Thomas, Napoleon, and Henry

Everyone agrees that Henry Leverseege would have become much more famous had he lived beyond 29. But even though he died young, his paintings hang in museums across England. There is only one of them in private hands.

Mine. A

Henry was born in 1803, the year that Thomas Jefferson famously negotiated the Louisiana Purchase with Napoleon Bonaparte. I say “famously” because Jefferson was fully aware that an American President had no authority to acquire territory in this way.

Ohio became the 17th state during those negotiations.

Want to hear something funny? Jefferson’s original goal was only to purchase the port city of New Orleans. But Bonaparte needed cash and Jefferson wasn’t an idiot, so as soon as the ink was dry he sent Lewis and Clark on their famous journey across our virgin continent. (I say “our” continent because the ownership of land was a foreign concept to Native Americans, so we just conveniently ignored any claim they might have to the property. Later, when they got fussy, we killed them.)

Forty-six years after the Louisiana Purchase, gold was discovered in California and westward expansion accelerated like a Southwest Airlines 737 after leaving the gate 8 minutes late.

The last time I flew Southwest, our pilot pushed our plane down the runway so hard I could feel the corners of my mouth pulling back to my earlobes. The woman sitting next to me thought I was an actor getting ready to play The Joker in a Batman movie.

As a young boy in a public-school classroom, I was taught that America was created by visionary “Founding Fathers” who saw the future and courageously paid the price for it. It’s a pretty story, but even a casual student of history can see that the early years of our young nation were as freckle-faced and awkward as a bucktoothed Romeo.

(I hesitated writing that last sentence, but Indy insisted. Blame him.)

Our nation is not the result of a grand plan. We are the product of a series of reactions to circumstances and a lot of stumbling and bumbling into happy accidents.

I’m proud of us.

Not the part about the Indians or the enslavement of Africans or the forced relocation of more than 60,000 American citizens of Japanese descent during WW II, but the rest of it. You know, the Charles Lindberg, Neil Armstrong part.

I see us real and I love us anyway.

I hope you do, too.

Can we please quit fighting now?

Roy H. Williams