Robert Tsai surveys a history of re-declarations of American independence after 1776, from the Republic of Indian Stream to the New Afrikan movement:
[T]here are drawbacks to Americans’ maverick streak. The notion that a group of citizens can claim to speak on behalf of all or most Americans isdestabilizing—as is the idea that sometimes the best way to improve on our political system is to start from scratch. But the revolutionary spirit can also be constructive, and in some cases separatists’ ideas have ultimately helped reshape American law, even if their actual independence efforts failed. When leaders of the major native American tribes living in Indian Territory met and wrote a constitution for their planned State of Sequoyah in 1905, they captured inhabitants’ grievances so perfectly that their plan subsequently became the model for Oklahoma’s constitution. The Indian-led independence movement spurred the creation of lasting government institutions and revitalized local politics.
If there is one lesson to be learned this Fourth of July, it is that the story of America is not that of a single revolution, but of a powerful revolutionary impulse that can never be quashed. The triumph of the Founders’ achievement isn’t that it happened once, and ended: It’s that it led to a system that has survived, even fostered, 230 years of challenges to its authority. For the rest of the world, the American legacy has not been the substance of the Constitution, which has so often been rejected, but rather the model of revolutionary action that it provides. To see history this way is also to understand that the law is not given or inalterable, but rather shaped by human hands—or, more accurately, a hand grasping a pen.
(Image of Oklahoma statehood bill, as originally introduced to the House in 1906, via the National Archives)
The Dish 
