What do we really celebrate today, on the Fourth of July: independence or liberty?
The answer, of course, is liberty. True, Independence Day commemorates the armed struggle that eventually allowed the 13 American colonies “to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”
But if mere independence is all this holiday is about, then hold the fireworks. Even North Korea exercises that kind of sovereignty, since its people suffer at the hands of a domestic, rather than foreign, tyrant.
In fact, Americans – then and now – celebrate far more than independence on this hallowed day. The jubilant citizens who gathered in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, to read the Declaration of Independence issued by the Continental Congress would have to wait more than 21 years before the U.S. Constitution – that magnificent charter for ordered liberty – would be unveiled in that same city. But even then, they sensed that America was fighting for much more than independence, and for the inspiring belief 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 [and] that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
It was those four words that lifted the Declaration of Independence above a mere rationale for rebellion into a truly revolutionary document. The very concept of self-government was antithetical to the theory of the “divine right of kings” that had dominated Europe for centuries.
Initially, most of the colonists themselves were uneasy with the notion of democracy – and even independence, for that matter. Though sporadic fighting had raged for more than a year before adoption of the Declaration, the rebels often protested that they were fighting for the rights of Englishmen, not independence as such. Frequently, they blamed the British government’s misdeeds upon the king’s advisers, believing that if George III could somehow be made aware of the real facts, he would make things right.
As historian Page Smith wrote in his magisterial “A New Age Now Begins” (McGraw-Hill, 1976), the notion of revolution against the mother country was so shocking to most colonists that, “It was much easier to go step by step, eyes fixed on the path ahead, placing one’s faith in the ultimate benevolence of the King-Father [while living] a kind of double life – loyal revolutionaries of His Majesty, George III.”
The Declaration of Independence, and the searing indictment of George III’s misrule that it contained, would end that ambivalence. The revolutionary leaders who pledged “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” sought total independence so that they could pursue their own vision of ordered liberty, rather than petition humbly before some hereditary monarch whose sole authority to govern them stemmed from the circumstances of his birth.
Obviously, 231 years later, America still falls far short of the universal equality enshrined in our original charter of liberty. But as the half-black, half-Indian Crispus Attucks, hailed by tradition as the first American to shed his blood in the fight against British rule in the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770, would have said, patriots don’t love their country because it’s perfect. They try to perfect it because they love it.
