Beyond the Founding Fathers: 12 Unsung Figures Who Helped Build America

BY OLIVIA B. WAXMAN  JULY 1, 2022 4:19 PM EDT

 While Founding Fathers behind that document like John Adams, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson are household names, there were many men and women who played an important role in shaping America in its infancy who are not as well known, This is especially the case for women and minorities. Native Americans, furthermore, had their own functioning societies that predated the U.S. by centuries.

• Mayken van Angola (early 1600s-late 1600s): Born in the early seventeenth century, Mayken was enslaved to the Dutch West India Company on the island of Manhattan for over three decades. She campaigned for and won her freedom in 1662, along with two other women, Susanna and Lucretia. But their freedom was constrained—they had to promise to continue to clean the house of Director-General Petrus Stuyvesant, the leader of the Dutch colonies in North America, to maintain their freedom. —Nicole Maskiell, author of Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry, forthcoming
• Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816): Gouverneur Morris single-handedly took all the drafts and put them together in a week and gave the Constitution its shape. And he made the most important editorial change in American history. The draft that he was given began as follows: “We the People of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island” and listed states down the east coast. He changed it to read “We the People of the United States.” All of a sudden, the single issue that’s central to the whole constitutional convention—” Are we a nation or a confederation of states?”—is resolved in that one line. —Joseph Ellis, author of The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents 1773-1783
• Lemuel Haynes (1753-1833): In July 1776, Lemuel Haynes, a free Black man with a white mom and a Black dad, was a soldier in George Washington’s Continental Army. He had just finished writing an essay called “Liberty Further Extended”—one of the world’s first anti-slavery pamphlets. When he read the Declaration of Independence, he liked the phrase ”all men are created equal” so much that he used it to open his essay—thus becoming the first person to quote what are now the Declaration’s five most iconic words. —Woody Holton, author of Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution
• Thayendanegea (1743-1807): Thayendanegea, a Mohawk from the village of Canajoharie in the Mohawk River Valley (later called New York), rose to prominence as a diplomat, political leader, and warrior among the Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse), also known as the Iroquois or Six Nations Confederacy. In his youth Thayendanegea attended a boarding school in Connecticut run by the Congregational minister Eleazar Wheelock, where he became a fluent English speaker and took the name Joseph Brant after undergoing a Christian Baptism.  —Michael Witgen, author of An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America

Read the entire informative, interesting article HERE.