The fourth and final Center for Constructive Alternatives of the 2025-2026 academic year explored the relevance of the American Revolution and founding in anticipation of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
The CCA began on Sunday, March 1, and ran through the evening of Wednesday, March 4. Hillsdale faculty and outside speakers discussed the context of the revolution, and many of them drew a distinction between the revolution and the founding. Most of the speakers emphasized that a lot of the colonists did not think they were creating anything new, but rather acted as they thought as British citizens.
Matthew Spalding, vice president of Washington operations and dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government, spoke on “The Story of Our Declaration of Independence.”
“The American founders understood them to be a part of those human events stretching back before them and ahead of them,” Spalding said. “The united colonies of British North America were going to war against the most powerful nation in the world. And what stretched back before them is actually our inheritance as well. The Greeks and the Romans, the medievals, the whole Christian tradition, and of course, the whole long and painfully divisive history of British constitutionalism, the Civil wars, the strife.”
Author Walter R. Borneman spoke about “Lexington and Concord: The First Battles of the Revolution” on March 1.
Historian John Steele Gordon gave a speech titled “The Economics of the Revolution,” and Mark Edward Lender, historian and professor emeritus of history at Kean University, spoke on “Keys to Victory in the Revolution” on March 2.
Kevin Slack, associate professor of politics, summarized the history of Election Day sermons in early America in a speech titled “Sermons of the Revolutionary Era” on March 3.
“The role of the sermons was first to instruct magistrates, the new deputies, and the public on their duties to God and the community,” Slack said. “They frequently drew on Old Testament themes. Many warned of divine punishment for public and private sins. That’s how you knew you were in covenant with God — when God punished your society if it deviated from the right path.”
Bringing the people back to God during the founding was another common topic, Slack said.
“A second important function was reconciliation to remind the people and leaders of a higher purpose of their political covenant, the religious language to bind, to tie, and to unite the people in a common moral order,” Slack said “God was not of one party or another.”
At the time of the founding, Slack said, there was little separation between religion and the revolutionary cause.
“Bishop James Madison, the cousin of the U.S. president and President of William and Mary College during the Revolution, sometimes prayed the Lord’s Prayer a ‘Thy Republic come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,’” Slack said. “American clergy actually fought in the war. Paul Revere’s ride was to the home of Rev. Jonas Clarke in Lexington, where he was lodging Patriot leaders John Hancock and Sam Adams. Hearing of the British Regulars, Hancock and Adams asked Clarke whether the people would fight, to which he replied, ‘I have trained them for this very hour.’”
Slack said the revolution was not against Great Britain, but against Britain’s rejection of its own principles.
“John Adams is asked about the war, and he says, ‘but what do we mean by the American revolution?’” Slack said. “The revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people, a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations, while the king and all in authority under him were believed to govern in justice and mercy according to the laws and constitutions derived to them from the God of nature and transmitted to them by their ancestors.”
Gordon S. Wood, author and professor of history emeritus at Brown University, urged Americans to consider the context in which the Founders acted.
“Slavery is inconceivable to us,” Wood said. “So atonement is everywhere in our writings. In other words, we can’t really imagine a past in which slavery was taken for granted and was thought to be just another base status in a hierarchy of degrees among freedom.”
The 1619 Project was like the “Lost Cause” movement in that both tried to reintegrate the South after the Civil War. Both projects, Wood said, are not history.
“It’s something we’ve gone through, and atonement is the source of it, but it’s not history, and I think most honest historians would acknowledge that fact now,” Wood said.
In considering America’s Founding period, Wood said, Americans understand its context.
“What you’ve got to do as a historian is get back to a period where slavery was taken for granted,” Wood said. “It’s just so hard to do, but if you start with that, then you realize what happened in the revolution was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a group of states, and they were the northern states where slavery was not substantial, but was legally established, outlawed, eliminated slavery legally. That’s the first example in the history of the world.”
The CCA ended with a faculty roundtable March 4, including Thomas I. Treloar, chairman and professor of mathematics; Jason Gehrke, assistant professor of history; Kevin Portteus, professor of politics; Nathan Schlueter, professor of philosophy; and Anna Vincenzi, assistant professor of modern European history.
“If there was one shared feature among the colonies before independence, I would say that it was their British identity,” Vincenzi said. “Colonists took pride in enjoying the rights of Englishmen.”
