Paradox Americana — What is an American?

For any American interested in history and genealogy, the rabbit holes you can follow are seemingly endless. For years, I’ve sought to better understand my lineage, both in this county for 300 years and from the familial fonts from which my ancestors sprang on the British Isles. With this review has come the task of applying hindsight to the actions and decisions of men and women long gone but whose blood runs through my veins.

My ancestors were patriots, but they fought on opposite sides of the American story, leaving me with a legacy that is both inspiring and impossible to reconcile. In one family line alone, one ancestor helped kill a king to create an English republic, while his descendant fought to defend a king against the rise of a new American one. And that man’s grandson died to save the American union that had defeated them all.

This isn’t just a tangle of genealogy; it is the American paradox in miniature. It forces a profound and deeply personal question: What does it mean to be an American?

Is an American a rebel?

On a cold January morning in 1649, Charles I — King of England, Scotland, and Ireland — was led to a scaffold outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, London. He had been tried and convicted of high treason against the English people following the civil war led by Oliver Cromwell, a brutal conflict that pitted Parliament against the crown and tore a nation apart. This wasn’t just a political dispute; it was a religious and philosophical earthquake.

Taking him from his cell to the site of his execution was my 10th great-grandfather, a colonel in Cromwell’s New Model Army. For years, he had stood with Cromwell and the Puritans, men who believed they were creating a new, more godly society. He was part of an army that did the unthinkable: they captured, tried, and were now preparing to execute their own king.

I try to imagine the sheer conviction required to participate in a regicide, to fundamentally reject the divine right of kings that had ordered society for a thousand years. His actions were part of a profound struggle over the “rights of Englishmen,” a defiant stand that feels like the very seed of American identity.

Is an American, then, someone who sees a tyrant and is willing to tear down the world to stop him?

Is an American loyal to his nation?

My family has been in Bucks County since 1725, but the revolutionary chaos of the 1770s felt a world away from the orderly Quaker life my sixth great-grandfather knew. A member of a faith that preached peace, he found the war on his doorstep. Armies marched through his fields and neighbors chose sides with violent passion.

For my ancestor, the question was not about some distant tyranny but about the immediate breakdown of society. He looked at the Patriots, with their revolutionary committees and militias, and saw not liberty but chaos. He stood on one of the oldest pillars of the Anglo-American tradition: loyalty to established government.

Misguided or not, he and his wife threw in with the now notorious Doan Gang that harried local troops, stole the treasury from the Bucks County government, and secretly passed information to British forces in Philadelphia and New Jersey. He risked everything for the crown, the symbol of a stable and predictable world.

Eventually, he would be arrested and, like King Charles, charged with treason — only escaping a noose by an acquittal, unlike his brother who was hanged in 1782.

How do I square this? The very institution my first ancestor fought to dismantle, this one fought to preserve. Was his loyalty a betrayal of the family’s spirit of defiance, or was it a different kind of courage — a stand for order in a world descending into madness?

Is an American, then, someone who stands for law and order against a chaotic rebellion?

Is an American a Patriot?

By the mid-nineteenth century, the arguments of both the rebel and the loyalist had been forged into a new, fragile nation. My fourth great-grandfather, the grandson of that Quaker loyalist, was born into this republic — the very nation his own grandfather had opposed.

When the Civil War came, it was the ultimate test of the American experiment. The question was no longer about a distant king but whether a nation conceived in liberty could survive its own internal contradictions.

At 55 years old, lying on his recruitment paperwork, my ancestor joined the Union Army and marched out of Philadelphia with other volunteers. He wasn’t a young man caught up in romantic notions of war; he was a man who saw the nation his ancestors had, in their own ways, helped to shape, and decided it was worth dying for. And on September 17, 1862, that’s exactly what he did on a battlefield in Sharpsburg, Maryland, near the Antietam Creek, in what remains the bloodiest single day in American history.

So, is an American a patriot willing to die to preserve the nation, even a nation with a paradoxical and bloody past?

My own blood contains all of these conflicting answers. This is my Anglo-American inheritance — a legacy that doesn’t resolve the question but embodies it.

What, then, is an American? Perhaps the answer is that you can’t be one without inheriting all sides of the argument. To be an American is to be the living paradox, the descendant of both the rebel who demands liberty and the loyalist who demands order, forever grappling with the enduring, and often difficult, questions that forged a nation.

Publius Pax is a tenth-generation Bucks Countian, political consultant, and author.