In the early years of the Revolutionary War, a Rhode Island man named Jehu Grant joined the Continental Army to fight for the nation’s independence. And for his own, too; he’d escaped enslavement by a British loyalist in hopes that an American victory and his personal sacrifice would allow him to be a free man. He discreetly traveled about 100 miles to an encampment where his military service included duties as a teamster and aide to the wagon master. Ten months later, the loyalist showed up at the unit’s supply depot, asserted a property claim on Jehu and demanded his return. The Continental Army — waging war for the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — complied, returning one of its own to captivity.
This outcome was certainly a moral failure, but framing it as that alone reduces the issue to one of hypocrisy, unprincipled leadership or expedience. Instead, it was a failure of institutions, which prioritized the nation’s interests over its values. Through this lens, Jehu’s patriotism and love of country weren’t in question; they were beside the point and wholly insufficient. Not because he misunderstood its ideals, but because he overestimated the willingness of the nation’s institutions to honor them.
This sentiment should feel familiar to Americans today, at the dawn of the nation’s 250th anniversary. President Donald Trump’s use of executive orders — he has already issued more in the past year than in his entire first term — has bypassed the principle of checks and balances established in the Constitution that have contravened public will and civic sentiment. In its more recent cases, the Supreme Court is revisiting mostly settled questions on abortion, voting rights, gun regulations and even birthright citizenship.
Congress is on pace for a historically unproductive year with its lowest legislative output in modern history; the dysfunction has been so pronounced that, to date, 44 members — nearly one-tenth of the institution — have decided not to run again. And the country’s current spiteful deportation operations, economic policies that accrue wealth for the few, and underperforming education, health care and criminal justice systems, all point to acquiescent institutions with little regard for everyday people. The erosion of norms and government institutions’ desire for autonomy from the public are not tempered by patriotism; they are largely indifferent to it.
And it doesn’t matter much which form of patriotism one practices. Trump’s insistence on uncritical patriotism isn’t an ask for the people to love the country unconditionally and ignore its failures, but rather a means to unbridle the presidency from oversight and constraints. Those who run afoul of him are immediately labeled traitors, ingrates and disloyal — just ask Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), who had been so targeted and announced in November that she would resign from Congress.
Moral patriotism critiques the nation on where and how it has fallen short but does so from a place of respect and affection for it and the people – the sort of moral patriotism practiced by Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., among scores of others. And there is civic or constitutional patriotism, which is based on loyalty to principles, laws and institutions, emphasizing shared values as the basis for national attachment — the version that compelled Jehu Grant to fight for a nation that sanctioned his enslavement.
Shortly after the Army gave him up, Jehu Grant was returned to slavery, resold, indentured, and finally earned his freedom decades later. Fifty years after the Revolutionary War ended, most of its veterans, who had been paid little while serving, were elderly and living in poverty. Care for these veterans became a matter of public debate and moral obligation, and in 1832, the Pension Act was passed to grant full or prorated pay for those who’d served more than six months.
Jehu, blind and broke and 80 years of age, applied to the War Department for his pension but was denied and informed that “services while a fugitive from [your] master’s service” did not qualify. In a somber, unanswered appeal to the government, he apologized for escaping slavery in pursuit of national independence and equal citizenship but explained that his service to the country had been faithful and that God had forgiven him. But the offending institutions had neither been faithful nor forgiving, no matter how much he loved America and no matter how much they said the same.
His life is a reminder that the most durable expressions of patriotism didn’t emerge from founding generation’s exemplars or the institutions they designed that have persisted, but from those most harmed by their shortcomings – abolitionists, suffragists, civil rights activists, veterans who returned home to unequal treatment, immigrants in search of opportunity. They all understood that loving the country requires confronting it and the institutions that govern it.
Our institutions are not self-correcting — they do not inherently work to close the gap between the nation’s professed ideals and its actions. Instead, they must be compelled to change — transformed by a patriotic people who love the country enough to make it work a quarter-millennium after its creation.
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