Who is an American? Is it merely someone with a precious blue passport or Social Security card? Is it merely someone who accepts the basic tenets of the Declaration of Independence or thinks the Constitution is neat?
It’s true that the Constitution constitutes our nation's government. It is also true that there is likely no better defense of that Constitution than the Federalist Papers. (If you haven't read them all, you should.) Hamilton, Madison, and Jay wrote to make the case that the Union was a good idea. But prior to making that case, John Jay had to make the case that the Union was real, which he did in Federalist No. 2, writing the following:
With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence. [Emphasis added.]
Here, we find Jay making the case that Americans should accept the proposed united government because they were already a united people.
Jay did not describe a union composed of flimsy notions of legal citizenship, or even a union composed of a shared belief in liberty. Instead, he describes solid bonds of unity. He points to our common heritage, our common language, our worship of the same God, our manners and customs. And it is because of those former things, I would argue, that Jay could point to our attachment to common principles of government. Jay is telling Americans that had lived together in one place long enough to become brothers.
This flies in the face of a common, though mistaken, belief that anyone anywhere on the planet can be as American as apple pie so long as they agree with the ideals of the American experiment. This was not the argument of Federalist No. 2. Americans were identifiable because they shared a common life, and to tear any state away from the Union would've been as impossible as removing a brother from the family.
“This country and this people seem to have been made for each other,” Jay wrote, “and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.”
This is not a rant about foreigners, for it is often said, and it is true, that Americans of European descent were foreigners once. Once. But we are no longer. The problem with the “America is an idea” line is not that people believe non-Americans can become Americans (they can). The problem is that they reduce American identity to a belief. In doing so, “America is an idea” fails to recognize that what makes America American is a common history, culture, language, and theology. Foreigners can become American precisely to the extent that they actually become American, which is an identity with identifiable characteristics. (If you don't believe me, ask a European.)
In our semiquincentennial year, it would be wise for us to reflect on and consider what makes us who we are. What are our unique virtues? What are the lessons we must learn from a past that no other nation on earth has shared?
If we want to stay united for another 250 years, we must build and defend bonds as thick as those Jay described in 1787. If we think the Union is good, we must work to make the Union real. And we must work tirelessly to preserve those virtues, lessons, and bonds so that we may give them to the Americans who will live here long after we are gone.
Elijah Newcomb is a Birmingham resident and graduate of Auburn University and Beeson Divinity School at Samford University. He will matriculate at the University of Alabama School of Law this fall, where he hopes to further his interest in religion, law, and public life, with a particular focus on protecting Christian values in the public square.
