by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.

America turns 250 today and somewhere and somewhere, Lee Greenwood is cashing another royalty check.

So in honor of the semiquincentennial — try saying that five times real fast — here are 14 things about the founding they probably didn’t teach you in school.

Consider this your Fourth of July cheat sheet.

  1. The first man to die for American independence was Black. Crispus Attucks — African and Wampanoag descent — was killed at the Boston Massacre in 1770, five years before Lexington and Concord. The revolution’s first martyr couldn’t have voted in the country he died for. Let that marinate.
  2. The French basically paid for the whole thing. More than a billion livres in loans, gifts, guns, and gunpowder. At Yorktown, the French actually outnumbered the Americans. The bill helped bankrupt the French monarchy and set off their own revolution. You’re welcome, Louis.
  3. Independence Day is arguably July 2. That’s when the Continental Congress actually voted for independence. July 4 is just the date on the paperwork. John Adams predicted July 2 would be celebrated for generations with pomp and parade. Right idea, wrong day. It happens to the best of us.
  4. Almost nobody signed the Declaration on July 4. Most delegates signed on August 2, 1776. Some signed even later. Government deadlines were flexible back then, too.
  5. The first country to recognize American independence was Morocco. Sultan Mohammed III opened his ports to American ships in 1777, and that treaty of friendship is still America’s longest unbroken treaty relationship. That’s right — a Muslim nation was America’s first friend, back when we were broke, outgunned, and needed one. Something to keep in mind the next time somebody tells you (Mr. Lt. Governor) Islam is incompatible with American values. Muslims were on Team America before there was a Team America. This whiskey-drinking, cigar-smoking Muslim appreciates the symmetry.
  6. A Prussian who barely spoke English built our army. Baron von Steuben showed up at Valley Forge, wrote the drill manual, and cursed at the troops through a translator. It worked. Some management styles are universal.
  7. A Polish engineer left his American fortune to free enslaved people. Thaddeus Kosciuszko, hero of Saratoga, willed his U.S. estate to purchase the freedom and education of enslaved Americans. His executor was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson never carried it out. Make of that what you will.
  8. An enslaved man was the spy who helped win Yorktown. James Armistead posed as a runaway, infiltrated Cornwallis’s camp, and fed intelligence to Lafayette. Then he had to petition Virginia for his own freedom. He got it — and took Lafayette’s name in gratitude.
  9. Roughly 5,000 Black soldiers fought for the Revolution. Rhode Island fielded an integrated regiment. Meanwhile, the British offered freedom to the enslaved who fought for the Crown — and thousands took that deal. Liberty was complicated in 1776. It usually is.
  10. Women bankrolled and fought in the Revolution. Esther Reed’s Ladies Association of Philadelphia raised the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars for Washington’s troops — the largest fundraising drive of the war. Deborah Sampson disguised herself as a man, enlisted, fought, and dug a musket ball out of her own leg to avoid being discovered. And Abigail Adams told her husband to “remember the ladies” while writing the new laws. He didn’t. It took another 144 years and the 19th Amendment to fix that one.
  11. Native Americans fought on both sides — and fed Washington’s army. The Revolution split the Iroquois Confederacy, the oldest democracy on the continent. The Oneida sided with the Americans, and when the Continental Army was starving at Valley Forge, they walked hundreds of miles to deliver corn. An Oneida woman named Polly Cooper stayed to teach the soldiers how to cook it and refused payment. Congress has formally acknowledged the Confederacy’s influence on the Constitution itself. The first Americans were, in fact, the first Americans.
  12. A ragtag army beat the world’s superpower with guerrilla tactics. Washington learned early he couldn’t beat the British head-on, so he stopped trying — hit-and-run raids, strategic retreats, and letting the world’s most expensive army exhaust itself chasing shadows. Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” ran an insurgency out of the Carolina swamps that drove Cornwallis to distraction. Two centuries later, Ho Chi Minh opened Vietnam’s own declaration of independence by quoting ours — word for word. He read the whole manual.
  13. Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration attacked the slave trade. He called it a “cruel war against human nature itself.” Congress cut the passage to keep South Carolina and Georgia on board. The first big legislative compromise in American history, and it was a doozy.
  14. As many as one in five colonists sided with the King. Tens of thousands of Americans fought for the British, and tens of thousands more packed up for Canada when it was over. The Revolution was also a civil war. We just don’t put that part in the musical.
  15. George Washington ordered the mass inoculation of the Continental Army. Smallpox was killing more of his soldiers than the British were, so in 1777 he had the whole army inoculated. Historians credit the order with saving the war. The father of our country, ladies and gentlemen.
  16. The Liberty Bell didn’t ring on July 4, 1776. It likely rang July 8, for the first public reading of the Declaration. And nobody called it the Liberty Bell until abolitionists gave it the name in the 1830s. Branding matters.
  17. Some of Washington’s own officers wanted to make him king. In 1782, Colonel Lewis Nicola wrote Washington suggesting he take a crown. Washington fired back that no occurrence of the war had given him more painful sensations and ordered the idea banished. Think about that. We fought an eight-year war to get rid of a king, and the first instinct of some folks was to install a new one. Washington said no — twice, if you count walking away after two terms. That refusal might be the most important thing he ever did.
  18. Seven years after ratifying the First Amendment, Congress made criticizing the government a crime. The Sedition Act of 1798 criminalized “false, scandalous and malicious” writing against the government, the Congress, or President Adams. Editors went to jail. A congressman went to jail. Some of the men who voted for it had signed the Declaration. The founders wrote free speech into the Constitution and then prosecuted people for using it before the ink was dry. As a First Amendment attorney, I’d call that job security.
  19. The fireworks you’ll watch tonight? Invented in China. Gunpowder and fireworks date back more than a thousand years to Tang dynasty China — the Chinese were lighting up the sky centuries before anyone in Philadelphia had the idea. When John Adams predicted independence would be celebrated with “illuminations from one end of this continent to the other,” he was calling for a Chinese invention to celebrate American freedom. Globalization: it’s older than we are.
  20. Adams and Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826 — the 50th anniversary, hours apart. Adams’s last words were “Thomas Jefferson survives.” He was wrong. Jefferson had died that morning. Even at the end, the two of them couldn’t agree on the facts.

So there you have it. The story is messier than the mythology. Good. A country that can survive its own contradictions for two and a half centuries has earned the fireworks.

Happy birthday,  America!  You’re a grand old nation.

Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the Editor and Publisher of IndyPolitics.org. Just wait until he writes about America’s 300th birthday — he plans to be here for it, or at least have his consciousness uploaded to the cloud. That’s the American innovation we celebrate today, too. Just call him “Skynet.”