The Statue of Liberty has come to seem as much a part of America as the Grand Canyon. The oldest rocks of the Grand Canyon were formed by forces of nature some two billion years ago, and the Statue of Liberty, a project of mere mortals, has been around only since the end of the nineteenth century. But it came along and suddenly forever became part of the identity of the country it came into.

Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Franklin County Virginia just a few years before the Civil War began. With heroic determination, he got himself an education and went on to found the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, where he remained principal for the rest of his life. By the time Frederick Douglass died in 1895, Washington was with no comparison the most well-known and influential black American living.

Every year in August, the oldest synagogue in America—Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island—holds a public reading of a letter written by George Washington to the congregation early in his first term as the first President of the United States. The letter ranks high among the documents affirming and defining the unprecedented American experiment in religious freedom.

Israel Beilin was five years old when he and his family arrived in New York and, like the rest of the family, he spoke only Yiddish. With the help of Ellis Island clerks, printing accidents, and his own American ambition, his name would become Irving Berlin, and he would become a master of the American language and one of America’s greatest songwriters.

Isabella Beecher was outraged like many of her Boston neighbors by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law 1850. The new law, part of the Compromise of 1850, required citizens in free states to assist in the recovery of fugitive slaves under penalty of stiff fines or imprisonment. Isabella was fully occupied looking after her eleven children, but she knew someone who might be able to do something: her husband’s sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Among the many challenges to the statesmanship of the framers of the Constitution, none was more fundamental or intractable than the problem of slavery. On August 21 the Constitutional Convention, meeting in Independence Hall in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, officially took up a provision that forbade the Congress they were designing forever to tax or prohibit the importation of slaves anywhere in the United States. Heated discussion erupted immediately.

Jefferson drafted the Declaration, a committee reviewed it, corrections were made, and on July 2-4, Congress—in the midst of much other pressing business of fighting a war—edited it into the final form. They made important changes, including deletion of a passage denouncing the king of Great Britain for imposing the slave trade on America. This deleted passage sheds light on the meaning of America’s central idea, that “all men are created equal.”

Slavery has been around since the beginning of human history. It was practiced among the native peoples of north America before and after Europeans arrived, and it was legal in every American colony in the years prior to the American Revolution. Then a great historic change began, a revolution in the hearts and minds of the British colonists that would eventually make them Americans. This revolution was at its heart an anti-slavery movement.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams celebrate their last Fourth of July.

America’s greatest enemy is not the Chinese or the Russians, or some other foreign tyranny—though they might indeed kill us if we continue so fecklessly to defend ourselves. But what will they kill? The body of a country that has lost its soul, unless we do something about it. Our greatest enemy is the bad ideas that have miseducated Americans so thoroughly for so long that many of us have forgotten what it means to be a free people.