A Salute to America

Author: U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio

Two hundred and fifty years ago today, in a brick hall in Philadelphia, our forefathers declared their independence from the most powerful empire on earth.

They were not fools. They knew exactly what the words on that parchment would mean. They knew that in that moment, they were convicting themselves of treason in the eyes of their mother country – and that the penalty for treason was death.

And so at the bottom of that document, beneath the soaring words about self-evident truths and the rights of man, they wrote one final sentence: “With a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Their lives, their fortunes, and their honor – everything they had and everything they were. All of it was on the line.

Think about the kind of men we’re talking about here. It’s easy to forget: These were not impoverished, destitute paupers with nothing to lose. They were some of the most successful and prosperous men of their day. Lawyers, merchants, wealthy landowners and planters – men with families, with farms, with fortunes.

Common sense would dictate that they would be the last to lead a revolution – let alone risk everything, including their lives, to do it.

But they did it anyways.

And they did it against impossible odds.

On one side was the British Empire – the most formidable power the world had ever seen. On the other was a scattering of colonies at the final edge of the known world, with a small agricultural economy and a ragtag force of poorly trained farmers and militiamen – what one British General at the time scoffed at as “a preposterous parade” and “a rabble in arms.”

Very few people in 1776 believed these American rebels stood a fighting chance. Across the Atlantic, the elites in Great Britain dismissed them as a minor nuisance, and nothing more. The cabinet minister for the Royal Navy declared that “the very sound of a cannon would carry them off…as fast as their feet could carry them.” General James Grant – the former royal governor of East Florida – boasted to the House of Commons that he knew the Americans very well, and “they would never dare to face an English army.” King George himself predicted that “once those rebels have felt a smart blow, they will submit.”

The early months of the war seemed to prove them right. George Washington’s army was brave, but hungry, untrained, and poorly supplied. They had left their farms, shops, and frontier settlements to fight for their country – only to lurch from defeat to devastating defeat.

By December of 1776, the Revolution was near collapse. The Continental Army had been chased out of New York, across New Jersey, and into Pennsylvania – beaten and freezing in the frigid northeastern winter. The army itself was rapidly shrinking in size. That month, George Washington wrote to his brother: “I think the game is pretty nearly up.” Unless something changed, the cause of independence would die, the rebellion would be crushed, and the men who had risked everything to lead it would be hanged as traitors to the Crown.

But they did not surrender. That’s not what Americans do.

On Christmas night, Washington gathered what remained of his army and crossed the icy Delaware River under the cover of darkness. His men marched through the night with broken shoes and rags wrapped around their feet, leaving blood in the snow. At Trenton, they struck. A few days later, at Princeton, they struck again.

Two resounding victories – and the aura of inevitable British victory began to crack.

Still, one miracle was not enough to carry the patriots to victory. The war dragged on. The next year, the British captured Philadelphia, and the Continental Congress was forced to flee. Washington’s army staggered into their winter quarters at Valley Forge – starving, freezing, and barely clothed, sleeping in huts they had built with their own hands. There, in that brutal winter, something extraordinary happened. The Continental Army did not collapse. It was transformed into a disciplined, hardened, professional fighting force: trained by Prussian officers, bound together by common sacrifice, the Americans emerged – against all odds – as an army that could bring down an empire, powered by an unbreakable belief in the country they were bringing into being.

Every American knows what happened next.

From the beginning, Americans have done the impossible. It is who we are. It runs in our people’s blood.

It is the deepest and most fundamental feature of the American soul, dating back long before the Revolution. We saw it in the wood forts of Jamestown, in the first colonies of Plymouth, on the decks of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria carrying Christopher Columbus across the Atlantic to the shores of a new world. It is a spirit that scoffs at constraints, that yearns for new frontiers; a boundless ambition to do what others can’t, to go where others won’t, to venture out into the darkness and find what lies beyond the horizon.

America was not a clean break from the past, but the culmination of an ancient story that began millennia ago. We owe much of ourselves to the very country our Founders went to war with 250 years ago: As President Trump said earlier this year, “this land was settled and forged by men [whose] veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage”; whose language, culture, and fierce love of liberty was a “majestic inheritance” from their ancestors across the sea. Our destiny was shaped, over centuries, in the kingdoms and empires of Europe, before bursting forth onto this continent to build a new world in its image. Its seeds were planted by the philosophers of Athens, the imperial majesty of Rome, the monks and kings of medieval Christendom – centuries of European exploration, science, faith, and restless ambition finally unleashed from every constraint on the boundless American frontier.

America was the destiny of an entire civilization. It was here, in our country, where thousands of years of history came to fruition, and painted the fullness of their promise on the blank canvas of a new world.

And look at what that has wrought.

In a mere two and a half centuries – a blink of an eye, in the full view of history – Americans have blown past any and every precedent that came before us. From microchips and atoms to railroads and rockets, across every new frontier and plane of human progress, we not only transformed a wild and unmapped land into the most powerful nation on earth; we carried the whole of mankind into a new age of history.

We didn’t do these things because we had to. We did them because we could. Because no one else had ever done them before. Because Americans have always been pioneers – the sons and daughters of the frontier. There is nowhere we can’t go. There is nothing we can’t do.

And for us, the frontier has never closed. When we ran out of land at the westward edge of this continent, we began to build upward – airplanes and skyscrapers that pierced the horizon. When we ran out of sky, we went further still, building machines that could carry us to the moon.

Now, we stand at the dawn of another new age, filled with new frontiers and possibilities that our forefathers could scarcely have dreamed. And just as we have in every chapter that came before, Americans will lead this one, too.

We Americans are the creating people: the spirit of world history is here, on this land, in our hands.

This is who we are. For 250 years, this has been a land of miracles, where larger-than-life men have done larger-than-life things. Tonight, we rededicate ourselves to our country, and to the sacred duty of ensuring that America’s future will be every bit as proud as her past.

Marco Rubio was sworn in as the 72nd Secretary of State on January 21, 2025. The Secretary is creating a Department of State that puts America First.