The Declaration of Independence famously declared that “all men are created equal,” endowed with the rights to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But the document never explicitly mentions “freedom” or uses the word “American.” When it mentions “the united States of America,” “united” is left lower-case, while the concluding paragraph insists that the colonies (plural) are “Free and Independent States.”

More than a mere matter of semantics, this fact is worth reflecting on as Washington celebrates 250 years of “American freedom.” In reality, the Declaration of Independence called the United States into being as an independent political entity before defining an identity for its inhabitants or articulating who among them would be granted freedom.

This tension, between independence and freedom, has reverberated through U.S. history, shaping the country’s domestic debates and foreign policy alike. Throughout the 19th century, Americans fought over what freedom and equality meant at home. Then, in the 20th, they struggled, and often failed, to apply this new understanding to the rest of the world.

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When members of the Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia in 1776, they did so with a clear purpose: to explain why colonists were justified in taking up arms against the British Empire, why King George III correspondingly had lost the right to rule the 13 colonies, and thus why the colonies deserved independence. This was a document built on Enlightenment principles—think John Locke on the social contract and the natural rights of man.

The declaration, as historian David Armitage reminds us, was written for foreign audiences as much as colonial ones. As Thomas Jefferson later recalled, it was “an appeal to the tribunal of the world.” The point was to persuade potential European allies that this was no mere rebellion. The declaration laid out King George’s failings in a 27-point list that showed how Britain had betrayed its North American subjects.

The widely read Law of Nations (1758) insisted, “For any nation … it is enough that it should be truly sovereign and independent, that is to say, that it governs itself under its own authority and its own laws.” By declaring independence, then, the Congress asserted the United States equal to its Old World peers. This was an act of rupture but also an insistence on the people’s rights to statehood.

But “the people” was, itself, a contentious term. The Declaration of Independence began the process of establishing a functioning United States of America by insisting on its legitimacy as an independent state. But it skirted the issue of who constituted an “American people” or nation. Among the country’s early ruling classes, there was broad consensus that the state’s apparatuses were the foremost concern.

Even the declaration’s framing—“all men are created equal”—indicated that who could contribute to the independence struggle was limited. Women were clearly excluded, as were Black and Indigenous Americans. Even white men did not count evenly among “the people.” Many U.S. states continued to stipulate that male voters had to own property, even after the end of the war. Many men did not have the necessary skills to run for office. In other words, equality was neither necessary nor inevitable among the people.

It was in the public sphere, rather than in initial policymaking, that a sense of shared identity began to circulate. Symbols, such as Benjamin Franklin’s “Join or Die” cartoon, showing a cut-up snake representing the colonies, helped create a sense of common cause, as did organizations like the Daughters of Liberty. But even with these, shared grievances and resistance to British oversight, rather than a sense of “Americanness,” offered common cause.

The War of 1812 provoked new attention to American identity. Partly this was due to a rematch with the British; the United States would not be recolonized. But it also was due to hemispheric happenings. As revolts broke out across Spanish America and local leaders issued their own declarations of independence, U.S. observers reveled in this sense that America, broadly defined, was leading the pursuit of popular sovereignty.

Here again, however, America was not synonymous with equality. From John Adams to Jefferson, U.S. observers insisted that South American republics would require a stronger guiding hand than the United States, thanks to their large mixed-race and nonwhite majorities. They lauded the literacy and landownership requirements that ensured a small white minority oversaw the new South American states.

At home, the United States’ ambitions also made clear that America was an exclusionary category. One of the sparks for the revolution had been colonists’ desire to move westward into lands the British had reserved for Native inhabitants. Thus, the declaration’s only reference to Indigenous Americans was as “merciless Indian Savages” who had supported the British in brutalizing the colonists. They were enemies of the new state, not its people.

As white American settlers moved west toward the Pacific, the United States’ relationship with Native Americans shifted from an exercise in foreign policy—signing treaties, making agreements with tribal leaders—into one of exploitation and exclusion—claiming “Indians” were too backward to use their own lands appropriately. As a result, the United States ironically came to replicate the British Empire it had repudiated. The idea of Manifest Destiny bore many of the same hallmarks as the European “civilizing mission,” which justified overseas expansion. What’s more, the reservation system that emerged in the 19th-century United States bore a marked resemblance to British “tribal” policy in India and West Africa, which also involved isolating indigenous populations in often inhospitable lands.

Meanwhile, debates about abolition and the end of slavery leading up to the Civil War further drew attention to the paradoxes of freedom and equality at the heart of the American nation. Who could be American, and what rights and privileges should be expected by those living on American soil?

Initially, both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution focused overwhelmingly on the mechanisms of governance and defining the legal rights of citizens. But in the aftermath of the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments focused on the relationship between identity and rights. These laws insisted that Americanness could not, and should not, be defined by racial difference. They expanded U.S. citizenship as a legal category and pointed toward a more aspirational definition of national identity that idealized a multiracial community. It helped instill a sense that freedom was critical to being American.

In fact, the promise of equal citizenship rights based on birthright and nondiscrimination struggled to materialize, as states found ways around the Constitution—at times with help from the federal government. As demonstrated by Supreme Court cases such as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which infamously endorsed the principle of “separate but equal,” rhetoric about the United States as a nation of free and equal people sat at odds with its practices.

This persisted well into the 20th century and beyond, as demonstrated by both the women’s rights and civil rights movements. Moreover, it crept into U.S. foreign policy in the era of global decolonization.

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As European empires began to break down in the mid-20th century, new Asian and African states emerged on the international scene. For leaders in these colonies-turned-states, the United States offered a potent model. After all, it was a country that had ripped its freedom from Britain’s clutches and, in independence, had become one of the most economically and politically powerful states in the world. Not only that, but rhetorically, U.S. leaders described their country as the leader of the “Free World,” seemingly positioning itself as a much-needed ally to other former colonies.

Ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter in 1941, U.S. governments had committed themselves to supporting self-determination abroad. Self-determination resonated with the Declaration of Independence. According to the Atlantic Charter, it was “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.”

But the United States proved ambivalent about spreading the gospel of “all men are created equal.” Nor did officials evince much interest in promoting freedom as anything more than political independence. Partly, this was a domestic issue: When segregation persisted at home and some states still barred Native Americans  from voting, how could the United States insist that India respect the rights of its ethnic minorities or demand an end to apartheid in South Africa?

It didn’t. All too often, an emphasis on independent statehood as self-determination served as an excuse to avoid wrestling with the more aspirational overtones the declaration gained during and after the U.S. Civil War. In articulating his eponymous doctrine in 1947, for example, President Harry S. Truman described Greece, a flawed democracy, as a “free nation,” while referring to Turkey, undeniably undemocratic, as an “independent and economically sound state.”

Again and again over the coming decades, U.S. officials returned to the language of the Law of Nations, insisting they were helping decolonizing states to “govern themselves under their own authority and their own laws.” By doing so, they could define freedom and equality—or lack thereof—in former colonies as domestic problems in which the United States would not intervene.

In a particularly egregious example, the Nixon administration turned a blind eye to the 1971 genocide in East Pakistan. Army action in the east, President Richard Nixon and then-national security advisor Henry Kissinger insisted, was a purely internal issue: The United States was respecting Pakistan’s sovereign rights as a state by not intervening. The idea of free and independent states was turned on itself to ignore a blatant attack on Bengalis’ struggle for freedom—and independence. The fact that Pakistan’s government was helping Nixon facilitate talks with China went unmentioned.

In 1857, Abraham Lincoln had dismissed the Declaration of Independence’s “practical use” in severing connections to the British crown as “old wadding left to rot on the battle-field.” Instead, he insisted two years later, it was the “abstract truth” of equality that was the declaration’s real legacy. By the 20th century, official U.S. views had changed. For Cold War statesmen, the Declaration of Independence could be invoked as a nod toward ending European colonization. But whether the citizens of newly independent states actually gained freedom and equality was a different and far more complicated issue.

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In our own moment, this tension between freedom as political independence and freedom as social or cultural equality is playing out most evidently in debates about “America First.” The meaning of America First has become increasingly diluted both at home and abroad. Foreign-policy decisions, like the interventions in Venezuela and Iran, seem to indicate that America First means putting U.S. strategic interests—state interests—first. Veering away from America First’s roots in protectionism, officials’ attention has turned outward and away from the domestic economic concerns that drove many voters to embrace America First in the first place.

But the American identity in America First also is fracturing. Republicans and Democrats; city-dwellers and country-people; northerners and southerners; coasts and heartlands: Who, or what, is American looks very different depending on the vantage point. Polling has shown how divided the country is politically, and this is directly linked to how people identify America and Americans differently.

So what, then, is America First? Ironically, perhaps, Americans have returned to an understanding of the Declaration of Independence focused on its litany of complaints, not its assertions of equality. At home and abroad, Americans’ lists of what they are fighting against are growing ever longer than the lists of what they are fighting for. Meanwhile, America the nation, and America the state, continue to drift apart.