What It Means for America To Be the ‘Last Best Hope of Earth’
February 12, 2020
Once a great people roamed through the forests and open plains of North America. Those great people were the various tribes of what appropriately can be called the American Indians, the indigenous peoples of what was mistakenly thought to be the Indies. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, those peoples were described as noble savages. They were thought noble because of their hardihood and fierce independence. They were a people infused with an animist confidence in the brute forces of nature. They were not, however, buttressed by confidence in reason and faith in the Providence that ordained reason as the basis for the governance of mankind. As a result, they receded in the face of the arrival of a people from Europe who possessed a combined faith in reason and God.
Over the course of the last two centuries, the indigenous peoples have undergone severe inflictions at the hands of the nation that grew out of the European settlements and at their own hands. During this long travail of alternating gestures of peace and blood-stained conflicts, that new nation has relentlessly moved to incorporate the indigenous peoples in a unified nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. That process of incorporation has not yet been completed. The wars ended, but the growth of a political community has been impeded by hesitations and misconstructions.
Those misconstructions included the early missteps by too many tribes of allying themselves militarily with the adversaries to the historical force of liberty and self-government. In the Seven Years War, they chose the losing side, suffering, as a result, the loss of independence and a considerable degree of territory.
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