Politics & Power Quote by Christopher Gadsden

Gadsden’s sentence is a brag, but it’s also a claim to authorship over an origin story Americans would rather treat as inevitable. He isn’t talking about the Continental Congress; he’s pointing to 1765, when the Stamp Act Congress gathered colonies to coordinate resistance to Parliament’s new taxes. By insisting he “strove more, and more successfully” than anyone else, Gadsden plants a flag in the messy prehistory of independence, when “America” was still a set of competing provinces and the idea of intercolonial unity was a hard sell.

The intent is partly reputational. Revolutionary memory quickly became a political currency, and Gadsden is cashing in: I was there before it was fashionable, and I kept the faith when the coalition was fragile. The subtext is defensive, too. If you have to announce you were the most committed, you’re answering some accusation of opportunism, exaggeration, or being sidelined by more famous names. It reads like a man who watched later narrators smooth out the rough edges and wants credit for the unglamorous work of building consensus.

What makes the line work is its tight pairing of “bring about” and “support it ever afterwards.” He frames leadership not as a single heroic moment, but as institution-building: convene the meeting, then do the thankless maintenance. For a soldier-politician from South Carolina, that’s also a subtle argument about legitimacy: resistance wasn’t just anger in the streets; it was organized, deliberative, and meant to look like governance long before independence was declared.