U.S. History at My Father’s Knee

My father was only high school-educated, but he was an ardent student of the history of our nation who felt privileged to live in an historic city, central to the forming of our country — Philadelphia.

When I was a young girl, in the 1940s and early ’50s, Dad would take me on Sundays by bus (we never owned a car) into the city to visit its colonial history. We visited Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed by the 56 men of the Second Continental Congress, striking the chord of freedom of the Liberty Bell (now resting in a separate shrine of its own).

We saw Ben Franklin’s first Post Office and the Betsy Ross house, a historic place even if there’s no documentation that she really did create the first flag of the incipient nation. Dad told me of the colonies’ struggles to gain independence from England, and the war they fought for freedom.

Philadelphia’s City Hall is topped by a statue of William Penn, the Quaker founder of the Province of Pennsylvania in 1681, establishing a safe haven for Quakers, Catholics, Jews and other persecuted groups. His writings and the colony’s founding principles heavily influenced the framers of the U.S. Constitution. Penn insisted on purchasing indigenous land at fair prices, not stealing it from the native Lenape people, and established a lasting peace treaty.

My dad and I walked along the surviving cobblestone streets, past the colonial brick-fronted row houses with marble stoops swayed in the middle, worn under the tread of booted British soldiers billeted in these commandeered private houses, and from the feet of colonialists, and ensuing 250 years of Americans.

I grew up steeped in this living history of defiance of the king’s rule — Boston’s Tea Party and the War for Independence fought by untrained farmers and merchants against musket-and-bayonet-armed soldiers. Unable to defend Philadelphia, Washington led his 12,000-man army into winter quarters at Valley Forge, approximately 18 miles northwest of the city. Between Dec. 19, 1777, and June 19, 1778, 1,700 to 2,000 soldiers died from disease, malnutrition and cold, wet weather as the Continental Army retrained and reorganized for counterattacks against the British.

Dad related to me stories of the young new nation and its struggle for freedom, breathed this into my young lungs and through my skin. It was proud history, alive in my dad’s mind, spoken aloud in his own ruminations. I, his audience, came to understand the massive accomplishment of gaining the freedom of self-rule and the ever-tenuous challenge of keeping this sacred right, each of us to have a vote in the combined fate of all Americans — a right even now under assault and in need of defense.

I pray we can keep our democracy as Franklin cautioned, for I am nothing if not an American patriot, and my father’s daughter.

Nancy Lee lives in Indianola.