Note: This Fourth of July, I think it is important to revisit an article I previously wrote only a couple of years ago. I have made updates where needed, but the core sentiments remain the same. Have a wonderful Independence Day!
“The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” —Alexander Hamilton
Independence Day is commemorated with hot dogs, fireworks, and John Philip Sousa. Friends and family gather in the heat of summer adorned in red, white, and blue, as it is the one time of year when people feel most patriotic. This year marks the 248th anniversary of our independence from Great Britain. While there will be joyous celebration, our nation is becoming increasingly fractured regarding our Founding Fathers and the legacy they have left us. The most famous words written by Thomas Jefferson from The Declaration of Independence state:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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.”
But opinions regarding how these inspiring words were put to use are varied and cause division.
Is all of humanity created equal? Yes. Were all men humans treated equally before, during, or after the Revolution? No. For, most certainly, slaves and women were not universally deemed equal, and it took generations for these wrongs to be righted.
But we need to remember this flawed but unparalleled experiment in government had to be made with compromises. And were it not for the foresight of our founders, the United States Constitution would have remained static and would have failed long ago. Instead, our independence and subsequent Constitution became a blueprint for other countries. Without an American Revolution, for example, there would never have been a French Revolution.
Yet our founding principles are controversial to some. For example, when Egypt as recently as 2012 was putting their parliament in charge of drafting a constitution, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg advised, “ [I] would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012." Not a ringing endorsement from a Justice who sat on our Supreme Court. Most recently, social justice movements stem from what those leaders believe are inherent grievances in our founding documents. But they are looking at things from a modern perspective, while losing sight of how revolutionary those documents were.
Our colonists had to make a difficult decision in 1776. Should they pursue a risky break with their mother country ruled by an unjust monarch or continue on a safer, easier path of being protected by the Crown while also being oppressed? That’s why these words within the document ring true:
“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
Jefferson set up the shot across the bow to King George III. After he laid out the fact that all men are created equal and that our rights come from God not a monarchy, he proceeded to say that fighting the system is not something citizens do on a whim. Rather than upsetting the apple cart, people will usually choose a path of least resistance. They will put up with unsettling governmental infractions and tyranny rather than ridding themselves of the powerful and starting anew. This is a sad truth even in our modern times. As the University of Gothenburg acknowledged in 2022, “Our measurements show that closed autocracies have increased from 25 to 30 countries globally. Dictatorships are on the rise around the world. Today, 5.4 billion people, 70 per cent, live in dictatorships.”
Continuing, Jefferson pointed out that the decision to break free from England was not one made haphazardly or impulsively. Instead, the colonies needed to separate from Great Britain because Britain made it impossible for the two to continue to be joined. Jefferson then listed the reasons the colonies needed independence.
If you are an English teacher, The Declaration of Independence is a fantastic lesson in the art of argumentation: introduction, claim, body with evidence, conclusion. It did exactly what it was intended to do. Calmly and rationally, it showed grounds why the colonies could no longer tolerate being ruled by Britain. It, also, provoked King George III and led to a war. But the colonists knew that to be taken seriously on the world stage as its own country, they could not be linked to England and at the same time forge their own way. If they did not completely cut ties, countries like France would be apt to think that any alliance with (what would eventually become) the United States, would upset mighty England. This could ultimately lead to trade disputes and war.
Here’s what I’m hoping that you will understand: The 1700s was a time of uncertainty. It would have been so much easier for the colonists to stick with what they knew. Instead, they debated the creation of a new country, with a new system of government never tried before. We take it for granted in 2024 that these white men in tights and wigs knew that all of this was going to work out, thus they should have taken into account slavery and women’s rights. Some look in hindsight and say that the promises laid out in The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution are filled with hypocrisy, so we need to tear down statues, rename schools and streets, or remove Lincoln’s bust and the Gettysburg Address from Cornell’s library. Anything that ties us to our history must be erased. But think of all that had to happen for us to get where we are today.
The Declaration of Independence set us on a crash course with the most powerful country in the world at the time—Great Britain. We had colonists with muskets fighting against the world’s greatest army and navy for almost eight years. Our cause was not won alone. France and Spain played a role, to be sure, by lending money and providing ammunition, soldiers, and a navy. But even Spain and France could see that the colonies could be prime real estate for their own desires should this war fail. Concurrently, the Continental Congress created a loose government primarily giving states sovereignty in 1777. When the Revolution ended and the Continental Army was victorious, they needed to have a binding Constitution that laid out the roles of government that formally united the number of states then and any that would be established in the future. Once independence was won, the real work began—how to form a unified group of states who each had their own interests.
A lot of credit goes to George Washington because without his leadership and integrity, the newly formed United States would never have come together. But, in my humble opinion, it was James Madison to whom we owe most of the credit regarding our Constitution and its ratification. He studied crates full of books regarding history, government, and law and brought that knowledge to the Constitutional Convention.
Keep in mind, there was no unanimous vote for The Declaration of Independence or for the United States Constitution. What was needed for ratifying the Constitution was 9 out of the 14 states. Yet it was a tough sell. Some felt the Constitution left too much power to the federal government, others wanted more federal government and less to the states. Could people really self-govern? Through debate and compromise, we ended up with three coequal branches of government. We ended up with a representative democracy. We ended up with a Bill of Rights. If it weren’t for Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton swiftly writing The Federalist Papers, which laid out the rationale for this new government for the masses, the U.S. would have been doomed before getting started and there would never have been the musical Hamilton.
The persuasiveness of The Federalist Papers helped a fledgling country get its wings. As Hamilton wrote:
“It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide, by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.”
To me, each Independence Day celebrates not just the Declaration of Independence but the subsequent Constitution. We live in a free society of our own making not through accident and force. Citizens rule through their votes on all levels of government—local, state, and federal—and those votes have power. For those who choose not to vote, that lack of interest can be disastrous. Elections have consequences, which is why voting and election integrity matters. Citizens have the choice to vote or not. Voters have choices of candidates to vote for on primary ballots and Election Day ballots. The founders also gave us the electoral college as a compromise between Congress choosing our President and popular votes, which would have left smaller states at a disadvantage.
I, like many of you, read the comments on social media sites both in praise of as well as the disparaging comments toward our Supreme Court Justices and their decisions; Trump, Biden and his administration; and our country in general. I may not like everything I read, but I recognize the importance of living in a country where freedom of thought and expression continues. Though we are facing First Amendment threats from social media companies, we are arguing about societal ideas and what kind of country we desire just like the Founding Fathers did. This healthy discourse has been going on since our country began and will continue long after we are gone. WE are rulers of our own destinies not government officials.
As such, sometimes people make gross errors of judgment. Slavery was and is wrong. The 13th and 14th Amendments were written to abolish slavery and enact voting rights to any man who was born in the U.S. No doubt it took a long time to get there, and the South was still finding ways to circumvent the laws. The Supreme Court even got things wrong after the passage of these amendments (e.g. Plessy v. Fergusson). And it took the 19th Amendment before women got the right to vote.Though the wheels of justice grind slowly, the Constitution made allowances for amendments in the first place.
Our Founding Fathers were not gods. They were flesh and blood with failings just like the rest of us. If you were born into a society that valued slavery and you knew no other way, you’d continue to enslave people. If you were born into a society that kept women out of education and politics, you’d continue to treat women unequally. Does the ownership of slaves or unequal treatment of women by our Founding Fathers undo the good they did in winning independence and writing the longest functioning constitution in the world? No, because we know that through our own powers as a citizenry we can right wrongs. Today we look back and wonder how anyone could ever have thought slavery and women’s inequality was considered okay, but times were different.
And if you look at what is easiest and most expedient to your own ends, you will not think outside the box for a different result. That is human nature. Our Founding Fathers looked beyond themselves on paper, but needed to compromise in practice leaving women’s rights and slavery to later generations. Challenges were waged for well over a century regarding things we take for granted now. Are women and people of color equal to white men? Of course. But that wasn’t the default for all in the 1700s, and it took the Civil War and civil rights laws to change the prevailing winds.
Look at the arguments being waged regarding abortion now. If you are under the age of 50, the practice of abortion is all you’ve known. It’s been ingrained in you that it is a right, and it angers you to see that “right” overturned. Yet each state and their citizens will now be in charge of finding a way through the abortion issue without federal intervention. Perhaps future generations will look back and question how anyone could have ever thought abortion was okay. Perhaps they will question how a fight for bodily autonomy coexisted with a willingness to allow government mandated Covid lockdowns and vaccinations. For we, too, are not gods and are fallible.
Battles over key issues are a good thing. They engage us to learn more about our history and founding. We are forced to lose complacency and realize that for a democratic republic to work, the federal government needs to stay in its lane and not usurp decision making granted to the electorate. We live in a democratic republic not a dictatorship.
This is why we should not have a government that makes decisions for us. It should make you shudder to hear an official on any governmental level telling us that gas prices are high, that we need to learn to adapt, and that this is all part of a new “liberal world order.” We the people tell government what we want not the other way around. We govern ourselves through our chosen representatives. We are not a perfect union, but we are perfecting our union with each passing day. It may not always be easy, but freedom must reign. Our Founding Fathers understood tyranny and chose freedom at great sacrifice, which is why we celebrate July 4th.
Remember that keeping a democratic republic can come down to one election. Our country is in the middle of the oft quoted dialogue with Ben Franklin after the Constitutional Convention of 1787:
“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
Thank you for these quotes and your opinion. I appreciate how this put together .
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's advice to Egypt, as it was writing a new constitution, not to use the U.S. Constitution as a templet (paraphrasing) is as chilling a comment one would not expect to hear from a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice. Appalling best describes my reaction to reading that comment. Memory deserts me as I attempt to remember Barack Obama's opinion on the Constitution but it went along the lines of the Constitution guarantees our rights but prevents elitists from bending the country to their perception of what those rights should be.
Thank you for updating your essay. The Ginsburgs and Obamas of this country are not proponents of our Republic. Thank God they are still a minority in that belief.
Happy Independence Day!