What Makes Us One People

In today's Letter from an Ohio Farmer, the Farmer talks about what makes us one people, in the sense as it was understood by the Founders when they appealed to the authority of the "one People" in the opening sentence of the Declaration of Independence and the "People" in the Preamble of the Constitution.  Here is the Farmer on what unites us: 

As I recalled in a previous letter, Thomas Jefferson once described the Declaration of Independence as an "expression of the American mind." He didn't say the American "heart" or even the American "character"—but the American mind. That’s important. Our heart feels emotion; character is made up of habits and dispositions. But the mind holds our ideas and principles—the ideas and principles that shape our characters and govern our emotions and lead us to choose to live as we do. That is what unites Americans at the deepest level, binds us together as "one People," and makes us the distinctive people we are.

Americans do certainly have important emotions and habits in common. We are famous for loving our country, for example, in a way that strikes some other people as too exuberant. And we are known to be habitually optimistic: for an American, the glass is almost always half full. But those sentiments and attitudes are the products of the ruling principles that united us in 1776 and still do today. We love our country because it stands for freedom. We are optimistic because freedom makes us think that we can do anything we set our minds to.

As Lincoln showed us, we could not simply narrow the principles enunciated in the Declaration to apply only to Englishman and English speaking peoples; that would render the principles of the Declaration nothing more than statements of custom and tradition and make it no permanent standard by which to judge anything true of false, right or wrong.  What makes us one people is our adherence to these principles, no matter our race, gender, or religion.