United States: Born on the Fourth of July

The United States celebrates its Independence Day on July 4, a day of patriotic celebration and family events throughout the country. In the words of Founding Father John Adams, the holiday would be “the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, It ought to be solemnised 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 forever more.”

The holiday is a major civic occasion, with roots deep in the Anglo-American tradition of political freedom.

INDEPENDENCE DAY: Community fireworks displays are common. In New York City, Macy’s department store for 30 years has sponsored a July 4 fireworks display. In 2005, the 30-minute show featured 35,000 shells launched from seven barges afloat in the East River and in New York Harbour. The Associated Press estimated

 that more than three million watched in person.

The event also has been televised nationally in recent years.

The Fourth is a family celebration. Picnics and barbeques are common. July is summer in the United States, and millions of Americans escape the heat at beaches and other vacation spots. Independence Day is not among the legal holidays fixed on a Monday or Friday, but many employees use vacation time to create an extended weekend, as in 2006, when the holiday occurs on a Tuesday.

Construction of important public works sometimes begins on July 4. The Erie Canal, Washington Monument and Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (the nation’s first) all broke ground on Independence Day. The date reflects a desire symbolically to stamp these projects as true civic improvements.

The Fourth of July is a time when elected officials and other public figures often give speeches extolling American traditions and values.

Independence Day has provided some of USA’s most stirring words of freedom. In 1788, Founding Father James Wilson addressed a Philadelphia gathering that was possibly the largest July 4 celebration in the young nation’s history.

He exhorted his fellow citizens to ratify the proposed Constitution. “What is the object exhibited to our contemplation?” he asked. “A WHOLE PEOPLE exercising its first and greatest power — performing an act of SOVEREIGNTY, ORIGINAL and UNLIMITED....”

On July 4, 1852, the black journalist and abolitionist Frederick Douglass decried the evils of slavery, still prevalent in the American South at that time, but identified forces “drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions in operation” that “must inevitably work the downfall of slavery.”

Ninety years later, near the darkest moments of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt reminded the nation that July 4 symbolised “the democratic freedom which our citizens claim as their precious birthright:” For the “weary, hungry, unequipped Army of the American Revolution,” he continued: the Fourth of July was a tonic of hope and inspiration. So is it now.

The tough, grim men who fight for freedom in this dark hour take heart in its message — the assurance of the right to liberty under God — for all peoples and races and groups and nations, everywhere in the world.

On July 4, 2001, President George W. Bush spoke outside Independence Hall, Philadelphia, birthplace of the Declaration of Independence. That document, he said, continues to represent “the standard to which we hold others, and the standard by which we measure ourselves. Our greatest achievements have come when we have lived up to these ideals. Our greatest tragedies have come when we have failed to uphold them.”

Across the nation, civic leaders of even the most humble station echo these words, and their audiences give thanks for the freedom and liberties that the founding generation won for all Americans.

The United States declared its independence in 1776 and defeated Great Britain with help from France in the American Revolutionary War.

As Seymour Martin Lipset points out, “The United States was the first major colony successfully to revolt against colonial rule. In this sense, it was the first ‘new nation.’” (Lipset, The First New Nation (1979) p. 2)

On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress, still meeting in Philadelphia, declared the independence of a nation called “the United States of America” in the Declaration of Independence, primarily authored by Thomas Jefferson. July 4 is celebrated as the nation’s birthday. The new nation was dedicated to principles of republicanism, which emphasized civic duty and a fear of corruption and hereditary aristocracy.

The structure of the National Government was profoundly changed on March 4, 1789, when the people replaced the Articles of Confederation with the United States Constitution.

The new Government reflected a radical break from the normative governmental structures of the time, favouring representative, elective government with a weak executive, rather than the existing monarchical structures common within the western traditions of the time.

The system of republicanism borrowed heavily from Enlightenment Age ideas and classical western philosophy in

 that a primacy was placed upon individual liberty and upon constraining the power of government through division of powers and a system of checks and balances.

The colonists’ victory at Saratoga led the French into an open alliance with the United States. In 1781, a combined American and French Army, acting with the support of a French fleet, captured a large British army led by General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia. The surrender of General Cornwallis ended serious British efforts to find a military solution to their American problem.

A series of attempts to organise a movement to outline and press reforms culminated in the Congress calling the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The first known inhabitants of the area now possessed by the United States are believed to have arrived over a period of several thousand years beginning approximately 20,000 years ago by crossing the Bering land bridge into Alaska. The first solid evidence of these cultures settling in what would become the US begins as early as 15,000 years ago with the Sandia and Clovis tribes.

Relatively little is known of these early settlers compared to the Europeans who colonized the area after the first voyage of Italian navigator Christopher Columbus in 1492. Columbus’ men were also the first known Old Worlders to land in the territory of the United States when they arrived in Puerto Rico during their second voyage in 1493.

The first European known to set foot in the continental U.S. was Juan Ponce de Le¢n, who arrived in Florida in 1513, though there is some evidence suggesting that he may have been preceded by John Cabot in 1497.

The Gettysburg Address

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863

On June 1, 1865, Senator Charles Sumner commented on what is now considered the most famous speech by President Abraham Lincoln. In his eulogy on the slain president, he called it a “monumental act.”

He said Lincoln was mistaken that “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.” Rather, the Bostonian remarked, “The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech.”

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate we cannot consecrate we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”