Imperfect though it may be, America was born headed in the right direction.
John Adams was quite the visionary. On an evening in early July 1776, just hours after he helped draft America’s Declaration of Independence, he wrote a most remarkable note to his wife. Among other things, the founding father and future president predicted that Independence Day would be “celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival … 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 forevermore.”
Two-hundred-forty-nine years later, wherever there are Americans, there will be illuminations on the Fourth of July – fireworks, as we call them nowadays. I’m no fan of fireworks – they’re noisy and messy – but I love the reason why my fellow Americans fill the sky with illuminations on the Fourth of July. America’s independence, freedom and founding are worth celebrating.
Costs Amid all the fireworks and festivities, we seldom stop to consider the gravity of what Adams and his fellow founders did on the Fourth of July. What they drafted in the summer of 1776 was not just a declaration of independence. In a very real sense, it was a declaration of war against what was then the greatest military-economic power on earth. Indeed, just a few years earlier, in 1773, a British diplomat had coined the phrase, “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” It wasn’t bluster or bravado; it was a fact.
King George III wouldn’t just shrug and allow his North American colonies “to dissolve the political bands” that connected the Old World with the New World. His resistance wasn’t simply a matter of pride and political will, though those were certainly factors in Britain’s response to America’s Declaration of Independence. It was a matter of national interest: Britain’s North American colonies – and the vast frontier beyond them – were rich in natural resources. They represented an ever-growing market for exports, a prize and a field of competition for Europe’s imperial powers, and a critical link in the Royal Navy’s global constellation of ports.
Just as Adams and his fellow founders believed their freedom and independence were worth fighting for, King George III and his parliament, navy and army believed their empire was worth fighting for and preserving. And so, the king declared the colonies to be in “open and avowed rebellion” and increased support for the war effort. In late August 1776, by way of example, 130 British warships landed 20,000 additional British soldiers in New York.
Those words “additional” and “increased” are important. Based on our grade-school retellings of the Revolutionary War, many of us think that it began after independence was declared. But it actually began long before July 4, 1776. The first battle of the American Revolution was fought in April 1775. Soon after that, in June 1775, the Continental Congress created America’s Army. That autumn, the Continental Congress created America’s Navy and Marine Corps.
Yet even as they stood up a fighting force to secure some measure of liberty, the colonies pursued reconciliation with Great Britain throughout the summer of 1775, asking King George III, as his ”faithful subjects,” to use his “authority and influence” to correct the abuses of his ministers. But the king refused even to accept that olive-branch document, and the British Empire continued its hardline policies against the colonies. (For a description of those policies, see the long litany in the middle of the Declaration of Independence.)
Adams was under no illusions about what would follow the Declaration of Independence. “I am well aware,” he concluded, “of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this declaration and support and defend these states.”
But even “through all the gloom,” Adams glimpsed “rays of ravishing light and glory,” holding firm to the belief that “that the end is more than worth all the means.”
There was more to Adams’ optimism than the power of enlightenment and reason. He was confident about America’s future as an independent, self-governing people because he submitted his “hopes and fears to an overruling Providence, in which, unfashionable as the faith may be, I firmly believe.”
Even so, his grim prediction about the cost of independence was all-too accurate. The former 13 colonies – renamed the United States of America – would lose 6,800 men killed in action; 17,000 more would succumb to disease; another 6,100 would be maimed. The war claimed a staggering 1% of America’s population, spanned nearly eight years and devoured something close to half of the young American republic’s wealth. (Given that Adams and his fellow founders affectionately described Britain as their “mother country” – at least up until the summer of 1775 – it’s worth noting that Britain lost an estimated 8,000 troops in battle and perhaps double that number to disease and grievous injuries.)
Those numbers reminded us again that freedom is not free – and never has been.
“Posterity,” Adams declared less than a year after he signed the Declaration of Independence but long before most of that blood was spilled, “you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it.”
Light Thomas Jefferson, the lead author of the Declaration of Independence, made a similar point after the Revolutionary War had been won and America’s independence secured. “The generation which is going off stage,” Jefferson sighed, “has arrested the course of despotism which has overwhelmed the world for thousands and thousands of years.”
Jefferson, Adams and their fellow founding fathers knew they were lighting the way to a freer world – and changing the course of history.
Indeed, the Declaration of Independence – with its stirring announcement that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” – was intended as a beacon of freedom for all people. Historians at Monticello point out that freedom-seeking peoples in more than 100 countries have imitated America’s Declaration of Independence in asserting their sovereignty and liberty.
Jefferson himself saw America maturing into “an empire of liberty” destined to become the driving force for the “freedom of the globe.”
Jefferson’s prediction is confirmed by the 20th century – what’s been labeled “the American century” – and by all those around the world who in this century wave America’s flag to defy despots and grasp at freedoms most Americans take for granted. In Tripoli and Tbilisi, Kiev and Kosovo, Hong Kong and Havana, they know about America’s founding document – and how it triggered a global freedom revolution.
Dreams On July 4, 1965, Martin Luther King reflected on the Declaration of Independence.
Rather than calling for statues of Jefferson to be torn down, King called Jefferson’s masterpiece “majestic,” specifically citing the most famous words in the American lexicon: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by God … with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
“This is a dream,” King cheered, “a great dream.”
Unlike the mobs that have scarred our streets and marred our monuments – in King’s time and our time – he recognized that even though America is imperfect, “the founding fathers of our nation dreamed this dream in all of its magnificence” and “professed the great principles of democracy.”
They may not have practiced those principles to the full – they may not have known how to practice them – but they were the first to profess them so clearly and plainly, as King explained. Pointing to the Declaration’s promise that “each of us has certain basic rights that are neither derived from or conferred by the state” but are “God-given gifts from His hands,” King declared that “never before in the history of the world has a sociopolitical document expressed in such profound, eloquent and unequivocal language the dignity and the worth of human personality.”
King had the wisdom – even during a time, like our own, of deep division – to see America’s founding as something to celebrate, as something momentous in the history of humanity. The entire founding project – despite all its contortions and compromises – was an enormous step forward for humanity. Like Lincoln a century before him, King concluded that “God somehow called America to do a special job for mankind and the world.”
It’s telling and deeply moving, given the injustice he fought, that King was able to recognize this, to look beyond the flaws of the founders, and to see what they envisioned, what they hoped for, what they dreamed. King understood that for nations, as for individuals, the measure of goodness is not perfection, but rather direction. And he recognized that America was born headed in the right direction.
“We have a great dream. It started way back in 1776,” King exclaimed. “God grant that America will be true to her dream.”
Alan W. Dowd serves as director of the Sagamore Institute Center for America's Purpose. Any opinions expressed in this article are strictly his own.
- Landing Zone