What's Independence Day?

Drafted by Thomas Jefferson between June 11 and June 28, 1776, the Declaration of Independence is at once the nation's most cherished symbol of liberty.

The political philosophy of the Declaration was not new; its ideals of individual liberty had already been expressed by John Locke and the Continental philosophers.  What Jefferson did was to summarize this philosophy in "self-evident truths" and set forth a list of grievances against the King in order to justify before the world the breaking of ties between the colonies and the mother country.

Keep in mind that everyone who signed the Declaration was putting his head in a noose.  When our Founders pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, that wasn't just rhetoric.  They were up against the greatest military power on earth and had very little military experience.  They had no money--there wasn't a bank in all of America in 1776.  And no colonial people had ever successfully revolted against the mother country.  Everything was against them.

Only about a third of the country supported the Revolution.  Another third was opposed--the Loyalists or Tories, who saw themselves as the true patriots because they were standing by their King.  The remaining third, in the human way, were waiting to see who won.

When the Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence about "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," what they meant by "happiness" wasn't longer vacations or more material goods.  They were talking about the enlargement of the human experience through the life of the mind and the life of the spirit.  And they knew that the system of government  they were setting up wouldn't work if the people weren't educated.  "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization," Jefferson wrote, "it expects what never was and never will be."

Jefferson and John Adams, who more than anyone got the Continental Congress to vote for the Declaration, served their new country well and then died on the same day, each in his own bed, surrounded by his books.  And it wasn't just any day.   It was the 4th of July, 50 years after the Declaration of Independence.  People at the time saw it as the clearest sign imaginable that the hand of God was involved with the destiny of the United States--and who could blame them?

Source: Abstracted from a public lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on March 31, 2006 by David McCullough who was born in 1933 in Pittsburgh, PA, and was educated there and at Yale University.  Mr. McCullough is the author of 1776, John Adams, Truman, Brave Companions, The Path Between the Seas, Mornings on Horseback, The Great Bridge and The Johnstown Flood.  He has twice received the Pulitzer Prize and twice the National Book Award.

Comments

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