When we celebrate July 4, we are celebrating Independence Day.
We know that it is the day the United States declared independence
from Great Britain, and with traditional fireworks and the
”
rockets’ red glare
”
of our national anthem, we may think we won a battle on that
day.
When we celebrate July 4, we are celebrating Independence Day. We know that it is the day the United States declared independence from Great Britain, and with traditional fireworks and the “rockets’ red glare” of our national anthem, we may think we won a battle on that day.
The battle in our national anthem actually happened some 30 years later, when we finally, definitively got Great Britain to stop picking on us.
So what really happened on July 4?
Paperwork.
Paperwork, yes, but paperwork heard ’round the world.
After working from June 11 to June 28, Thomas Jefferson finished a draft of the Declaration of Independence, with comments from Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, and submitted it to the Continental Congress.
This declaration was the culmination of years of frustrating attempts to get the King of England to stop squeezing the colonies for money to help pay for his Seven Years’ War against France and Spain, and its counterpart, the French and Indian War in North America.
The people, all men, who agreed to the declaration probably knew, and probably discussed with their wives, their closest friends, or their priests or pastors, that this declaration would be considered an act of treason, and if their attempt at independence failed, it would cost them their lives.
Not only that, since almost 250 years earlier, English monarchs – already believed to rule by divine right – had held the position as head of the Church of England. So to defy the monarch was an act of conscience that might not only cost their lives, but any hope of reaching paradise, as well.
The King had already proclaimed rebellious colonists traitors, and had set a bounty for the capture of some of them. In November 1775, dozens of members of the Congress signed an oath of secrecy to protect each other.
Juxtaposed against their belief in the near-divinity of the King is the logic with which the Declaration sets out the rightness of the rebels’ cause. The ideas themselves were not new. Many of them appeared in the Virginia Declaration, written in June of 1776. One of the most fundamental ideas in both documents is that “Governments … deriv(e) their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
So what had begun as an attempt by colonists to obtain fair treatment from their home country led not only to the war known as the American Revolution, but to a real revolution in which the very nature of government was overturned. Rather than governmental power deriving from Divine Right, governmental power is now believed to derive from the people.
That would be you and me.
So next Tuesday, 230 years after the 13 colonies unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, let’s remember the courage it took, before any shots were fired, before any cities or people were captured, before the rockets’ red glare brightened the night sky, for the gentlemen of the 13 colonies, with their “decent respect for the opinions of mankind,” to declare that the colonies “are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.”
They were willing to pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to make freedom real.
