No Gifts of Prophesy

The men who approved and signed the Declaration of Independence did not possess any gifts of prophecy of which we are aware, but having created a nation that consisted principally of towns and farms arrayed across a thin strip of land along the Atlantic coast of North America, they probably did not foresee that in 1860, the eighty-fourth year of Independence, the United States would stretch across the continent, the settled eastern portion would extend to and across the Mississippi River, and that two states on the Pacific coast would be organized and admitted to the union. They knew about water power, steam power, and electricity – Benjamin Franklin had become an international celebrity for his experiments that established that lightning was electricity. They knew as well that large-scale manufacturing was expanding in Europe. Some of them, no doubt, regarded those factories as “dark Satanic Mills” (William Blake’s phrase from a few decades later), but we cannot reasonably expect that they would have anticipated the degree to which these mechanical forces and this means of organizing production would transform and bind the expanding nation together with a wealth of manufacturing, economical transportation, and telegraphic communication.