Cartoonist Walt Kelly years ago had a popular cartoon strip called “Pogo,” about a possum and his animal friends who lived in a Georgia swamp. Every now and then, one of them would proclaim, “Friday the 13th came on Wednesday this month!” or whatever day was appropriate.
So today we celebrate Independence Day. We can’t say we’re celebrating the fourth of July because that’s not util tomorrow. And actually, there are several dates we can observe because the Declaration was a work in progress for almot a month before Congress adopted it.
John Adams thought July 2nd would be the day to be remembered. He wrote to wife Abigail 247 years ago today, “The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha, in the history of America…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 forever more.”
Why July 2ns?
Let’s go back to June 7th when delegate Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed a resolution “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”
Four days later a committee of five—Adams, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Thomas Jefferson—was appointed to write a document expressing those views. Congress recessed until July 1 while the document was written.
Jefferson reluctantly took the job of writing the first draft. But he alone did not write the Declaration. Adams and Franklin were his chief editors. His first draft contained about 1850 words.
The five-member committee made about four dozen changes. Other committees of the Continental Congress made 39 more. Jefferson made five. In the end of the document was reduced by about 25 percent, to 1,337 words.
One immediate change was made by Benjamin Franklin in the most-cited part of the document—“all men are created equal”
The idea is not Jefferson’s alone. He borrowed the sentiment from fellow Virginian George Mason, the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights that had been adopted a month earlier, saying, “all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
Jefferson re-wrote that idea:
“We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty,& the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it’s foundation on such principles & organizing it’s powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness.”
Jefferson took an already wordy sentiment and made it even more wordy.
And this is where Franklin made a significant change. He immediately removed “sacred and undeniable” and inserted “self evident.” Franklin biographer Walter Isaacson says Franklin argued that the new nation was to be one in which rights come from rational thinking and the consent of the governed, not from the dictates or dogmas of religion.
The document mentions God or substitute names for God several times but it does so in neutral phrasing. This is not a Catholic God. This is not a Christian God—in those days there were plenty of people who believed Catholics weren’t Christians and Protestant belief organizations were actively splintering into different denominations with differing interpretations of God and the Scriptures.
The God in the Declaration is nature’s God, not a denominational God for a reason.
In Jefferson’s state of Virginia, between 1768 and 1774, about half of the Baptist ministers were jailed for preaching. In Northampton, Massachusetts—Adams’ state—eighteen Baptist ministers were jailed in one year for refusing to pay taxes to support the Congregational minister in the town.
The sentiment about God had been voiced in the very first sentence of the Declaration that asserted that the colonies are separate from England and as a unified entity assume “among the powers of the earth and the separate and equal stations to which “the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them.”
The Congress resumed its session on July 2 and the Lee Resolution was adopted and debate on the Declaration began immediately. For the next two days, Congress made changes—the most significant one being the removal of a section that attacked slavery.
It was late in the morning of July 4 when the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration and the handwritten original with all of its changes was given to printer John Dunlap. But until August 2, the only signature on the document was that of convention president John Hancock.
The document was not signed July 4th—the famous painting by John Trumbull showing the five-man committee turning in the document with other members seated behind them.
Most members of the Continental Congress did not sign the Declaration until August 27. And there were stragglers: Richard Henry Lee, Elbridge Gerry (of gerrymander infamy), and Oliver Walcott did not sign until November 19. And it was not until 1781 that Thomas McKean added his signature.
McKean had left Congress a few days after adoption of the Declaration to become a colonel in the Pennsylvania Association, a military unit despite its name created by Franklin.
They promised their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor when they signed the document. Several, tragically, kept that promise.
Five of them were captured by the British, branded as traitors, and died after being tortured. A dozen saw their homes burned. The sons of two of them were killed in the war. Nine of them fought in the war and died of their wounds or the hardships of the war.
Lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. Those words and the passionate commitments behind them meant something in 1776.
As we honor them today, we should be haunted by those words and wonder what place they have in our political world today.