The Canadian option? No thanks

How could anyone be against the Fourth of July? I was shocked and appalled when, as a student at Drake University, my favorite professor said the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution had been a huge mistake. No commie-loving peacenik (as the phrase went during the Vietnam War era), Dr. Francis Wilhoit was friends with Henry Kissinger at Harvard and seemed to be a patriotic American. He argued that it would have been much better had the 13 colonies remained British and opted for a gradual, peaceful move toward independence like Canada. As the British Empire outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery itself in 1838, the “Canadian option” would have ended slavery in America decades sooner and would have precluded the mass slaughter of the Civil War, Dr. Wilhoit concluded.

I had never considered that. The history of freedom and slavery is sometimes entwined in contradictory ways. As a U.S. diplomat serving in South Africa during the administration of Nelson Mandela, I often heard about the Great Trek of the 1830s, when Dutch-speaking settlers migrated to the interior of southern Africa to escape British oppression. They also wanted to keep their slaves, who the British were about to free. Generations of enslavement, two Boer Wars, and decades of a racist Apartheid regime were the result.

The former Republic of Texas holds a similar lesson. As a kid, I had a coonskin cap just like Davy Crockett (Fess Parker) wore as he went down swinging in the Disney version of the 1836 Battle of the Alamo. What I didn’t know then was that some Texans fighting for freedom from Mexico were also fighting to keep their slaves, as Mexico had previously banned slavery. After seceding from Mexico, most Texans wanted their (slaveholding) republic to join the United States, but that wasn’t allowed for nine years. Iowa joined the Union less than a year after Texas did, thus maintaining the balance of free and slaveholding states so important in pre-Civil War America.

Dr. Wilhoit’s sanguine counterfactual opposition to the Declaration of Independence is perilous, however. Absent the American Revolution, perhaps powerful colonial slave owners and their British commercial partners would have stymied British abolitionists and kept slavery legal in the British Empire for generations longer. The same problem arises with those who argue that if the United States hadn’t entered World War I, the war would have ground to a draw, thus enabling the world to escape World War II, the Holocaust, and perhaps the Cold War. We just don’t know — perhaps things would have turned out even worse.

When I was the U.S. ambassador to Eritrea (a ruthless dictatorship sometimes called the “North Korea of Africa”) we once featured Sam Adams beer at a diplomatic Fourth of July reception. I asked the assembled guests, including some Eritrean government officials, to raise their bottles in a toast. Sam Adams, I explained, was an American patriot who ardently believed it was not only the right of citizens to oppose tyranny, it was their obligation. At the end of the reception, the Eritrean officials left scowling, the other Eritrean guests left beaming. American values still resonate. While the United States is by no means perfect, just as no person is perfect, we need to continue to aspire to that “more perfect union,” as the Constitution puts it. So on the Fourth of July, enjoy the fireworks, fly the flag, and share a Sam Adams beer with your British and Canadian friends.

Ron McMullen, a graduate of Drake University and a former U.S. diplomat, teaches political science at the University of Iowa.