Today, July 4, 2022 is the 246th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence establishing the United States of America
AGN.News Team
July 4, 2022
WASHINGTON (AGN.News) – Today marks the 246th anniversary of the signing of the United States Declaration of Independence. Fifty-Six of the United States’ Founding Fathers, meeting in Philadelphia, signed this Declaration.
These delegates represented the Thirteen Colonies. The occasion was the Second Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 4, 1776. This event represented a collective first step in forming the United States of America.
This Declaration of Independence was signed by fifty-six (56) of America’s Founding Fathers, congressional representatives from New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, the Thirteen Colonies.
What is the Declaration of Independence?
The Declaration of Independence is a document that explained why the colonies were at war. Enacted during the American Revolution, the Declaration explains why the Thirteen Colonies, at war with the Kingdom of Great Britain, regarded themselves as thirteen independent sovereign states, no longer under British rule.
The Declaration of Independence completed
The Declaration was a formal explanation of why Congress had voted to declare independence from Great Britain, more than a year after the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War.
A Declaration Committee of Five was formed to compose the document. They worked on it from June 11, 1776, until July 5, 1776, the day on which the Declaration was published. The Declaration committee composed of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman.
The Declaration became official when Congress voted for it on July 4; signatures of the delegates were not needed to make it official. The handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence that was signed by Congress is dated July 4, 1776.
This event, Independence Day, would be forever celebrated on the 4th of July. The date, July 4, 1776, is the day the wording of the Declaration of Independence was ratified. The exact date each delegate signed is not exactly known. What is known is that the fourth day of July would forever be called Independence Day throughout the United States.
Signed copy at National Archives in Washington
Thomas Jefferson’s original draft is preserved at the Library of Congress, complete with changes made by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, as well as Jefferson’s notes of changes made by Congress. The best-known version of the Declaration is a signed copy that is displayed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and which is popularly regarded as the official document.
The Declaration justified the independence of the United States by listing 27 colonial grievances against King George III and by asserting certain natural and legal rights, including a right of revolution.
What the Declaration accomplished
The Declaration of Independence has become a well-known statement on human rights, particularly its second sentence: “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.”
The Declaration was made to guarantee equal rights for every person, and if it had been intended for only a certain section of people, Congress would have left it as “rights of Englishmen”.
“All men are created equal”
The Founding Fathers, after much deliberation over several weeks, knew the newly-formed country would not only have thirteen colonies, but would continue to grow over time.
They knew that eventually the indigenous population as well as the enslaved population would one day be included in the “all men are created equal” part of the Declaration. Some of the Founding Fathers wanted the enslaved population set free then or at best set free eventually.
Thomas Jefferson had included a paragraph in his initial rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence vigorously condemning the evil of the slave trade, and condemning King George III for forcing it onto the colonies, but this was deleted from the final version.
Slavery and the Declaration
While Jefferson wanted the matter of slavery in the country addressed in the Declaration, he himself was a prominent Virginia slaveowner, owning over six hundred enslaved Africans on his Monticello plantation. He knew that slavery was in total conflict with the idea of freedom from oppression.
Many of the American Founding Fathers had heard of Crispus Attucks (c.1723 – March 5, 1770) who was an American whaler and sailor of African and Native American descent. He was generally regarded as the first person killed in the Boston Massacre and thus the first American killed in the American Revolution.
William Whipple Jr. (1730-1785) was an American Founding Father and signatory of the United States Declaration of Independence. Whipple freed his enslaved servant, Prince Whipple, believing that no man could fight for freedom and hold another in bondage. He wrote:
“A recommendation is gone thither for raising some regiments of Blacks. This, I suppose will lay a foundation for the emancipation of those wretches in that country. I hope it will be the means of dispensing the blessings of Freedom to all the human race in America.”
Blacks in the American Revolutionary War
African Americans have fought and died in every war on the side of the United States from the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, both World Wars, Korean War, Vietnam War, Iraq War, Gulf War, Afghanistan War, and every war or conflict in between over the past 246 years.
William Whipple Jr. was correct. Over 9,000 Blacks (including 5,000 were combat dedicated troops) were soldiers in the American Revolution. Notably, the average length of time in service for an African American soldier during the war was four and a half years (due to many serving for the whole eight-year duration), which was eight times longer than the average period for white soldiers.
Referring to this contradiction, English abolitionist Thomas Day (1748-1789) wrote in a 1776 letter, “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”
Lemuel Haynes (1753-1833), an American clergyman and a veteran of the American Revolution, was the first Black man in the United States to be ordained as a minister. This prominent African American writer expressed similar viewpoints in his essay “Liberty Further Extended”, where he wrote that “Liberty is Equally as precious to a Black man, as it is to a white one”.
On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), an African American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York. He delivered a speech asking the question, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”.
The first major public debate about slavery and the Declaration took place during the Missouri Compromise controversy of February 1819 to August 10, 1821. Anti-slavery Congressmen argued that the language of the Declaration indicated that the Founding Fathers of the United States had been opposed to slavery in principle, and so new slave states should not be added to the country.
Declaration and freedom from slavery
As abolitionist worked to end slavery, defenders of slavery such as John Randolph (1773-1833) and John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) found it necessary to argue that the Declaration’s assertion that “all men are created equal” was false, or at least that it did not apply to Black people.
Their pro-slavery position as a part of the planter class was abundantly clear when seen through the prism of slaveowners. Agreeing that the Declaration was against slavery would mean a loss of monetary income from non-paid slave labor.
In 1853, Salmon P. Chase (1808-1873), United States Senator and future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and Benjamin Wade (1800-1878) a United States Senator for Ohio from 1851 to 1869, defended the Declaration and what they saw as its antislavery principles.
Amendments to the Constitution
William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) was a prominent American Christian, abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer. He is best known for his widely read antislavery newspaper The Liberator, which he founded in 1831 and published in Boston until slavery in the United States was abolished by constitutional amendment in 1865.
The Thirteenth Amendment (Amendment XIII) to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. The amendment was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, by the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the required 27 of the then 36 states on December 6, 1865, and proclaimed on December 18, 1865.
The amendment was bitterly contested, particularly by the southern states of the defeated Confederacy, which were forced to ratify it in order to regain representation in Congress.
Additionally, the Fourteenth Amendment (Amendment XIV) to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. Often considered as one of the most consequential amendments, it addresses citizenship rights and equal protection under the law and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves following the American Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration
The Declaration’s relationship to slavery was taken up in 1854 by Abraham Lincoln when he gave a speech in Peoria, Illinois. He was a little-known former Congressman who idolized the Founding Fathers. Lincoln thought that the Declaration of Independence expressed the highest principles of the American Revolution, and that the Founding Fathers had tolerated slavery with the expectation that it would ultimately wither away.
In his Peoria speech, the President said, “Nearly eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a “sacred right of self-government”. … Our republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust. … Let us repurify it. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. … If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union: but we shall have saved it, as to make, and keep it, forever worthy of the saving.”
Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address
In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of November 19, 1863, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg, President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address:
“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.”
The President continued, “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.”
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