Thus, only during and immediately after the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War II and the Cold War have black Americans made significant progress toward equality. Outside of these particular wartime eras, however, the position of black Americans has either stagnated or worsened.

Indeed, Horowitz acknowledges at least part of this dynamic in his discussion of the movie "The Patriot" and his example of how after the Revolutionary War, North Carolina equalized the laws against murdering black slaves and whites. (The law was actually changed in 1791, not in 1782 as he asserts.) This is not an isolated example, as the Revolutionary War led to the ending of slavery north of the Mason-Dixon line and to the extension of political and civil rights for blacks throughout the new nation.

This, however, is only part of the story. What Horowitz omits is that as the military necessity and ideological fervor of the revolution faded away, these advances in black rights were rolled back. Take again his example from North Carolina. Beginning in 1801, a series of state court decisions began to once again make distinctions between the killing of a black slave and the killing of a white man. More broadly, black Americans, both slave and free, North and South, saw a significant erosion in the rights and liberties that they once possessed. Only with the coming of the Civil War would military and ideological pressures again force a positive change in the status of black Americans.

Horowitz correctly acknowledges the linkage between the American Revolution and black freedom. But he should also acknowledge that that linkage was incomplete, fragile and temporary. To ignore either point is to distort American history.

Finally, Horowitz asserts that black Americans are "the freest, richest and most privileged community of blacks anywhere in the world." Perhaps this is true, but it is indisputable that they remain, despite our nation's ideology of equality and individual rights, less free, less rich and less privileged than white Americans.

Surely the black Americans who fought and died in the American Revolution (as well as in every other American war) did so not just to be better off than blacks in other countries. They fought so that they and their descendants would be full and equal citizens in a nation in which skin color would not condition one's right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is no slur on our Founders or their principles to acknowledge that they and we have failed to achieve this goal. It is, however, an insult to suggest that we need no longer try. To paraphrase the great patriot Patrick Henry, if this be anti-American, make the most of it.

P.S. My historian colleagues insist that I correct Horowitz's attempt at smearing them by association. I am a political scientist, not a historian.