Happy Fourth of July!
This is my favorite American holiday. Not because I love fireworks and cookouts. I do but my love of this day is based on why we celebrate it. This being a musing which I will post on face book let me begin with a one question quiz.
Why do we celebrate America’s Birthday on the 4th of July?
A. It is the day the colonists won the first great battle with the British at Bunker Hill.
B. It was the day we signed the Treaty of Ghent, the peace treaty with Great Britain.
C. It is the day Patrick Henry led an attack on the guard house at Williamsburg setting free 86 colonists held as political prisoners by the Governor per order of the King.
D. It is the day on which a majority of the delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia finally voted to succeed from Great Britain.
E. It was the day Washington defeated Cornwallis essentially ending the American Revolution.
F. None of the above.
As you look at the list I am sure you are thinking that many countries celebrate the day they defeated their greatest foe, but you're not going to fall for that. So you scratch off A and E. The French celebrate setting the prisoners free from the Bastille but you know we didn’t do that so scratch off C. B. gets a look, but we don’t celebrate the day that Great Britain finally agreed we were free so B gets the scratch.
Now we are down to D and F. And I might venture a guess most of you chose D. The day a majority of delegates in Philadelphia finally agreed to tell the King to count us out. But technically, F. is the correct answer.
The fourth of July was not the first day the delegates voted to leave. First they voted to have a Committee which included Jefferson, Adams and Franklin draft a Declaration of Independence. Then on the third of July the majority of delegates voted that the Declaration be passed to be engrossed. What happened on the fourth was a forgone conclusion. The bill was reported back to the body as “truly and strictly engrossed” and passed to be enacted. The second or third time it received a majority vote depending on how you keep count.
This may seem a small point, but in the words of Bernie Sanders, I think it Huge! These men who were putting their heads in a noose cared deeply about procedure, about rules and laws. That is why the same John Adams had defended the British Officers accused of murder at the Boston Massacre declaring if we were fit to govern ourselves we must be a nation of laws, not of men. Adams won their acquittal from a fired up Boston jury.
The Fox News equivalent at the time called Adams a weakling and a traitor. Somewhere we can be sure a Donald was saying the families of the British Officers should be hung right beside them.
This concern with law and legalisms is what led the delegates to decide that they needed a formal declaration making it clear why they felt justified in setting aside the laws and rulers from London. These were careful and educated men, who believed in education and worried about ignorant citizens running amuck. Read the Massachusetts original Constitution written by Adams, it seems like half of it is about educating the citizens.
Some historians have characterized these men as conservative and in some ways that is fair. They certainly had as much they wanted to preserve as that which they demanded to change. But the Declaration which they passed was and is no conservative document. It declares that the war is being fought to create a nation that recognizes that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights including Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
The men in Philadelphia were by and large men born to a position of wealth and privilege. Among them there were brilliant men like Patrick Henry and Ben Franklin of more common birth, but what prompted them to pass such a radical document? Maybe it was the rare excitement of stepping out into an unknown. Maybe it was because these politicians realized they had to give common men like Paul Revere a reason to lay down his tools and risk his life in the militia.
We know now that those founders struggled to make real the promise of the Declaration, but in many ways they fell short and the Constitution is full of them. More than a decade after the Declaration the drafters of the Constitution thought slavery would end, encouraged its end by prohibiting slaves from the Northwest Territory and setting a date in which the importation of slaves would be prohibited. But they left it intact and even provided how slaves would be counted in the census. Then came the cotton gin and any hopes about a natural end to slavery were dealt a death blow.
But before we point our finger of condemnation at the founders, let’s acknowledge that it was those pesky words that they put in the Declaration that rallied men like Abe Lincoln to take on the Dred Scott decision. And those words have driven every effort to make real the promise of Ameica. With the 14th Amendment, we included slaves and the children of immigrants. In our life time we’ve learned to read it to say men and women are born with certain rights. Free to marry whom we want. Free to come and go. Free to say what we like and free to get up in the face of people who say things we find offensive.
Some of our fellow citizens don’t like common core educational requirements because they focus on negative things in American History such as slavery and the treatment of native Americans. I think this part of the American story is more reason to love this country, because we as a people were no better than the rest of a struggling humanity. But the words we nailed on the wall in the Declaration of Independence have been like a giant magnet pulling us toward its great ideal. In the course of time the world has been changed and now often challenges us in a race to make the promise complete. There is no greater gift a parent can give a child than an ideal to guide their life, today we celebrate the gift our nation was given by our founders on July 4, 1776.
This is my favorite American holiday. Not because I love fireworks and cookouts. I do but my love of this day is based on why we celebrate it. This being a musing which I will post on face book let me begin with a one question quiz.
Why do we celebrate America’s Birthday on the 4th of July?
A. It is the day the colonists won the first great battle with the British at Bunker Hill.
B. It was the day we signed the Treaty of Ghent, the peace treaty with Great Britain.
C. It is the day Patrick Henry led an attack on the guard house at Williamsburg setting free 86 colonists held as political prisoners by the Governor per order of the King.
D. It is the day on which a majority of the delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia finally voted to succeed from Great Britain.
E. It was the day Washington defeated Cornwallis essentially ending the American Revolution.
F. None of the above.
As you look at the list I am sure you are thinking that many countries celebrate the day they defeated their greatest foe, but you're not going to fall for that. So you scratch off A and E. The French celebrate setting the prisoners free from the Bastille but you know we didn’t do that so scratch off C. B. gets a look, but we don’t celebrate the day that Great Britain finally agreed we were free so B gets the scratch.
Now we are down to D and F. And I might venture a guess most of you chose D. The day a majority of delegates in Philadelphia finally agreed to tell the King to count us out. But technically, F. is the correct answer.
The fourth of July was not the first day the delegates voted to leave. First they voted to have a Committee which included Jefferson, Adams and Franklin draft a Declaration of Independence. Then on the third of July the majority of delegates voted that the Declaration be passed to be engrossed. What happened on the fourth was a forgone conclusion. The bill was reported back to the body as “truly and strictly engrossed” and passed to be enacted. The second or third time it received a majority vote depending on how you keep count.
This may seem a small point, but in the words of Bernie Sanders, I think it Huge! These men who were putting their heads in a noose cared deeply about procedure, about rules and laws. That is why the same John Adams had defended the British Officers accused of murder at the Boston Massacre declaring if we were fit to govern ourselves we must be a nation of laws, not of men. Adams won their acquittal from a fired up Boston jury.
The Fox News equivalent at the time called Adams a weakling and a traitor. Somewhere we can be sure a Donald was saying the families of the British Officers should be hung right beside them.
This concern with law and legalisms is what led the delegates to decide that they needed a formal declaration making it clear why they felt justified in setting aside the laws and rulers from London. These were careful and educated men, who believed in education and worried about ignorant citizens running amuck. Read the Massachusetts original Constitution written by Adams, it seems like half of it is about educating the citizens.
Some historians have characterized these men as conservative and in some ways that is fair. They certainly had as much they wanted to preserve as that which they demanded to change. But the Declaration which they passed was and is no conservative document. It declares that the war is being fought to create a nation that recognizes that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights including Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
The men in Philadelphia were by and large men born to a position of wealth and privilege. Among them there were brilliant men like Patrick Henry and Ben Franklin of more common birth, but what prompted them to pass such a radical document? Maybe it was the rare excitement of stepping out into an unknown. Maybe it was because these politicians realized they had to give common men like Paul Revere a reason to lay down his tools and risk his life in the militia.
We know now that those founders struggled to make real the promise of the Declaration, but in many ways they fell short and the Constitution is full of them. More than a decade after the Declaration the drafters of the Constitution thought slavery would end, encouraged its end by prohibiting slaves from the Northwest Territory and setting a date in which the importation of slaves would be prohibited. But they left it intact and even provided how slaves would be counted in the census. Then came the cotton gin and any hopes about a natural end to slavery were dealt a death blow.
But before we point our finger of condemnation at the founders, let’s acknowledge that it was those pesky words that they put in the Declaration that rallied men like Abe Lincoln to take on the Dred Scott decision. And those words have driven every effort to make real the promise of Ameica. With the 14th Amendment, we included slaves and the children of immigrants. In our life time we’ve learned to read it to say men and women are born with certain rights. Free to marry whom we want. Free to come and go. Free to say what we like and free to get up in the face of people who say things we find offensive.
Some of our fellow citizens don’t like common core educational requirements because they focus on negative things in American History such as slavery and the treatment of native Americans. I think this part of the American story is more reason to love this country, because we as a people were no better than the rest of a struggling humanity. But the words we nailed on the wall in the Declaration of Independence have been like a giant magnet pulling us toward its great ideal. In the course of time the world has been changed and now often challenges us in a race to make the promise complete. There is no greater gift a parent can give a child than an ideal to guide their life, today we celebrate the gift our nation was given by our founders on July 4, 1776.