Lately, I’ve been rethinking my feelings about the American Revolution. What if we had lost that war? Presumably, we would have remained a part of the British empire. We would have remained a part of the empire that began abolishing slavery in the early 1800’s. We didn’t abolish it until a horrible Civil War in the 1860’s. And nobody can say that slaves were freed in the sense of enjoying citizenship like white Americans did. Certainly not in my native Tennessee.

Heroes of the American Revolution like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and didn’t seem bothered by owning humans as possessions.

A few decades later in Britain, William Wilberforce and others fought to end the British slave trade, but we were no longer a part of the empire that would begin to end that trade.

Certainly, inflicting German troops on the colonies as the British did in the years leading up to the Revolution wasn’t the wisest move on the part of Britain. Mistakes, as they say, were made.

Nevertheless, I think my celebration of the next 4th of July will call for a different kind of reflection: Perhaps a bit of repentance might be a part of it.