About Our Country

Greetings,

      Further comments on the Declaration of Independence and our holiday.

      On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress approved a Declaration of Independence.  The changed and approved final draft was then written in final form for signing on July 4^th.  Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4^th: John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, and Charles Thomson, the secretary.  Upon signing with a very large hand, Hancock declared, "There! King George can read that without his spectacles!"  It was not until August 2^nd  that a formal parchment copy was ready for signing by the remaining members of the Continental Congress.  Several signatures were obtained later ... George Wythe (Virginia) on August 27; Richard Henry Lee (Virginia), Elbridge Gerry (Massachusetts), Oliver Wolcott (Connecticut) signed in September; Matthew Thornton (New Hampshire) in November. Thomas McKean, representing Delaware, was serving in the army and was unavailable to add his “John Hancock” until 1781.

      Thomas Jefferson was the major author of the "Declaration", but he had help from John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston and Roger Sherman.  Franklin, for example, changed Jefferson’s “…truths to be sacred and undeniable” to “truths to be self-evident.”   Following the natural rights theory of John Locke, the document proclaimed the equality of 'all men' and their 'unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. The authors wrote that governments were established to secure these rights; when they failed to do so, the people could abolish them. This one statement alone was considered as treason to the British crown.

      On July 3, 1776, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail:

      “Yesterday the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America; and a greater perhaps never was, nor will be, decided among men.  A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, that those United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”

      “The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America.  I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.  It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.  It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward for evermore.”

      The Declaration of Independence was read aloud in New York City on July 9, 1776.  The gathering crowd became so excited that a statue of King George was torn from its pedestal and melted into 42,000 patriot bullets.  The American Revolution lasted eight years, until 1783.  On that first truly independent fourth of July, bells rang out in every city in the nation except Charleston, South Carolina, and only because the British had taken all the bells.

      It was an era before polls, fortunately for the signers of the Declaration.  If a poll had been taken in that July of 1776, it is almost certain the great majority of the people would have responded in favor of remaining a part of Great Britain, even while wanting a stop to the taxation Britain had imposed.  Families were torn apart by the revolution.  Benjamin Franklin’s son, William, was Governor of New Jersey and remained for the rest of his life a loyalist, and their relationship was broken forever.  Abigail Adams wrote to her son: “These are times in which a genius would wish to live.  It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed...Great necessities call out great virtues.”  (Letter to John Quincy Adams, 19 January 1780.)

      By 1826, America was 50 years old and the original 13 colonies had blossomed into 24 states.  On the fourth of July that same year, Thomas Jefferson, who was 87, died at noon.  The same day, John Adams also passed away, his last words being, “Jefferson still lives.”  Adams had no way of knowing that Jefferson had preceded him in death that very day.  The last two members of the committee responsible for writing the Declaration dying on the same day exactly 50 years later is a coincidence beyond belief.  

      Charles Carroll of Carrollton, one of four Maryland signers, was the last survivor of all the signers.  He would later sign the charter for the first railroad in America, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. 

      The founding fathers had gotten us to age 50.  The rest would be up to us. 

Yours & His,

DED