WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT

As we all round into a Fourth of July weekend in which the entire structure of the American democratic republic seems to have been revealed to have rotted away from within, I’ve thought this weekend about how we got here.

Over the years, I have had friends tell me that when I say the words “My country,” there is a “pride of ownership” in the tone. That’s true. It is My Country because my ancestors first came here a century before the United States of America was a country, and all after them made contributions at risk of their lives to insure this this country lives up to the words “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.”

My name, Thomas McKelvey Cleaver, is symbolic of the answer to why that is so. Those are three surnames of people - my direct ancestors - who came here in search of the promise of America: economic freedom, political freedom, and religious freedom.

My seventh great-grandfather on my father’s mother’s side, John Thomas, came here from Wales in 1745, an economic refugee from the “enclosure movement.” That was the act by the British nobility in the mid-eighteenth century to take back the “commons,” the lands “held in common” in the villages they owned since time immemorial, for the people to use for their personal needs - to grow food for their families and raise livestock. The landlords took back “the commons” in order to make money, and in so doing they drove most of the rural people into the cities, where they became the exploited urban working class in the new Industrial Revolution. It was said at the time, “The man who stole a goose from the commons was transported to America, while the man who stole the commons from the goose was transported to Parliament.” John Thomas eventually settled in the colony of Pennsylvania.

My fourth great-grandfather on my mother’s mother’s side, James McKelvey, was a Scotch-Irish Protestant whose lowland Scots ancestors had been transported to Northern Ireland in the years after 1606 by order of James I to remove the “Protestant threat” to his Catholic Scottish highlanders who supported him - and to bring the “divide and conquer” policy in Ireland by creation of the Plantation of Ulster, introducing religious strife that has continued to our time. James was a participant in “The ‘99," the only Irish rebellion against their English oppressors that saw both Catholics and Protestants fight together. The rebellion is memorialized in the song “The Wearing of the Green” in which Napper Tandy, one of the leaders of the rebellion, appears to the singer: “I met with Napper Tandy/And he took me by the hand/He asked how’s poor old Ireland/And how does she stand?/She’s the most distressful country/That ever you have seen/They’re hangin’ men and women there/For wearin’ o’ the Green.” He arrived as a political refugee in Philadelphia in the new State of Pennsylvania, in 1801, “A step ahead of an English rope,” as the family oral history has it.

My tenth great-grandfather on my father’s side - the first member of the family to come to America - Peter Klebber (the name was Anglicized to Cleaver after the Revolution, to note we were now Americans and were now speaking English rather than German) arrived with his family and the other members of his Quaker Meeting in 1681, the second year of the colonization of Pennsylvania, the first place in the world founded on the principle of religious liberty for all. They were German Quakers from Frankfurt-am-Main, refugees from the religious wars of Germany that saw Quakers persecuted and killed by both Protestants and Catholics for their “heresy” of believing in peace. They founded Germantown, then a three-day journey outside Philadelphia. Peter was “Reader of the Meeting,” the Quaker equivalent of a minister, the spiritual leader of the community. In 1688, after they had become enslavers like every other white community, some members concluded that this was a sin against every reason they had become Quakers. That year, after much discussion at Meeting, they came to a very Quaker-like decision: one could not own a slave and attend Meeting. The decision to free their slaves was left up to each individual. But it was at Meeting that the life of the community happened: property was bought and sold, marriages were arranged, business deals were discussed and consummated. Not to attend Meeting was to be cut off from all that. And so, in 1688, the Germantown Quakers became the first group of Europeans in the world to abolish African slavery. There’s no record of it, but I am pretty sure the Reader of the Meeting would have had a major role in that decision. As a result, for the next 175 years, Cleavers would be Abolitionists along with the rest of the Quaker church after the church-wide anti-slavery position was taken following the Revolution.

There are two others of my ancestors I think of today.

Peter Klebber’s fourth great-grandson, my sixth great-grandfather, Isaac Cleaver (as he became in 1781), held the family farm in Germantown that Peter had created a century earlier, and was by all accounts firm in his faith as a Quaker. In 1775 he was married five years and had two children. And when the call came for independence, he put that all aside, changed his church for a different faith, and joined the Pennsylvania militia. By that Christmas, he had survived the disaster of the Long Island campaign, which saw the British under the Lords Howe (there were two of them, one an admiral, one a general - in command of the naval and military forces) drive the American forces out of New York and take Long Island and most of New Jersey. The enlistments of most of the surviving soldiers would be up on New Year’s Day and while many had already taken unofficial leave of their duty in the aftermath of disaster, most of those who now huddled in the forest on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River that Christmas Eve were planning on taking an honorable departure with the new year, in hopes they could slink home and not be identified and hanged by the British as traitors in the defeat to come.

The officers - who had been elected by the men they led - were called to the army’s headquarters when a sleigh arrived from Pennsylvania. Sometime later, they returned to their men with a broadsheet on which the ink was by some accounts still wet, which they read to the troops. Isaac was thus one of the first people ever to hear these words:

“THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.”

Tom Paine, the author of those words, went on explain how things had come to this pass, to exhort the men for one final act. (You should go read the whole thing). He goes over similar crises in other countries, admits the mistakes that were made, the possibilities that were lost, and ends:

“This is our situation, and who will may know it. By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious issue; by cowardice and submission, the sad choice of a variety of evils - a ravaged country - a depopulated city - habitations without safety, and slavery without hope - our homes turned into barracks and bawdy-houses for Hessians, and a future race to provide for, whose fathers we shall doubt of. Look on this picture and weep over it! and if there yet remains one thoughtless wretch who believes it not, let him suffer it unlamented.”

And then the men put out the fires and went over the ridge and down to the river and manned the boats and crossed the river(the river really was filled with ice, like the painting shows, but it’s pretty certain General Washington had the good sense not to stand up in his boat) and then they hid in the snowy forest and listened to the Hessian mercenaries drunkenly sing Christmas carols and in the morning they took Trenton Barracks and gave us all the best Christmas Present ever: our country.

Isaac served through the whole war, eventually transferring to the Continental Army where he rose to Sergeant and was present at Yorktown to see Lord Cornwallis lead his troops out of the trenches to the tune of “The World Turned Upside Down.” The same Lord Cornwallis who as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland 20 years later would send the ancestor of Isaac’s great-great-great grandson’s wife fleeing to America.

Isaac returned to Germantown to find the family farm forfeit as “rebel property” to the Tory Squire of Germantown and his family living as refugees. Along with his friend William Thomas (son of John Thomas) a fellow ex-Quaker he had met in the army, the two families managed to survive the winter of 1781 while they built Conestoga wagons. That spring they set out into the howling wilderness of central Pennsylvania, where they arrived at the Susquehanna River and the small Quaker village of Catawissa (it’s still only got a population of 1,700 now) that had been founded in 1774 by friends from Germantown. While Isaac was no longer a Quaker, his wife and children were and they were welcomed into the community. Isaac and William Thomas. Eight years later, in 1790, Isaac had the misfortune to come across a bear while out hunting. Badly mauled, he made it home and died three days later.

Catawissa being largely Quaker (though they’re all gone now, leaving behind only the old Meeting House) was a center of Quaker Abolitionist activity. Isaac’s grandson, another Peter, built a house in the 1840s that had a root cellar with a hidden compartment; he was a Conductor on the Underground Railroad. In 1856, he was one of the Quaker Abolitionists who participated in founding the Republican Party, and was such a staunch believer in Abolition that he allowed his son Alem to go to war in 1863 after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Alem served in the Army of the Potomac and was wounded in the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. Captured by the traitors, he spent the rest of the war in Libby Prison in Richmond. It was actually a concentration camp, and he returned home a very different man at 20 than he had been when he left at age 18, never really recovering from the experience.

Alem’s good friend, Henry Clay Thomas (named for the Great Compromiser, Senator Henry Clay, who had been the object of hope over 30 years that his politics of conciliation would avoid civil war; unfortunately he only delayed it) who was three years younger, lied about his age to the recruiter and joined the 17th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry shortly after Alem joined the army in the spring of 1863.

On July 2, 1863, the 17th Pennsylvania was headed to Gettysburg, when they learned the battle had already begun. They began running, though they were 20 miles away. They ran in the humid heat of a Pennsylvania summer, in wool uniforms, carrying 50 pound packs. Henry and two others were the only ones still on their feet when they arrived. There was a Union force on one of the two hills, known as Little Round Top. That’s a name that does nothing to describe reality. The hill is not that small, and it is definitely not round. It’s more like a fairly steep pyramid, and covered in thick vegetation. I can only wonder that they had the strength after running a marathon to climb the steep hillside, but they did and they joined the men of the 18th Maine atop the hill. The next day was Henry’s 16th birthday.

After the battle, Henry took the time to write a letter to his younger sister, Alice, that survived in the family.

“It was certainly some effort to get here, and then we found that it was expected the rebels would make a second attempt in the morning to take our position, which they did. I have to tell you I was scared more than anything I experienced ever as they came at us, and I was knocked down when hit by a Minie Ball. I thought I would die sure, since I was hit in the back, which is a wound almost always fatal. It seemed to be forever that I bled as I felt it seep in my shirt, but then it came to me that one doesn’t have that much blood possible. I reached around and found my canteen - it had been split by the ball and emptied its contents upon me! I was alive! And so by that canteen, I am alive to write to you.”

After the war, both Alem and Henry took some time to recover. Henry stayed in the army until 1868 supporting Reconstruction. Both of them were young and unmarried when they went to war, so the family was out of the Quaker Church with their generation. They both finally married in their 30s, late in life those days, and each had one child: Alem a boy, Louis, and Henry a daughter, Mary. They too married late in life after Louis became a dentist and Mary finally gave up her dream of becoming a cartoonist in Philadelphia, work denied to a woman then. They married and moved to Johnstown, where Louis established his pracice. After several miscarriages, they had one son, Louis Thomas Cleaver. When he was in his 30s, the Second World War came and he joined the Navy. He survived being sunk by the kamikazes at Okinawa and returned home to his wife and year-old son. Me.

And I was the first in my family whose service in wartime turned out not to serve our country. But I believe I have carried on the other traditions of involvement by my ancestors.

Ours is a nation defined not by history, geography, racial or ethnic composition, or religion but by a commitment to democracy and to equality and equal justice under law. It is that shared commitment that brings us together despite our differences—that makes us, out of many, one.

But...

For the first time in my life, for the first time in my family’s life, it really feels like the American experiment has failed, that there was an expiration date to this attempt at self-government through a democratic republic that the Founders all agreed in 1789 not to let anyone know about. Now, as the result of a “president” who took office because of the moral failure of the political party my ancestor helped found in order to advance every cause that party now opposes, a money-soaked national leadership that has lost whatever moral compass it once possessed, and an inattentive, apathetic and politically-ignorant public have combined to exploit every weakness, every loophole, and every soft spot in our 233-year-old Constitution, it feels we have failed to hold to my family’s 340 years of striving to “hold these truths self-evident.”

The compromise with the enslavers that led to the deliberately anti-democratic parts of the constitution in an effort to keep them part of the new union - the Electoral College that allows presidents who lose the popular vote to take office; the absurdity of the Senate that allows Wyoming - with ten percent of the population of Los Angeles County - to checkmate California with both equal in power, turning that body into the graveyard of popular policy ideas because of arcane traditions that should departed with the re-establishment of the Republic in 1865, has now resulted in a situation where those who through all those years were opposed to that goal seem now to have gained the upper hand in a manner difficult to overcome. The United States now appears dedicated to inequality - social, political, and economic.

There is good solid reason to despair of the future. But I am the descendant of people who launched themselves into an adventure of which they had no knowledge, who traveled to an unknown place, who faced great difficulties and yet overcame them. My sixth great grandfather spent a night hiding in a snowy forest while many others believed the end of the struggle for independence had come, and by so doing created this country. My second-great grandfather ran a marathon on his 16th birthday and by so doing helped to save that Union.

I don’t think they or any of the others would approve of me giving up in the face of mere political difficulty.

So...

Despite every reason not to, I shall spend this Fourth of July thinking of my ancestors and the world they sacrificed to create, and renewing my personal commitment to keeping their traditions.

“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.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...”

If you can, leave a comment about all those others who came to a place about which they knew nothing, and created the world that led to you being here to celebrate Our Country.