America: A Celebration of Independence
By Charles Markey
At least one of the Founders thought that Independence Day would
become important. When the Continental Congress voted for independence
on July 2, 1776, John Adams, who more than any other single Founder
was responsible for that vote, was ecstatic. “America’s declaring of
independence from Great Britain,” he told his wife Abigail, marked “the
most memorable Epocha in the History of America.” He hoped that the day
would be celebrated by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary
Festival. “It ought to be commemorated,” he said, “as the Day of Deliverance
by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with
Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and
Illuminations from one end of this Continent to the other, from this Time
forward forever more.”
Although Adams was wrong about the day (two days later on July 4,
Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence), he was right
about the celebrations, at least through much of our history. For us today,
July Fourth is still an important holiday, and we can be thankful that no one
is suggesting that we move it to the closest Monday. Yet the day no longer
seems to have the solemnity and significance that Adams hoped it would
have. To be sure, we have lots of parades, games, and fireworks, but much
of the meaning of these festivities seems to have slipped away from us.
This is too bad, for July Fourth, 1776, is not only the most important day
in American history, but because the United States has emerged as the
most powerful nation the world has ever known, it is surely one of the most
important days in world history as well. The Declaration legally created the
United States of America. It announced to a “candid world” that Americans
were assuming “among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal
station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them.” But
it did much more than that. It stated all governments everywhere were
supposed to derive “their just powers from the consent of the people,” and
that when any one of these governments become destructive of the people’s
rights and liberties, the people could alter or abolish that government and
institute a new one.
These words have served as inspiration for people everywhere. Colonial
rebellions against imperial regimes throughout the world have looked to
the Declaration to justify their cause. In declaring Vietnam independent
from France in 1945, Ho Chi Minh cited the American Declaration
of Independence. Members of Solidarity in Poland and dissidents in
Czechoslovakia invoked its words to oppose Soviet domination in the
1980s. The Chinese students who occupied Tiananmen Square in 1989
used its language. And maybe there are some participants in the Arab
Spring who are aware of our Declaration of Independence. It certainly has
become one of the most influential documents in world history.
But for Americans, the Declaration has a special significance. It infused
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into our culture most of what we have come to believe and value. Our
noblest ideals and highest aspirations—our beliefs in liberty, equality,
and individual rights, including the right of every person to pursue
happiness—came out of the Declaration of Independence. Consequently,
it is not surprising that every reform movement in American history—from
the abolitionists of the 1830s, to the feminists at Seneca Falls in 1848,
to the civil rights advocates of the 1960s—invoked the words and ideals
of the Declaration. It was Abraham Lincoln who made the most of the
Declaration, particularly its assertions of human equality and inalienable
rights. “Thomas Jefferson, the principal drafter of the Declaration,” said
Lincoln, “had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a
merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men
and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming
days, it shall be a rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of
re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” A century later, on the steps of
the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr. took inspiration from this
abstract truth embodied in the Declaration.
For us Americans, the words of the Declaration have become central
to our sense of nationhood. Because the United States is composed of
so many immigrants and so many different races and ethnicities, we can
never assume our identity as a matter of course. The nation has had to be
invented. At the end of the Declaration, the members of the Continental
Congress could only “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our
Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” There was nothing else but themselves
that they could dedicate themselves to—no patria, no fatherland, no
nation as yet. In comparison with the 235 year-old United States, many
states in the world today are new, some of them created within a fairly
recent past. Yet many of these states, new as they may be, are undergirded
by peoples who had a pre-existing sense of their ethnicity, their
nationality. In the case of the United States, the process was reversed: We
Americans were a state before we were a nation, and much of our history
has been an effort to define that nationality.
In fact, even today America is not a nation in any traditional meaning
of the term. We Americans have had to rely on ideas and ideals in order
to hold ourselves together and think of ourselves as a single people. And
more than any other single document in American history, the Declaration
has embodied these ideas and ideals. Since it is our most sacred text, the
day July 4, 1776, that gave birth to it ought to be understood with all the
significance and solemnity that John Adams gave to it.
So this July 4th, now more than ever, we as a whole need to embrace
the hopes and dreams of our forefathers and unite as one to truly make
this nation what they had hoped for.