Built By Immigrants

By: Elaine Lehman

 

Americans celebrated the 245th anniversary of the Fourth of July 1776. Beyond the gatherings and fireworks, this year – as the country’s faced with reckoning- it is especially important to remember the ideals we aspire to bring to fruition and immigrants who helped in the founding of this nation.

Many contributed” including Filipino Americans contributed to this effort. “’Manila Village’ was home of Filipino seamen and fishermen on the lower Mississippi since 1763. The little town down the river from New Orleans, which furnished soldiers to Jackson for the defense of that city against the British…”(1937 United Press International article)

It is the words of an immigrant who captured the hopes and vision of this imperfect but beautiful country.

“Tutti gli uomini sono per natura egualmente liberi e indipendenti. Quest’eguaglianza è necessaria per costituire un governo libero. Bisogna che ognuno sia uguale all’altro nel diritto naturale.”

“All men are by nature equally free and independent. Such equality is necessary in order to create a free government. All men must be equal to each other in natural law”

– Filippo Mazzei, The Virginia Gazette, 1774, translated by friend and neighbor, Thomas Jefferson

Filippo Mazzei (December 25, 1730. , Poggio a Caiano, Italy – March 19, 1816 Pisa, Italy) was an Italian emigre and patriot, merchant, doctor, winemaker, horticulturist and pamphleteer.

Mazzei moved to London in 1755 where he met Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Adams. They quickly bonded with the American forefathers over shared progressive views on liberty and corresponded.

In 1773, Mazzei moved to Virginia and became a lifelong friend of Thomas Jefferson. While in Virginia, Mazzei and Jefferson created what would become the first commercial vineyard with George Washington in Virginia. He was among a select group who was given a draft copy of the Declaration of Independence. He would return to Europe and act as an agent for Jefferson and the state of Virginia as an unofficial ambassador and even an arms dealer, buying munitions and shipping them to the state.

Thomas Jefferson was inspired by Mazzei’s writings of liberty, independence, and religious freedom.

It is clear that this ideology influenced one of the most popular and well-known sentiments from the founding docunent:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Those views found plenty of space for the contradictory practice of human chattel slavery. Mazzei, however, is not known to have owned slaves or used slave labor.

In 1958, John F. Kennedy acknowledged Filippo Mazzei’s contribution to the Declaration of Independence when he wrote in his book “A Nation of Immigrants.” In 1993, Joint Resolution 175 of the 103rd Congress officially recognized the phrase in the Declaration of Independence ‘All men are created equal’ and attributed its inspiration to Mazzei.

Mazzei has received little attention for his contributions to the nation’s founding. His face was placed on a 40-cent U.S. airmail stamp in 1980. His name was also given to a World War II-era Navy cargo ship.

In a country that was built by and home to immigrants, it worth recognizing the legacy of Filippo Mazzei, and those whose contributions were material to the founding of the nation.

Filipino homes in NOLA. Harper’s Weekly illustration of Saint Malo by Charles Whitney, 1883

Filippo Mazzei (December 25, 1730. , Poggio a Caiano, Italy – March 19, 1816 Pisa, Italy) was an Italian emigre and patriot, merchant, doctor, winemaker, horticulturist and pamphleteer.