The Original Preppers: What America's Founders Knew About Self-Reliance
As America approaches its 250th birthday this summer, I have been thinking a lot about where the spirit of preparedness comes from and how deeply it is woven into the history of this country.
The founders of this nation were, by necessity and by conviction, some of the most prepared people who ever lived. Not because they loved emergency kits. But because the world they lived in demanded self-reliance as a baseline condition of survival.
WHAT SELF-RELIANCE LOOKED LIKE IN EARLY AMERICA
Storing food in Colonial America was a daily necessity rather than a choice. Because there were no grocery stores or refrigerators, households had to preserve, cure, and can their seasonal harvests and butchered meats to ensure they had enough sustenance to survive the harsh winters. Root cellars were stocked each fall with enough preserved food to survive a winter without resupply. Salt, smoke, and fermentation kept meat and vegetables viable for months. Water was collected, stored, and conserved. Every household maintained the tools and skills needed to produce what they could not buy which, in many cases, was most things.
In doing some research, I learned that when Thomas Jefferson wrote about the virtues of an “agrarian, self-sufficient citizenry”, he was not writing abstractly. He was describing what he believed made free people free — the practical ability to sustain themselves without dependence on systems or institutions that could fail or be controlled by others.
Benjamin Franklin's ‘Poor Richard's Almanack’ was, among other things, a preparedness manual. "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail" is not a quote about business strategy. It is a statement about how free people take responsibility for their own lives.
The past 20+ years I have been learning and practicing self-reliance in as many areas as I can. It is something that gives me peace-knowing I can provide for my family in the lean times or seasons of natural disasters. It is freeing. It is something I am very proud of.
COMMUNITY PREPAREDNESS AS AN AMERICAN VALUE
The founding era also understood something that modern preparedness culture sometimes misses: individual preparation and community resilience are not competing values — they reinforce each other.
Have you ever seen videos of the Amish and their barn raisings? It is a work of beauty in so many ways but I especially love the many helping hands coming together to help and then the speed and quality in which the barns are built. They come TOGETHER. They build their community TOGETHER.
Barn raisings. Food drives. Food swaps. The tradition of neighbors helping neighbors through hard seasons. Ahhhh….these were not charity cases. They were systems of mutual preparedness — everyone contributing to a collective capacity that benefited everyone. To me, that’s what the true American spirit is all about. We NEED to get back to our roots, the fundamentals.
A prepared neighborhood is exponentially more resilient than a collection of prepared households with no connection to each other. We need to get to know our neighbors. Find out what they need or how we can help them be a little better prepared.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR US 250 YEARS LATER
The infrastructure of modern life is remarkable. It is also more fragile than we tend to acknowledge. Power grids, supply chains, water systems, communication networks — all of it can be disrupted by weather, by natural disaster, by human error, or by any number of events that history tells us are not as rare as we hope.
The founding generation did not see self-reliance as pessimism. They saw it as FREEDOM. The ability to sustain your family without depending entirely on systems outside your control is not a doomsday mentality. It is an expression of the same spirit that has always made this country resilient.
Two hundred and fifty years later, the tools look different but the principle is the same. Store what you need, build your skills, know your neighbors and prepare with the same quiet confidence that built this country.
Happy almost-250th!