In August 1814, as British troops marched on Washington and President James Madison and his government fled to Virginia, a State Department clerk named Stephen Pleasanton did something that nobody asked him to do.
Pleasanton took the initiative. He didn’t wait for the passing down of orders to act.
He rushed to the offices of the Department of State and gathered the founding documents of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the correspondence of the founding fathers, wrapped them in linen sacks, loaded them onto carts, and drove them to safety in Virginia. The documents sat in a barn until the war ended. Nobody ordered him to do it. No committee convened. No institution mobilised. One man, in a moment of crisis, decided that some things were worth protecting and acted accordingly.
Almost nobody knows his name, but without him the founding documents of this great nation may no longer exist.
Embedded in that act is something that America has always understood: the most consequential decisions in history are driven by the agency of the individual.
I am not American. I was born in London. I hold Irish and British passports. By every conventional measure, America is not my country.
And yet. When I read the Declaration of Independence, I feel something that I can only describe as recognition. Recognition not for ‘my country’ but for truths that, through my own view of this world, do come as self-evident.
The organising principle of my own life is freedom. Not freedom in the abstract, not freedom as a political slogan, but freedom in its most concrete and personal form: the freedom to determine the shape of your own existence. Financial freedom. Personal freedom. Locational freedom. The freedom to build, to move, to pursue. The freedom to fail on your own terms rather than succeed on someone else’s.
This is, I would argue, the American idea in its purest form. And it did not originate with a government programme or a bureaucratic initiative. It originated with a group of men who sat down and tried to write, for the first time in human history, a system of government whose primary purpose was to protect the individual from the state rather than the other way around.
Look at the framers themselves. Jefferson was 33 when he drafted the declaration. Hamilton was 21 when he joined Washington’s staff. Madison was 36 at the Constitutional Convention. These were not elders endowed with state power, dispensing wisdom from a position of authority. They were young men with agency, an idea, and the courage to implement it.
These men understood something that most political thinkers before them had missed or deliberately ignored: that the greatest threat to human flourishing is not external chaos but internal consolidation. Not the absence of order but the concentration of power. The Constitution is not primarily a document about what government can do. It is a document about what government cannot do. Every clause that limits, separates, checks, and balances is a clause written in defence of the individual against the institution.
This is what Pleasanton’s act illustrates so perfectly. The institution was in chaos, and yet the idea survived because of one individual who took personal ownership of it.
I find this idea not just intellectually compelling but personally galvanising. Ideas, documents, principles, and enterprises survive not because of structural protection but because of the individuals who do so. Do not wait for systems to create momentum, forge your own path and take radical accountability.
That is, I think, a deeply American way to live.
On the 4th of July, I find myself thinking about what it means to be, as I have come to think of it, a spiritual American.
It means believing that the individual is not subordinate to the collective by default. That ambition is not a character flaw. That the pursuit of your own self actualisation is not selfish, and that success should be celebrated.
It means believing, as the framers did, that freedom is not given. It is built, defended, and occasionally, like a set of founding documents wrapped in linen sacks and driven through the night to a barn in Virginia, rescued by one person who decided it was worth saving.
Happy Independence Day.
Matthew Barnes is a student at Trinity College Dublin and host of the Trinity SMF Podcast.