From Principle American: The Immigrant Founders of America

Robert Morris was born in Liverpool, the great Atlantic port from which Britain sent out its ships to trade goods, migrants, and enslaved people across the ocean. By 1776, he was helping to finance a rebellion against the country of his birth. “I am a native of England,” he wrote, “but from principle am American in this dispute.” The sentence encapsulates something central to the country whose independence Morris joined in declaring. America was an identity, defiantly asserted, by people who had come from elsewhere and by their children. These were people rushing toward opportunity, fleeing hardship, seeking fortune, or trying to make a life under freer conditions.

The Declaration of Independence can be viewed as a sort of birth certificate; what’s clear is that the nation it announced remained far from the nation it would become. The document, maintaining that “these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States,” announced the work of turning 13 colonies, with different histories, churches, economies, customs, and regional loyalties, into a single republic. The American “we” was, from the start, an act of improvisation, and immigrants were foundational to it. In older national stories, peoplehood is often imagined as something autochthonous that rises from a soil, a language, a shared ancestry, perhaps a sacred geography. That isn’t the American story. Here, belonging had to be argued into existence before it could be inherited.

Eight of the 56 signers of the Declaration were foreign-born. They came from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and they crossed in different ways. Francis Lewis, the Welsh-born signer, arrived from privilege. Educated at Westminster School in London, he turned inherited property into the capital needed to launch a merchant’s life in New York and Philadelphia. If there was any doubt about his membership in a transatlantic elite, his daughter married an Archbishop of Canterbury. Among the three signers with Irish origins, James Smith, a Philadelphia lawyer born in Ulster, and Matthew Thornton, a New Hampshire doctor born in Ireland, represented the professional classes. George Taylor’s crossing was rougher. He arrived with little money, indentured to the owner of a Pennsylvania forge. He rose from laborer to ironmaster, and to political representative. The distance between Taylor and Lewis reminds us how disparate the experiences of immigration can be. Some immigrants floated on family capital. Others sold years of labor for the chance at a better life.

The Scottish-born signers, both raised Presbyterian, lend another dimension to the story. James Wilson came to teach at the College of Philadelphia and later served as an associate justice of the first Supreme Court. John Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister, was persuaded to come to New Jersey in 1768 as president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton. Of all the signers, Witherspoon was the most recent to have become resident on the continent. Like so many others, he joined in declaring the independence of a place that had become his by conviction rather than ancestry.

If Morris’s phrase “from principle am American” is arresting, it’s because in much of the world, nationhood has been imagined as a bond between people and territory sanctified by some putatively ancient origin. America has had its own nativisms, its own racial and ethnic exclusions, to be sure. The founding “we,” expansive in one sense, was notably restricted in another. No women signed the Declaration. No Black people did. No Native people did. No Jews did. They were, of course, available. Abigail Adams wouldn’t have had to admonish her husband to “remember the ladies,” if Massachusetts had sent her, too. Benjamin Banneker was already studying astronomy and surveying in Maryland. Haym Salomon, a Polish Jew, helped finance the Revolutionary War by raising and lending money to the American government, and died in poverty because the government never repaid him. Native nations occupied the continent long before Europeans gave the new republic a name.

Still, the ethnoterritorial ideal has never truly comported with America’s self-image, because it could never plausibly describe the fundamental American origin story: the United States began as a place made by arrivals. Indeed, the delegates to the Second Continental Congress were more disparate than any previous representative body in the British Empire had been. (Unlike the British Parliament then, composed by law entirely of Anglicans, at most 34 of the 56 men who eventually signed the Declaration were members of the Church of England. One was even a Catholic!) And though America’s founders did not create a fully democratic nation, they did help create a political tradition in which excluded people could ask, with force and effect, why the principles announced in 1776 failed to encompass them.

Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration, it is worth remembering that the United States was not first a settled national community that later decided to admit immigrants but that immigrants and their children helped create that community in the first place. A political identity founded on principle is bound to be tested, argued over, and made capacious enough for subsequent generations. Andrew Carnegie’s own life belongs to a later chapter of that story: the Scottish immigrant child who became an American industrialist, then spent much of his fortune building institutions through which others might educate themselves.

If the Declaration did not fix the meaning of America, it did set the terms for conversation and contestation over that meaning. Its signers included men who had changed countries, forged new allegiances, and helped create an identity that spoke of an active decision to belong. Morris’s phrase still conveys the force of that beginning: “from principle am American.” The nation’s promise, and its burden, lies in the unending project of defining and refining that principle.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, is a renowned philosopher and the author of As If, Idealization and Ideals, The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity, Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science, The Ethics of Identity, and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, among many other works. Born in London and raised in Ghana, Appiah was named a Carnegie Great Immigrant in 2017. He has been The New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist columnist since 2015.