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Remembering the Fourth of July

  • Writer: Media Manager
    Media Manager
  • Jul 1
  • 3 min read

Join Anticus in remembering America’s birthday and the history leading up to this momentous event.




Though we call July 4, 1776 the nation’s birth date, the creation of a new nation is not the work of a day. On that singular summer day, more than a year after the Revolutionary War had started, delegates from thirteen of Britain’s North American colonies ratified the Declaration of Independence. (Britain’s American colonies farther to the north on the continent and in the Caribbean did not secede from the empire.) The Continental Congress was not an especially representative governing body, neither by demographics nor by political opinion. Plenty of colonists wanted to remain a British colony. And though the delegates resolved on independence on July 4,  many people did not hear of it until weeks, even months, later and the war lasted for five more years.


A big part of the work of the revolutionaries in the summer of 1776 was to publicize their action and seek popular support. In Philadelphia, copies of the Declaration were printed beginning on July 5. It took longer for the text to get to printers farther away. Ezekiel Russell of Salem, Massachusetts printed the Declaration on July 17 and included as a footer the instructions from the Massachusetts government, now in rebellion against Britain, that the Declaration should be read by ministers of every denomination to their congregants and should be entered into the town meeting records of every town. Word spread. And the words of the Declaration became a touchstone. 


Over 70 years later, in 1848, the first local women’s rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, adopted a Declaration of Sentiments whose preamble is almost exactly the language of the Declaration of Independence: 


We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.


Organizationally, the first national women’s rights convention, held in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850, was more consequential, but the rhetoric of the Declaration of Sentiments continued to resonate with those who saw the social and legal practices of their time as an organized tyranny of men over women. Throughout the multi-generational struggle to win the vote, women’s suffrage activists continued to invoke the language and events of the Revolution.


In 1852, when July 4, 1776 was 76 years in the past, Frederick Douglass was invited to speak at an Independence Day event. He began with words of respect for the Continental Congress delegates: “They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.” But he addressed white listeners in two contradictory registers: he called them fellow citizens while emphasizing that slavery created a racial gulf between them” “This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” Until the nation truly committed to the premise that all are created equal, he insisted, the celebrations would be a shameful charade. (Douglass was also a signer of the Declaration of Sentiments.)


By the mid-1800s, the living memory of the revolution that won independence was dying out. (Coincidentally, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration. Some long-lived people who were children at the time of the Revolution survived into the 1850s.) Independence and the rights-based rhetoric used to justify the first revolution became an inheritance rather than the achievement of a living generation. Participants in the revolutions that followed often called on their nation not to reject that inheritance but to perfect it.



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