Since 1776 the U.S. has grown from a sliver of colonies along the Atlantic coast into a colossus whose shores are also washed by the Pacific and even the Arctic oceans, from a population of 2.5 million into one nearly 90 times larger, from a simple agrarian society into the world's most technologically sophisticated civilization. How did we get from there to here? How have we changed in our 200 years? And what do these changes portend for our future?
The following TIME Bicentennial Essay is the first in a series that will appear periodically into early 1976, and will seek to answer those questions. The opening essay examines the nature of American nationhood: how we evolved from "these United States" into 'the United States"—one nation, indivisible.
Looking back from the late 20th century, it is easy for us to forget that our nation was really born in a War for Independence and not in a war for nationhood. Yet that is the crucial fact about American nationalism, and helps us understand how this nation could be born without ever having been conceived.
Nowhere in the Declaration of Independence does the word nation appear. The title of the final version described the document as "the unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united [small] States of America." There was no one capital city against which the British could aim a mortal blow. During the first five years of the War for Independence, British troops occupied every one of the most populous towns (Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston) without decisive effect on the war's outcome.
The wartime union of the colonies, American statesmen assumed, would be only temporary. "The present Union will but little survive the present war," James Madison predicted. "They [the states] ought to be as fully impressed with the necessity of the Union during the war as of its probable dissolution after it." Endless bickerings in their Continental (not "National") Congress, accusations by small states against large and by the poor against the rich, the difficulty of securing "contributions" from the states—all these have become familiar in our own time in the meetings of sovereign independent states in a so-called "United" Nations, and give a new vividness to the problems of our leaders in those days.
The colonists survived against the most powerful nation of their day, not because of strong national sentiment but rather because of a host of other factors: the extended British lines, the aid of the French, the unorthodox modes of American warfare, the ingenious makeshifts and improvisations of American commanders who had not had the advantage of being bred in a rigid European military etiquette (Americans would actually fight at night, in the woods and on rainy days), and the steadfast, courageous leadership of George Washington. In retrospect it might be more accurate to say that the British lost, than that the Americans won.