The United States of America is preparing to celebrate the 250th anniversary of her founding. On a June afternoon in 1776, statesman Richard Henry Lee (a distant cousin of the Virginian military commander Robert E. Lee) introduced to the Second Continental Congress a resolution to declare independence from the British Empire, clarifying that the Thirteen Colonies are “free and independent States” and not subjects of British rule. The resolution was approved on July 2 that same year and, two days later, Lee and his brother, Francis Lightfoot Lee, signed the monumental Declaration of Independence, largely authored by Thomas Jefferson, which detailed the reasons that North and South Carolina, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia were no longer shackled to the British crown.

In the nearly-250 years since that fateful day, when history would be forever changed, the question, oft repeated in recent years, has arisen: “What is an American?” Is an “American” nothing more than a transplant from Europe? Are “Americans” a distinct people, with their own nation, culture, customs, and history? Is being an “American” adhering to a belief system, so that some may apostatize and others convert? Fittingly, on the eve of this great nation’s 250th birthday, American President Donald Trump suggested an answer to the question. Surprisingly, the occasion was afforded by a state visit from Britain’s King Charles III, successor to the very King George III that America’s inaugural class of citizens rebelled and waged war against in a desperate fight for independence.

“Honoring the British king might seem an ironic beginning to our celebration of 250 years of American independence, but, in fact, no tribute could be more appropriate,” the president intoned when welcoming the monarch to the White House. (Also ironic is the fact that British forces nearly succeeded in burning the White House to the ground during the War of 1812.) “Long before Americans had a nation or a constitution, we first had a culture, a character, and a creed. Before we ever proclaimed our independence, Americans carried within us the rarest of gifts: moral courage. And it came from a small but mighty kingdom from across the sea,” the president continued. “For nearly two centuries before the Revolution, this land was settled and forged by men and women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British. Here, on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and the great Briton’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride.”

“The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage, their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true,” the president said. Then came a slight shift, a line drawn between the settlers, pioneers, and founders of the U.S. to the present day: “In recent years we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea, but the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776. The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Referring to the signing of the Magna Carta, which bound the English King John (of “Robin Hood” fame) to respect and protect the rights of his subjects, the president continued, “Fate drew a long arc from the meadow at Runnymede to the streets of Philadelphia, that ran through the lives of people born and bred on the British Code: that no man should be denied either justice or right. American patriots today can sing, ‘My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,’ only because our colonial ancestors first sang, ‘God Save the King.’”

Speaking at a later event alongside the British monarch and again commenting on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the president said, “It’s only natural that Americans begin this commemoration by paying tribute to the transcendent bond we share with the nation that Thomas Jefferson himself called ‘our mother country.’” The men of English stock who crossed the Atlantic Ocean to settle the New World called their new home New England, the president observed, and they “meant that very, very literally. The first Americans saw themselves as free men, carrying forward and central liberties and ancient rights of the Anglo-Saxons into this new and beautiful world. In the eyes of America’s founders, our War of Independence was fought not to reject this heritage, but to reclaim it and perfect it.”

He continued, “The Declaration of Independence was a miracle for the ages that sparked a far-reaching revolution in self-government and human freedom. But even though the political bonds between the United States and Great Britain were dissolved forever, they thought — on July 4th, 1776 — the more powerful strands of memory, culture, and identity proved unbreakable in any conflict and grew into a friendship unlike any other on earth.”

The president noted that many states and cities are named after British monarchs and heroes — Albany in New York was christened after the Duke of Albany, later King James II, England’s last Catholic monarch; the Carolinas were named in honor King Charles I, and the capital city of North Carolina is named after explorer Sir Walter Raleigh; Georgia is named after King George II; Anne Arundel County in Maryland is named after Lady Anne Arundel, wife of Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, after whom the city of Baltimore and Calvert County are named, while Maryland’s capital city, Annapolis, is named after Queen Anne; Virginia is named after Queen Elizabeth I, the “Virgin Queen” — but stressed that the impact of English culture, morals, and law went far deeper than namesakes. “Historians have noted that to this day, the distinct regions of the United States still echo with the particular accents, habits, and traditions of the British communities that first settled them centuries ago,” he said. “But far beyond names and principles, there’s something unique and very special that has always united our two people, a certain nobility of spirit and heroic soul.”

“The same audacity that called a small island kingdom to rule the seven seas — and rule them you did — inspired the children of 13 American colonies to explore a great frontier, a very, very dangerous frontier, and settle what was known as the Wild, Wild West. The men who planted the American flag on the moon carried with them the same hunger for adventure and achievement as those who raised the Union Jack above Antarctica and first sailed Saint George’s Cross all around the globe,” the president chronicled. “The entire world has been uplifted by this distinct and special character. We share this unstoppable daring, this unconquerable courage. It really is, it’s unconquerable.”

The president’s soaring, stirring language is more than fanciful rhetoric fit for a king; it acknowledges an essential truth about the American nation and, just as importantly, the American people. A nation and its people are inextricable, one from the other. There is no America without Americans. But what is an American? As the president noted, the American people found their roots in England, specifically, and Europe more broadly. The traditions of Europe — Christian morality and customs evinced from the waning days of the Roman Empire through to the very time of the founding of America, a love of beauty and building made manifest in countless cathedrals and chapels and castles and showcased in museums across Britain and the European continent, and the richness of the Western legal and intellectual tradition, eternal truths identified and clarified by Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Cicero, Seneca the Younger, Julius Caesar, Tertullian, Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, Gratian, Albert the Great, Peter Lombard, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Dante Alighieri, William of Ockham, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas More, and many others, all the way up to John Locke and Edmund Burke — served as the bedrock upon which the U.S. was founded.

Even today, the U.S. Supreme Court sometimes refers back to English common law in matters of constitutional interpretation. The court does not examine the ancient laws of India, the Middle East, China, or sub-Saharan Africa, for these cultures have no relation to the founding and the tradition of America.

The American nation was settled by predominantly English men, those who established settlements at Jamestown, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, Williamsburg, and eventually the 13 Colonies, which would become the inaugural United States. These brave men crossed the ocean and tamed an alien wilderness, bringing a uniquely English order to the wild New World and making it their home. Houses, forts, streets, and eventually entire towns and cities sprang up across the East Coast, built and defended by the descendants and spiritual heirs of Alfred the Great, Richard the Lionheart, Henry V, and other great men of courage, resolve, and virtue.

Of course, the English were not the only ones to set up camp in the New World. By the time that the Lee brothers put their names to the Declaration of Independence, alongside the names of John Adams and his cousin Samuel, Charles Carroll, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, and 48 other men, America was a nation with a predominantly English heritage and character, but included some of Dutch, French, German, and Irish stock, as well as many Scots and Scots-Irish. All those who made up the founding stock of the U.S. shared a common Western heritage, and largely settled on an English model of governance, with unique American innovations inspired by the Roman Republic and the mighty city-states of Ancient Greece.

Of course, others from outside that sphere of English influence became Americans. While the Irish have been present since the nation’s founding (it was an Irish architect who designed the White House in the early 1790s), waves of Irish immigrants in the early-to-mid 19th century had great difficulty being accepted by Nativists, who worried about the impact that such a surge of non-natives (Catholics, to boot!) might have on the nation’s social and cultural fabric.

A flood of Italian immigrants in the latter half of the 19th and very beginning of the 20th centuries was even more problematic, overseeing a nationwide rise in organized crime and prompting President Calvin Coolidge and an overwhelming majority in both chambers of Congress to pass the stringent Immigration Act of 1924. (The legislation was broadly popular, with only nine senators and a mere handful of congressmen — including then-freshman Emmanuel Celler, who would later reverse the Act with his catastrophic Hart-Celler Act in the 1960s — opposing the bill.) Nevertheless, both the Irish and the Italians eventually came to be accepted as Americans, after a lengthy and trying period of assimilation.

Trump acknowledged, rightly, that America is not “an idea,” it is not a purely propositional nation. America is a nation and a people, and while both have a set of ideals to which they strive to conform and which they fight to uphold, being an American is no mere belief system, a matter of passing a series of exams and checking a list of boxes: “Yes, I believe this,” “Yes, I believe that,” “Sure, I’m willing to believe this.” There are some who could accept every single proposition of the propositional nation, yet who have never set foot in the country, have no ties or relations to the country. Is such a one more of an American than the young man who perhaps devotes himself to half of America’s ideals and grapples with the rest, but counts among his ancestors veterans of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War and Pilgrims of the Mayflower? No. Being an American is more than a mere creed: it is a life, a life lived and, when necessary, offered up.

In the final line of the Declaration of Independence, the 56 Signers agreed that “for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Had the American Patriots lost the Revolutionary War, all of the men who attached their names to the Declaration would have almost certainly been tried for treason, easily convicted, and hanged by the neck until dead. Each of the men who attached their names to their nation’s foundational document offered his life for his nation and her people. The Declaration of Independence was not a “statement of belief,” it was a blood pact, a tethering of one’s mortal life to one’s nation and her people.

It was this complete devotion — what Abraham Lincoln would later call the “last full measure of devotion,” in his celebrated Gettysburg Address — this unwavering offering of one’s own life that made these men Americans. In the succeeding years, many men paid for the title of “American” with their blood, others with their daily offering of sweat, tears, and toil. Nobody became an American by simply signing a consent form or agreeing to a series of charming propositions.

Trump is not the first to address what it means to be an American. In a 1901 speech, President Theodore Roosevelt observed that the American people are rooted in the blood and traditions of Europe, but have become a distinct and unique people. “The Americans are children and grandchildren of the men who came here from England, Ireland, Germany, France, Scandinavia, and the rest of Europe [and] have become Americans — a new race, with a new ethnic type, and they are no more Englishmen or Germans or Scandinavians than the descendants of the Norman invaders of England are Frenchmen,” the quintessentially American president said, addressing Coloradans. “The frontier conditions made a new race. The stern struggle with the wilderness and with wild men welded together the descendants of many European stocks into one people — the American,” he continued. “Out of the crucible of the wilderness came a new ethnic type, hardy, self-reliant, democratic in instinct, and with a continent for its inheritance.”

Roosevelt also acknowledged that those who are not necessarily of that foundational English stock can, with time and commitment, become Americans, but that it would come at a cost. “We must Americanize them in every way, in speech, in political ideas and principles, and in their way of looking at the relations between Church and State,” Roosevelt said of “newcomers to our shores” in his 1894 treatise on “True Americanism.” “We welcome the German or the Irishman who becomes an American. We have no use for the German or Irishman who remains such. We do not wish German-Americans and Irish-Americans who figure as such in our social and political life; we want only Americans,” he continued. “We have no room in any healthy American community for a German-American vote or an Irish-American vote, and it is contemptible demagogy to put planks into any party platform with the purpose of catching such a vote. We have no room for any people who do not act and vote simply as Americans, and as nothing else.”

“From his own standpoint, it is beyond all question the wise thing for the immigrant to become thoroughly Americanized. Moreover, from our standpoint, we have a right to demand it,” Roosevelt wrote. “We freely extend the hand of welcome and of good-fellowship to every man, no matter what his creed or birthplace, who comes here honestly intent on becoming a good United States citizen like the rest of us; but we have a right, and it is our duty, to demand that he shall indeed become so,” he continued. “The mighty tide of immigration to our shores has brought in its train much of good and much of evil; and whether the good or the evil shall predominate depends mainly on whether these newcomers do or do not throw themselves heartily into our national life, cease to be Europeans, and become Americans like the rest of us,” he said, at a time when immigration to the U.S. was almost exclusively European in origin.

“It is urgently necessary to check and regulate our immigration by much more drastic laws than now exist; and this should be done both to keep out laborers who tend to depress the labor market, and to keep out races which do not assimilate readily with our own, and unworthy individuals of all races–not only criminals, idiots, and paupers, but anarchists…” While Roosevelt argued vehemently against discriminating against immigrants on the basis of color, creed, or national origin, he warned in a 1919 letter that “this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American.” He continued, “There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag. … We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language … and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”

So what is an American? The very first Americans were fierce patriots of English stock, steeped for generations in the great moral and intellectual traditions of the West. It was their blood, sweat, tears, toil, and the sacrifice of their lives that made them Americans. It was that same fiery spirit which drove Americans in subsequent generations to head West, to tame the wilderness, to seek out and settle every frontier, with many perishing in the attempt. In short, as both Trump and Roosevelt implicitly acknowledge, an American is a person of any color or creed devoted unwaveringly and unerringly to America.