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As the Declaration of Independence was being adopted by the Continental Congress in 1776, one of its signers contemplated how the event should be celebrated in the future.
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 shows, games, sports,
guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of
this continent to the other, from this time forward
evermore.
So wrote John Adams from Philadelphia on July 3, 1776 --
a day before the Fourth. He believed the holiday would be
July 2, the day that the Continental Congress adopted a
resolution of independence offered on June 7 by Richard
Henry Lee: that these United Colonies are, and of right
ought to be, free and independent states...
The holiday came to be on the Fourth, the day that the Declaration, which set forth the reasons for the preceding resolution, was approved by the Continental Congress.
Adams's thoughts were in a letter written to his wife,
Abigail, who had remained back home in Massachusetts. She
was paying close attention to the proceedings; on March 31
she had written In the new code of laws which I suppose
it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would
remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to
them than your ancestors.... If particular care and
attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to
foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by
any laws in which we have no voice, or
representation.
Both partners were prescient. As Abigail predicted,
the ladies
eventually did foment a rebellion
to gain political rights, and as John hoped, independence
came to be celebrated with parades, games, guns, bells and
illuminations,
by which he presumably meant
fireworks.
There was another piece of foresight on John's part,
when he wrote of a celebration from one end of this
continent to the other.
At the time, British
settlement was confined to the eastern seaboard, although
Virginia and other colonies claimed land clear to the
Pacific Ocean.
So did other realms. In that summer of 1776, Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, who had set off months earlier from Sonora, Mexico, leading more than 200 colonists across brutal deserts, reached the great bay on the Pacific and founded the Presidio of San Francisco.
As the historian Patty Limerick once observed in a
speech here about Anza, if you want to be remembered for
founding a great American city, don't do it in July of 1776
-- Anza suffered from bad timing.
Deep in the interior of the continent, in the Spanish territorial capital of Santa Fe, July 4, 1776 had been planned as a day of some import. On that date, two priests -- Silvestre Velez de Escalante and Francisco Atanasio Dominguez -- had hoped to depart in their search for a land route to Monterey on the Pacific Coast.
For various reasons, their expedition was delayed for nearly a month, but they did make their way north and west, leaving some of the first accounts of the Western Slope of Colorado as they skirted the San Juans, crossed Uncompahgre Plateau, ascended the North Fork of the Gunnison and crossed Grand Mesa before leaving Colorado where the Green River does.
But it is the July events in Philadelphia that are celebrated today, and that is as it should be. John Adams was on the committee in charge of drafting the Declaration of Independence, but the work fell to Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson, among his other flaws (tobacco marketing,
slave possession, hemp cultivation, underage drinking) was
also an imperialist. With the Louisiana Purchase of 1803,
as well as two military forays, he extended his empire
of liberty
across the continent.
And so we hold commemorative parades and fireworks today in regions remote from Philadelphia, regions then uncharted to the men who adopted the Declaration.
Now, of course, it is the Declaration that is pretty
much unknown territory to the leaders of America. It says
that there are certain unalienable Rights,
among
them Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,
and to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted
among Men.
In other words, the primary obligation of government is to protect rights, rather than children (always a good excuse for Democratic politicians to deprive us of rights) or corporations (what Republicans protect first).
Little wonder that the reading of the Declaration has fallen out of favor at those commemorations that John Adams hopefully predicted in 1776.
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