CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

America 250 and the Imperial Nation

Image by New York Public Library.

The renowned political theorist Danielle Allen once wrote, “The Declaration of Independence matters because it helps us to see that we cannot have freedom without equality.” As the United States commemorates the 250th anniversary of its independence on July 4, 2026, the Declaration of Independence (1776), the U.S. Constitution (1787) and Northwest Ordinance (1787) link early concepts of imperial power, sovereignty, legitimacy, and interdependence. Combining these three documents is a departure from the historiography that sometimes places American imperialism starting in the nineteenth century and in the context of Westward expansion or U.S. pursuit of places like Alaska (1867) and Hawaii (1898); the latter two in accordance with the “blue water thesis” of imperialism.[1] I argue that the founding principles of the country were rooted in colonization and imperialism more so than freedom and liberation. In other words, the process of colonization started much earlier than the 1800s.

The U.S. started out as both a republic and an empire in the 1700s. As scholar Greg Grandin recently pointed out, “American freedom was built on endless conquest.” This was evident in its territorial expansion and indigenous dispossession that were built into its early stages. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” wrote Thomas Paine in 1776. Paine was a rarity, as the lone progressive Founding Father in that he envisioned domestic liberty and not an empire. His contemporaries, at best, however, saw native people as obstacles and children to be disciplined when they were not steered for diplomatic purposes. At worst, they were to be removed or slaughtered outright. In 1776, the First Report on Canada stated its purpose as a territorial strategy.[2] Even with the Articles of Confederation (1777) there was acknowledgement of indigenous sovereignty, but at the same time, speculation over the future of “Indian affairs.”[3]

Historians such as Fr. Francis Paul Prucha, Colin G. Calloway, and Robert J. Williams, Jr., documented the shift in the colonial perspective from strategic ally and brothers in liberty, to children and domestically dependent nations. Native Americans went from equals to those in need of guardianship.[4] The Treaty of Paris (1783) further undermined Indian sovereignty and legitimacy and allowed indigenous ancestral lands to be transferred without native peoples’ consent. Recent scholarship pays more attention to the Northwest Ordinance, drafted mainly by Manasseh Cutler, Rufus King and Nathan Dane, over the Constitution, and points to the direct expansionist policies it structured culturally through America’s founding documents and strategies.[5]

The U.S. was also intended to be both a republic and an empire. The Ordinance was used to organize and pacify white settlers and protect their interests from the big planter class. Further, since James Madison favored orderly expansion and feared direct democracy he “used [the Ordinance] as a tool of settler colonial expropriation and violence against indigenous peoples and their homelands. That it served the ends of white supremacy, however, can obscure the fact that much of its essential work was directed at, not on behalf of, white men, specifically to harness and direct the polities they created,” stated historian Jessica Choppin Roney.[6]

Years prior to the U.S. reach toward Alaska or Hawaii, and writing from Mount Vernon on August 29, 1788, George Washington stated, “The natural, political, and moral circumstances of our nascent empire justify the anticipation. We have an almost unbounded territory whose natural advantages for agriculture & commerce [are] equal [to] those of any on the globe.”[7] Further, Thomas Jefferson in writing to James Madison from Monticello on April 27, 1809, expressed “I [am] persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self-government…”[8]

In 1787, Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist Papers No. 1, “To the People of the State of New York: The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the Union, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world…”[9] In other words, it was clear to Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton in these exchanges that “empire” was an inevitable and desired component of an American grand strategy. These outweighed notions of democracy and republicanism.

In yet another sequence, and writing from Paris on January 25, 1786, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Virginia attorney Archibald Stuart and stated:

Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South is to be peopled. We should take care too not to think [about] it for the interest of that great continent to press too soon on the Spaniards. Those countries cannot be in better hands. My fear is that they are too feeble to hold them till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them [piece] by [piece]. The navigation of the Mississippi we must have.[10]

Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South is to be peopled. We should take care too not to think [about] it for the interest of that great continent to press too soon on the Spaniards. Those countries cannot be in better hands. My fear is that they are too feeble to hold them........

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