As Americans gather together with family and friends for the Thanksgiving weekend, many will likely have partisan differences. That just seems to be a fact of life in present-day America. But there are things so fundamental to our shared experience that we can find bases for agreement. I believe we are all proud and inspired by the struggle of our forebearers to found a new country on the principles laid out 249 years ago in our Declaration of Independence. It is easy to overlook the fact that our ancestors were barely able to found a new nation dedicated to the proposition “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

We should first give thanks this year that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Idaho Public Television aired a Ken Burns six episode, twelve hour series documenting the events leading to the Revolutionary War through the signing of the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783, which officially ended the war. It was a dangerous journey, fraught with numerous reversals that might well have caused the war to end in failure.

We should give thanks that the Patriots were blessed to have a courageous leader in George Washington. At the end of December 1776, following his crossing of the Delaware River to win the skirmish at Trenton, Washington managed to personally rally retreating Patriot troops to attack and defeat British troops at the Battle of Princeton on January 2-3, 1777. Those two victories were looked upon as a turning point in the war, giving hope that King George’s troops could actually be defeated. For the next several years there were victories and defeats in numerous battles and skirmishes across the thirteen colonies.

It was not just fighting between the armies that killed our troops. The greatest number of Patriot casualties were the result of smallpox, typhus, dysentery, and malaria. Diseases took a toll of over 17,000 deaths, while over 7,000 died in fighting and from 8,500 to 25,000 were wounded or disabled.

We should give thanks that Washington ordered the mandatory inoculation of his  troops against smallpox in February of 1777, after determining that the disease posed a greater threat to his troops than British soldiers. That order would redound to the benefit of the country’s civilian population long into the future.

We should give thanks for the Patriot victories at the Battles of Saratoga in September and October of 1777. Benjamin Franklin had been trying to get the French to join the Patriot cause for months before those battles. Although the French were supplying arms and logistics beforehand, they were not willing to openly join with the colonies until there was evidence that the war could be won. Saratoga provided that evidence and brought the French in as allies in the war. We might likely have failed without them.

The French were not always the most steadfast helpers. After the British decided they could not win in the northern colonies, they shifted their war efforts to the southern colonies where they had more success. Had the French fleet coordinated better with the Patriot troops, the fighting in the south would have favored the Patriots. Poor coordination produced a major defeat for Americans in the Siege of Charleston where the British captured some 5,266 prisoners and a massive amount of war supplies.

I must personally give thanks for an occurrence at Charleston. According to family lore,  an ancestor in French service was left wounded on the field in a skirmish with the British in the spring of 1780. A woman named Polly found the French soldier and, apparently not wanting to let him go to waste, brought him home, nursed him to health and married him. My father’s mother was one of his descendants.

We should all give profound thanks that the combined French and American forces were able to score their greatest victory at the Siege of Yorktown, Virginia, the last and decisive engagement of the Revolutionary War. Washington’s combined American and French forces besieged and defeated the army of British General Cornwallis, resulting in the British surrender on October 19, 1781.

Thus, we became a great nation and a beacon of freedom and independence to the entire world. That is certainly a great achievement to be thankful for during this Thanksgiving season and throughout the year. Let’s leave our petty disputes and troubles aside and continue the task given us by the US Constitution– to make our people and states “a more perfect Union.”