America's 250th

Two hundred and fifty years ago, men with everything to lose bet it all on an idea: that ordinary people might govern themselves. It was a reckless bet, and it paid off. For some, right away, and for the rest of us, eventually. That's the part worth sitting with. The Revolution didn't free everyone at once. It freed enough people, with enough conviction, that the freeing kept going for two and a half centuries after. Slow, contested, occasionally violent, never finished, but it kept going. A nation founded on a promise it couldn't yet keep, spending the next 250 years trying to keep it anyway. I think about that founding generation more than I probably should for a man who wasn't born until two centuries after the fact. I've walked the streets of Boston and Philadelphia chasing their footsteps. I've visited Saratoga (NY) and Washington's Crossing (PA). I've read Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson ... flawed men, several of them slaveowners, all of them blind in ways their own time…