On the occasion of its 250th birthday this July 4, amid the usual fireworks, state fairs, battle re-enactments, parades and backyard barbecues that define Independence Day celebrations, America is a country reflecting on its founding ideals in an era of division and reinvention.

In a sense, this is history repeating. In 1776, America was forged in a spasm of division and reinvention, when 56 members of the recently convened Continental Congress of Britain’s 13 colonies accused King George III of tyranny, split from the mother country and declared independence.

The colonialists won the war that had begun the previous year and, in the terms of the peace deal signed in Paris on Sept. 2, 1783, Britain formally recognized the birth of a new nation: the United States of America.

If America’s birth pains were severe, its growth was equally agonizing, with its expansion westward carried out at the barrel of a gun and at the expense of the native Americans, referred to in the Declaration of Independence as “the merciless Indian Savages.”

One of the contradictions inherent in the Declaration — and at the core of some of the divisions in American society that continue to this day — was its assertion that “all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

Yet many of the men who endorsed that statement were slave owners, a glaring hypocrisy that festered at the heart of the new nation for almost a century until, in 1861, it erupted into a brutal civil war.

The four-year war claimed a quarter of a million........

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