A compact signed belowdecks. A general's letter after an ambush. A diary kept by a president turning fifty. A phone call from a hijacked plane. Read them here in the words of the people who wrote them — in order, start to finish — and discover the Secret of America's Greatness.
Something besides geography and good luck explains how a small, quarrelsome experiment in self-government grew into a great power — and you can trace it, if you look, through the nation's own paper trail.
What follows are seventeen of those documents, gathered in chronological order and left to speak for themselves: compacts, letters, diary entries, inaugural addresses, a postage stamp, a transcript of a phone call. Their authors did not always agree with one another, and several of them would have been startled to find themselves in the same collection. Read on, and judge the thread for yourself.
Nine documents from the century that planted the colonies, fought a revolution, and wrote the rules of a new republic. Pilgrims, generals, and Founders alike tend to narrate their own story as a providential one.
Before a single Pilgrim set foot on land, forty-one men crowded belowdecks and signed a hundred-word agreement to govern themselves by law rather than force.
"Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia."Read the source ↗
A twenty-three-year-old militia officer survived an ambush that killed most of the men around him, and wrote home trying to explain how.
"By the all-powerful dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability and expectation; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, altho' death was levelling my companions on every side."Read the source ↗
Twenty years before he helped declare independence, a twenty-year-old schoolteacher named John Adams used his diary to imagine a country run on one book.
"Suppose a nation in some distant Region, should take the Bible for their only law Book, and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited… What a Eutopia, what a Paradise would this region be."Read the source ↗
Across the river from her son's boyhood home, Mary Ball Washington is remembered as having prayed alone here for years while George led the Continental Army.
"Here Mary Ball Washington prayed for the safety of her son and country during the dark days of the Revolution."Read the source ↗
Handing back his sword at the end of the war he'd just won, Washington's farewell letter to the states reads less like a victory speech than a sermon.
"I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you…to do Justice, to love mercy…which were the Characteristicks of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy Nation."Read the source ↗
Eighty-one years old and watching the convention stall into bitter deadlock, Franklin rose with a handwritten speech and one practical request: open each morning with prayer.
"I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth — that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?"Read the source ↗
Answering a Rhode Island synagogue's letter of welcome, the new president wrote one of the earliest American statements that a religious minority should expect equal standing, not mere tolerance.
"May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."Read the source ↗
"But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken it."
Read Micah 4 ↗
The man remembered for "give me liberty or give me death" spent the final lines of his estate inventory on an inheritance that wasn't land or money.
"This is all the Inheritance I can give to my dear family. The religion of Christ can give them one which will make them rich indeed."Read the source ↗
Four documents from the decades the young nation spent proving it could survive itself — a contested election, a president's private reckoning, and a war that nearly broke the compact in two.
Sworn in after one of the bitterest elections the young republic had yet seen, Adams opened his address by admitting how little any single president can do alone.
"…knowing that 'except the Lord keep the city the watchman waketh but in vain,' with fervent supplications for His favor, to His overruling providence I commit…my own fate and the future destinies of my country."Read the source ↗
Turning fifty in the White House, the hardest-working president the country had yet seen used his diary to write himself a different kind of memo.
"It awakened the reflection that I had lived fifty years, and that before fifty years more would expire I would be sleeping with the generations which have gone before me…it was time for me to be putting my house in order."Read the source ↗
Three months after leaving office, and weeks before he would die of cholera, Polk asked a Presbyterian minister the question he had spent twenty years postponing.
"Sir, if I had suspected twenty years ago that I should come to my death-bed unprepared, it would have made me a wretched man…I am now about to join the Church…I go forward in the name of my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ."Read the source ↗
With the war he'd led for four years visibly ending, Lincoln used his second inaugural to refuse the easy version of who God had been rooting for.
"Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other…let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered — that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes."Read the source ↗
Four documents from a nation grown into a superpower, still reaching for the same handful of words — oaths, scripture, prayer — at its highest and lowest moments.
In the first inaugural address amplified by loudspeaker to the crowd beyond earshot, Harding opened by quoting the prophet Micah back at the country he was about to lead.
"I have taken the solemn oath of office on that passage of Holy Writ wherein it is asked: 'What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?' This I plight to God and country."Read the source ↗
Two hundred forty thousand miles from home, in the last hours of one of the hardest years in modern American memory, three astronauts in lunar orbit read the opening of Genesis to whoever was listening.
"We are now approaching lunar sunrise…In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep…And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."Read the source ↗
Trying to comfort an avowedly atheist father-in-law on his deathbed, a sitting president sat down and wrote out, by hand, the case for faith as he understood it.
"We've been promised this is only a part of life and that a greater life, a greater glory awaits us. It awaits you together one day and all that is required is that you believe and tell God you put yourself in his hands."Read the source ↗
Somewhere over Pennsylvania, a passenger asked a stranger on the other end of an airphone line to pray the Lord's Prayer with him — then said three words that became a kind of epitaph.
"Todd: Jesus help me! A few of us passengers are getting together. I think we're going to jump the guy with the bomb!…Yes. I'm going to have to go out on faith, because at this point, I don't have much of a choice…Let's roll!"Read the source ↗
If these seventeen documents share a single thread, it may run through three older verses than any of them:
"When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn."
"Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people."
"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land."
Adapted from the poster series "The Secret of America's Greatness." Quotations are drawn from primary historical documents, letters, diaries, and public records; sources, dates, and locations are noted with each entry as represented in that series.