Every Independence Day, the United States returns to a familiar vocabulary: liberty, equality, popular sovereignty, resistance to tyranny. The words are so deeply embedded in the American national story that they can appear less like political principles than historical facts. Yet the founding of the United States contained a contradiction that has never been fully resolved. The republic was established in the language of universal rights while simultaneously constructing a political order that excluded enormous numbers of people from those rights. Indigenous nations were not simply unfortunate bystanders to that process. Their dispossession was central to the expansion of the new country, and the institutions developed to manage that expansion left a lasting imprint on American ideas about territory, sovereignty and executive power.
That does not mean that the United States was simply a dictatorship disguised as a democracy, nor that the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence were meaningless. The more uncomfortable historical reality is that the American founding created two systems at once. One was a representative political system that, despite severe limitations, established mechanisms of elections, constitutional government and checks on authority. The other was an expanding continental empire whose growth depended on the removal, containment and political subordination of Indigenous peoples. The tension between these two traditions was never fully eliminated. In different forms, it continues to influence American politics.
The Declaration of Independence itself captures the contradiction. Americans are taught to remember its assertion that human beings possess inherent rights and that legitimate government derives its authority from the governed. Less frequently discussed is the document’s catalogue of grievances against King George III, which includes a reference to “merciless Indian savages.” The phrase was not an accidental insult inserted into an otherwise universal document. It reflected the worldview of colonists who regarded Indigenous resistance to territorial expansion as a major obstacle to their political and economic ambitions.
Land was one of the central questions behind the American break with Britain. British authorities had attempted, with varying degrees of seriousness and effectiveness, to restrict colonial expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountains, particularly after the costly Seven Years’ War. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 sought to limit unauthorized settlement west of the Appalachians and to preserve a degree of separation between colonial communities and Indigenous nations. For many colonists, however, western territory represented economic opportunity, social mobility and the future of the emerging country. Independence therefore was not simply a revolt against taxation or parliamentary authority. It also opened the possibility of removing imperial restrictions on expansion.
That does not reduce the American Revolution to a land grab. The conflict involved genuine constitutional disputes, political philosophy and opposition to imperial rule. But the territorial dimension is essential because it explains why the United States could simultaneously celebrate self-government and pursue policies that denied meaningful political autonomy to Indigenous peoples. The contradiction was not merely rhetorical. It was institutional.
A Republic Expanding Through Empire
The founders faced a problem that would become characteristic of American history: how could a government claim legitimacy from popular consent while extending its authority over populations that had never consented to being governed by it?
The answer developed gradually. Indigenous nations were sometimes treated as sovereign diplomatic entities, particularly when treaties served American interests. At other times, federal and state authorities treated them as obstacles to settlement and national development. Treaties could recognize Indigenous territorial rights and later be violated or superseded. Military force, legal mechanisms, land purchases and coercive removal all became instruments of territorial expansion.
The result was not a single, coherent policy but a recurring pattern. American sovereignty expanded faster than the political rights of the people living within the territory claimed by the United States. The contradiction became especially visible during the nineteenth century, when policies of removal pushed Native communities away from their ancestral lands while the government presented territorial expansion as the natural progress of a democratic republic.
This history matters because it complicates the conventional distinction between democracy and authoritarianism. Americans often imagine authoritarian government as something imposed from outside – monarchy, dictatorship or foreign political influence – while democracy is treated as the country’s native political condition. But American history demonstrates that democratic institutions can coexist with highly coercive systems when political rights are distributed unevenly.
The United States could hold elections and maintain constitutional checks on federal power while simultaneously conducting military campaigns against Indigenous nations. Congress could debate legislation in an increasingly representative political system while federal authorities forcibly relocated entire communities. The existence of democratic institutions did not automatically make every exercise of state power democratic.
This is perhaps the most important distinction obscured by simplified accounts of the American founding. The question is not whether America was “really” a democracy or “really” an empire. For much of its history, it was both.
The Frontier as a Laboratory of Power
The frontier also helped shape the American relationship with military power. Before the United States became a global superpower, territorial expansion required a state capable of maintaining forts, raising armies, negotiating treaties and enforcing federal authority over enormous distances. The frontier was repeatedly portrayed as a dangerous zone in which exceptional measures were necessary because ordinary political institutions supposedly could not provide security.
That logic has echoes in later American history. The language changes, the targets change and the legal justifications evolve, but the underlying argument can remain recognizable: extraordinary threats require extraordinary powers, and extraordinary powers are easier to justify when the people affected are politically marginalized.
This does not mean that contemporary American military or immigration policy is simply a continuation of nineteenth-century Indian policy. Such comparisons can become historically careless. The United States today operates under a vastly different constitutional and international framework, and modern federal institutions are constrained by courts, elections, Congress, the press and civil society in ways that did not exist in comparable form during earlier periods.
Yet historical institutions leave precedents behind. The federal government’s extensive authority over Indigenous affairs created a distinctive legal tradition in which sovereignty could be asserted over communities without granting them the same political status as citizens. The frontier also normalized the idea that national security and territorial expansion could justify exceptional state power.
That legacy deserves attention precisely because the United States is now confronting renewed debates about executive authority, immigration enforcement, domestic military deployments and the limits of presidential power. It would be simplistic to claim that current policies are merely repetitions of the past. It is more useful to ask why certain forms of coercive government have historically been easier to accept when directed at populations portrayed as threats, outsiders or people standing outside the political community.
The Myth of a Finished Democracy
The American national narrative often treats democracy as something the founders created in finished form and subsequent generations merely expanded. The historical record suggests something much more complicated. Political participation was initially restricted by race, sex, property and status. Slavery existed at the heart of the republic. Indigenous peoples were largely excluded from the political community. Women lacked the vote. Many working-class Americans faced substantial barriers to political participation.
American democracy was therefore not a completed invention in 1776 or 1787. It was an unfinished struggle over who counted as part of “the people.”
That distinction is particularly important today because political arguments about democracy frequently assume that there is a single, uncontested American tradition to defend. In reality, there have always been competing traditions. One emphasizes constitutional restraint, individual rights and representative government. Another emphasizes national expansion, executive authority, security and the power of the state to determine who belongs within the political community.
Both traditions have existed within American institutions for centuries.
The conflict between them can be seen in moments when the government claims exceptional authority in response to perceived threats. During wartime, immigration crises or periods of domestic unrest, Americans repeatedly confront the same question: are constitutional protections universal, or can they be suspended for particular groups when national security is invoked?
The historical treatment of Indigenous peoples provides an uncomfortable answer. American political institutions have repeatedly demonstrated that rights can be defined differently for different populations while the country continues to describe itself as free.
Why This History Matters Now
The value of revisiting this history is not to produce a simple indictment of the United States. Nor is it to suggest that contemporary America is equivalent to the colonial or nineteenth-century state. Such comparisons flatten history and obscure the enormous expansion of American citizenship and civil rights over the past two and a half centuries.
The deeper lesson is that democracy is not protected merely by celebrating democratic ideals. It depends on whether institutions apply those ideals consistently, especially when doing so is politically inconvenient.
The unresolved Indigenous question therefore remains more than a historical grievance. It is a test of how Americans understand sovereignty itself. Indigenous nations continue to possess forms of legal and political status rooted in treaties and federal law, yet that sovereignty exists within a political system whose territorial expansion historically depended upon reducing Indigenous control over land. The contradiction has never completely disappeared.
This is why the story of American democracy cannot begin and end with Philadelphia, the Declaration or the Constitution. It must also include the territories beyond the early republic, the treaties that were signed and broken, the wars fought on the frontier and the communities displaced in the name of national expansion.
America did build a democracy. But it did not build only a democracy.
It built a republic inside an expanding empire, and for generations the two systems operated simultaneously. The country’s political development has largely been the story of trying to reconcile – and repeatedly failing to fully reconcile – those competing inheritances.
The question confronting Americans today is therefore not whether the country has always been democratic or whether its founding ideals were fraudulent. The more consequential question is which part of the American inheritance will determine the future: the principle that government derives its legitimacy from the consent and rights of the governed, or the older tradition that allows political power to expand while placing some populations beyond the full protection of those principles.
Independence Day celebrates the moment Americans declared that governments could not legitimately rule people without their consent. The unfinished history of Indigenous America asks the country to confront the obvious contradiction: for much of its own history, the United States applied that principle selectively.
Two and a half centuries later, the central challenge is not to abandon the democratic story, but to make it honest enough to include the people whom that story once excluded. That is a more demanding form of patriotism than celebration alone, because it requires Americans to recognize that democracy was never a finished achievement. It was, and remains, an argument over who possesses rights, who possesses sovereignty and whose consent actually matters.
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