Our Declaration of Independence started out as a pragmatic alliance to facilitate the Colonies' break from distant Great Britain. Its high-minded platitudes, though, were but marketing gloss directed at other countries' governments whose support might prove helpful, e.g., France, or neutrality would keep them from being British force-multipliers.
Really, though, our Declaration of Independence was a fundamentally racist document designed to (1) erase King George III's Royal Proclamation line which prohibited white settlement west of the Appalachians to protect the Amerindians so they would continue to have safe, ample habitations and resources such as furs to trade with Great Britain www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/1763-proclamation-of www.ushistory.org/us/9a.asp and (2) preserve the Colonists' "property rights" in slaves (even Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey had slavery in 1776) from Lord Chief Justice Mansfield's judicial activist declaration in Somerset v. Stewart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_v_Stewart that slavery is so "odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law".
The June 13 letter [Gazette Packet, “Celebrate Army and Flag”] points to our Pledge of Allegiance's characterization of our country as a republic, which she attributes to our Constitution. Our Constitution, while it requires states to have governments which are "republican in form" (which is why our state governments usually work so much better than our federal government), nowhere explicitly states that the United States is a republic. Never does it use any cognizable term to specify what kind of governing system we are to have. More egregious, it never even defines the term "People" from which it derives its authority, which is why even today we are debating who has a right to be here. If, arguably, it began as a republic (or mimicking one), like the Roman Empire much of whose symbolism it appropriated, the United States soon became, if it was not always, an empire, characterized by expansionist conquest of land and peoples, a multicultural society, reliance on foreign trade and resources, lack of internal coherence resulting in a civil war to attempt imposition of a common regime, military and economic intervention abroad, etc.
Whatever protections were afforded for individuals or minorities functioned, from the outset, as primarily protecting wealthy special interests under the guise of rule of law (written by and for the primary benefit of wealthy special interests) which a true democracy, where the people have real power, might imperil.
Dino Drudi
Alexandria