On 4 July, the United States celebrated the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. Although independence wasn’t actually achieved until Britain accepted defeat with the 1783 Peace of Paris, the Fourth of July is usually celebrated as the ‘birthday’ of the United States. As John Adams wrote,
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 Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.
(Adams, incorrectly, predicted that 2 July—the day that Congress voted in favour of independence—would be remembered as the nation’s birthday, rather than 4 July, the day when Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence.) In keeping with the spirit of Adams’s remarks, back in May, Chevrolet used a specially designed Corvette to blow out 250 candles at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
If the Fourth of July is America’s birthday, then the Declaration of Independence is its birth certificate. The Declaration is the foundational document for the nation, its creedal statement, establishing that the United States will be a republic premised on equality. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’, its most famous sentence asserts, ‘that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’
In the 250 years since 1776, Americans have interpreted the Declaration of Independence as the nation’s birth certificate, embracing its language to make claims for greater rights and equality. When women’s rights advocates gathered at Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton reworked the language of the Declaration of Independence when she drafted the Declaration of Sentiments to claim equal rights for American women. In his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Martin Luther King described the Declaration of Independence as ‘a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, Black men as well as White men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’
While the revolutionaries of 1776 did intend the Declaration of Independence to be a justification of their rebellion, and an assertion of their rights, it was not only a birth notice but an obituary as well. For the revolutionaries, the Declaration of Independence signalled the failure of the British Empire. During the previous decade, since Parliament adopted the Stamp Act in 1765, through the series of subsequent laws aimed at taxing the colonies (and asserting greater control over them), self-styled ‘Patriots’ in the colonies sought to find a solution that would allow them to exercise their rights within the British Empire. They believed that they were British subjects who had the same rights and liberties as Britons who resided in Britain. They sought to reform and remake the empire to ensure that the British constitution applied to them. When George III declared the colonies to be in rebellion and waged war against them, he asserted that the vaunted ‘rights of Englishmen’ that the constitution guaranteed did not apply in the colonies. That was when, as a last resort, the colonies declared independence. The Declaration of Independence was a declaration of failure.
Thomas Jefferson adopted an elegiac, emotional tone when writing about ‘our British brethren’ in his draft of the Declaration.
We must endeavor to forget our former love for them, and to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends. We might have been a free & great people together; but a communication of grandeur & of freedom it seems is below their dignity. Be it so, since they will have it: the road to glory & happiness is open to us too; we will climb it in a separate state, and acquiesce in the necessity which pronounces our everlasting Adieu!
Jefferson’s language suggests less a celebration of what Lincoln would later term a ‘new birth of freedom’ than regret and sorrow over what might have been. To his way of thinking, independence had been forced on the Americans by a brutish, tyrannical, and unfeeling king and his ministers who lacked the vision to find a constitutional solution that would secure the rights of his subjects in America. He is saying, ‘We might have been great together, but we will have to be great without you.’ Congress tempered and cut Jefferson’s emotive language in its final draft of the Declaration, concluding simply, ‘We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.’
It struck some commentators as somewhat incongruous that King Charles III made a state visit to the United States in April to mark the Semiquincentennial of a republican revolution (his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, made a similar visit during the Bicentennial in 1976). However, when he addressed a joint session of Congress on 28 April, the king said,
With the spirit of 1776 in our minds, we can perhaps agree that we do not always agree—at least in the first instance. Indeed, the very principle on which your Congress was founded—no taxation without representation—was at once a fundamental disagreement between us, and at the same time a shared democratic value which you inherited from us. Ours is a partnership born out of dispute, but no less strong for it, so perhaps, in this example, we can discern that our nations are in fact instinctively like-minded—a product of the common democratic, legal and social traditions in which our governance is rooted to this day.
Thomas Jefferson would have agreed.
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