused “freedom from” with “liberty for.” But liberty, as imagined by the founders, was not a freedom defined by unbounded anarchy. It was a structured, lawful condition—secured by the government and articulated most clearly in the writings of John Locke and the Declaration of Independence. Yet, from the beginning, this liberty was conditional. It was constrained by factors such as race, gender, land ownership, and wealth. Liberty, as conceived and practiced by the 1776 generation, belonged exclusively to wealthy white men. This exclusion wasn’t incidental—it was foundational, encoded in law, custom, and economy from the start.
America’s founding myth placed freedom within liberty—an idealized, universal freedom that, in practice, was an illusion. “The land of the free”—except it wasn’t.
To understand the origins of this conditioned liberty—this selective freedom—we must look not to 1776 but to 1619, when two events, more than 400 miles apart, quietly launched two systems that would shape the American future: African slavery and Indigenous erasure.
In August 1619, at Point Comfort in the English Colony of Virginia, the captain of the White Lion exchanged “twenty and odd Negroes” for provisions—marking the beginning of African slavery in British North America. Meanwhile, along the northeastern coast near what would become Plymouth Rock, a devastating epidemic that had raged for three years was finally subsiding. It had killed an estimated 90% of the Wampanoag people. These simultaneous events—one in the South, one in the North—foreshadowed centuries of settler colonialism, genocide, and racialized chattel slavery. Together, they form a twin origin story of dispossession and forced labor—stories central to the American experience, even as they have long been denied, obscured, or rationalized.
Before the Mayflower, before Plymouth Rock, before the Declaration—unfreedom was already the foundation. America’s story did not begin with liberty for all but with liberty for the few, secured by the unfreedom of the many. From the beginning, the myth of freedom was ritualized, repeated, and celebrated—until it appeared natural and absolute. In reality, it was a beautiful illusion covering a brutal truth. Its power lay not just in its telling but in its belief—ingrained, inherited, and internalized across generations.
The first colony, Virginia, was founded in 1607; the thirteenth, Georgia, in 1732. In classrooms across America, students learn a simplified version of history—beginning with 1492, skipping to the 13 colonies, and culminating in the Revolutionary War. The colonies are presented geographically as puzzle pieces to be fitted neatly into a brightly colored map. It’s a digestible myth—calm, contained, manageable. However, this simplicity is a lie, as the map conceals what the land and the ancestors of the dispossessed remember.
In truth, those 13 colonies were occupied territories carved from bloodied soil by an aggressive imperial power. The British Empire established them by warring with, killing, and displacing Indigenous peoples while simultaneously trafficking enslaved Africans to serve its colonial economy. By 1776, Native nations in every colony had already lost vast swaths of ancestral land through war, broken treaties, forced removals, and the early formation of reservations. By that same year, slavery was institutionalized in every colony, with more than 450,000 people enslaved.
The Thomas Jefferson of 1776—a man who proclaimed that “all men are created equal”—embodied one of the deepest contradictions of the American founding. He championed liberty while owning more than 600 enslaved people, freeing only a handful in his lifetime. He fathered six children with the enslaved Sally Hemings while he believed that Native Americans were superior to Blacks and could be “civilized.” Still, he supported policies that displaced them to make way for white expansion. His vision of equality was narrow—bounded by race, gender, and property. He helped define a nation where liberty was aspirational, but exclusion was systemic.
This painful paradox lies at the core of the American experiment: a republic born in the language of universal freedom yet built on slavery and settler colonialism.
The 157 years between 1619 and 1776 did not simply precede the Revolution—they laid the foundations for it. The systems established in that era persisted through the Civil War, the end of the Indian Wars in 1890, the dismantling of Jim Crow in the 1960s, and even beyond 1980, when the last federally run Indian boarding school closed in Oklahoma. These years were not a preface but a prologue to an ongoing struggle—one that still defines American life.
We would do better to ask not when unfreedom ended but how it endures: in wealth inequality, childhood poverty, low-wage labor, homelessness, voter suppression, mass incarceration, systemic racism in education and healthcare, the addiction crisis, the exploitation of undocumented workers, and the continued erasure of Indigenous sovereignty and Black history, and now, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).
As the 1619 Project powerfully asserts, America’s true founding lies not in liberty but in slavery and stolen land. The Revolution did not dismantle colonialism—it rebranded it. The Betsy Ross flag replaced the Union Jack, but the tools of empire stayed firmly in place.
Even before 1776, settlers defied the British Crown’s limits—like the Royal Proclamation of 1763—and pushed westward into Shawnee and Lenape territory. Lord Dunmore’s War, fought in 1774 between Virginia militia and Indigenous nations, signaled that settler expansion was already well underway. Though the term “Manifest Destiny” would not be coined until 1845, the pattern of violent expansion was embedded from the start. Independence from Britain gave white settlers control of the empire’s machinery—not to dismantle it, but to seize it and entrench white supremacy and sanctioned dispossession. The Revolution’s promise of freedom masked a continuation of conquest.
In this way, hypernormalization of the freedom myth was maintained not only through civic ritual and patriotic narrative but through relentless repetition—in policy, violence, and silence. Each generation inherited the illusion while perpetuating the exclusion. The founding lie—that America is the land of the free—became so deeply woven into the nation’s conscience that even glaring contradictions were dismissed or normalized. This was not a mistake. It was design—strategic, sustained, and deeply effective.
Hypernormalization became self-sustaining: so total and so constant that the truth of 1619 felt radical, while the myth of 1776 seemed like common sense. The lie became comfort. The truth became disruption.
This is the real legacy of America—not universal liberty, but the normalization of a profoundly unequal freedom.
Day 136: days left to January 20, 2029: 1,326 days
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