by Robbie Totten
Liberty—a word and ideal most closely associated with the Declaration of Independence—came at extraordinary human cost. The Declaration led to the American Revolution, a conflict fought not only against Great Britain but also as a civil war among colonists and a continental struggle involving Native nations and imperial powers, in which approximately one percent of the population died. Less than a century later, the political order the Declaration helped establish was violently transformed in the Civil War, fought among American states as the northern states sought to preserve that system, at a cost of roughly two to two-and-a-half percent of the population. By comparison, deaths in the two world wars—often remembered as the nation’s great sacrifices—amounted to far smaller proportions of the population, underscoring the demographic severity of the wars that framed the American founding.
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Robbie Totten, PhD, is Provost at American Jewish University. Send him mail: RTotten@aju.edu.
Isonomia Quarterly 