The American experiment has a foundation based on a government that expresses the voice of the people, or vox populi. We’ve never achieved perfection, but one of the positive changes in our nation, arising from the colonial period, has been the idea that government should represent the interests of the people, by the people (and for the people, to round out the phrase). This ideal distinguished the British colonies from the monarchies of Europe. In Great Britain, colonial government was expressed through the companies that bankrolled the colonies and the charters they were granted.
But my family had to have some troublemakers (maybe that’s a long-lasting trait as well). Many of my ancestors were Reformed Protestants who ran afoul of the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches and the crowned heads of France, Spain, and England. Their heretical ideas reflected the rise of the middle classes as feudalism waned and included a distrust of human nature such that they believed power should not reside solely in one figure of authority, such as a king or a pope. When the colonies opened up, they were among those who sought refuge away from the royal courts.
The Reformed Protestant churches moved away from hierarchy and toward greater representation. Pastors were still important, but churches themselves were governed by elders (elected representatives) or by congregational votes. These republican and democratic forms of church government provided a foundation for our current system.
But I think my ancestors took it a step further. As I’ve written before, Stephen Hopkins made his second journey to the New World on the Mayflower and was a signer of the Mayflower Compact, which distributed governing power among the adult males of the colony. Interestingly enough, it was the non-Puritan passengers who insisted that, since they had landed somewhere other than their intended destination, they were free to do what they wanted. Stephen Hopkins had witnessed the debacle that was Jamestown and may have been one of those advocates for self-governing. With the Puritans being their own rebellious selves—and highly educated—we do not need to wonder why New England became a hotbed of revolution in the 18th century.
But that is not all. I have found many ancestors who fought for the Patriot side during the American Revolution, and the more I dig, the more I find. Our Declaration of Independence, now 250 years old, represented the views of the elected Continental Congress. Through bumps, twists, and turns, and even changes in who has a voice, that ideal has endured. It was the inspiration for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered to dedicate the cemetery for those “gave their lives so that that nation might live.”.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
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