ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, July 4, 1996 TAG: 9607050014
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: JOSEPH ELLIS
AT FIRST blush the question seems silly: What is the greatest Fourth of July in American history? The obvious answer is that there is only one Fourth, the one that occurred in 1776, when the delegates to the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence and thereby established American independence from Great Britain.
True enough, we celebrate our national birthday every Fourth of July, but the disarming historical truth is that no one signed anything on that day.
On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress approved the revised version of Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence and sent it to the printer for publication. The actual vote on the motion for independence had occurred two days earlier.
This was the chief reason John Adams, writing to his beloved Abigail, predicted that July 2 was the day that would be celebrated ``by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival'' and eventually ``solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shows, Games, Sports, Guns, Bonfires and Illuminations from one end of this Continent to the other ... ''
Adams had the correct story in all the details, right down to the fireworks, except for the date itself. Meanwhile, if one wanted to resist Adams' preference for July 2 but align the anniversary with the actual signing ceremony, the rather awkward reality is that there was no such ceremony.
Most of the delegates signed the Declaration of Independence on Aug. 2, but additional signatures were added throughout the summer and fall, as the delegates wandered in and out of Philadelphia. What we seek to honor as an event was really a muddle.
Perhaps this inconvenient fact should not trouble us. After all, we have grown accustomed to government decisions that move Washington's or Lincoln's birthday around and that shift other national holidays to prolong weekend vacations. In the post-modern world, everything is relative. On the other hand, the Fourth is a rather sacred and chronologically specific item. If neither the vote on independence nor the signing ceremony occurred on that date, have we not been wrong all these years?
Fortunately, if history has posed this embarrassing question, it also has provided us with the ingredients for an effective answer. For it just so happens that the Fourth of July has been blessed by providence several times over: On that day in 1803, the news of the Louisiana Purchase arrived in Washington; on that day in 1845, Henry David Thoreau took up residence at Walden Pond; on that day in 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered his eloquent manifesto on behalf of black liberation; and on that day in 1863, word reached Abraham Lincoln of Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, thereby sealing the fate of the Confederacy. It was as if the gods, noticing that we had blundered in defining our national birthday, graciously decided to shape the future to correct our mistake.
There can be little doubt that something akin to divine providence has been at work. The clinching evidence occurred in 1826, when both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the Fourth of July, the 50th anniversary to the day of the not-quite-correct date. However much an accidental anniversary the Fourth had been until then, the exquisitely timed departure of two of the original signers, one of whom had actually drafted the Declaration of Independence while the other had led the fight in the Congress for its passage, could not be dismissed as coincidental. (Down at Yale at that time, the prominent mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch calculated the odds against such an occurrence as ``one in twelve hundred million.'') Nor can there be much doubt that Jefferson, at least, knew what he was doing. His last words, uttered just before midnight of the magic date, were ``Is it the Fourth?'' He was dying on schedule.
What Adams and Jefferson essentially accomplished in 1826 was to transform the highly problematic celebration of July 4, 1776 into a legitimate national birthday. In their deaths as in their lives, the two patriarchs shaped history.
And in the correspondence of their twilight years they frequently looked back to those fateful days in the spring and summer of 1776, comparing recollections of who said this or did that. If their mutual death sealed the significance of the Fourth, their letters defined the meaning of independence as a dialogue between competing political impulses that each man neatly symbolized.
For Jefferson, independence meant liberation, sustained suspicion of all government power, the triumph of individual rights. For Adams, it meant discipline, balanced governments empowered to shape public policy, and the internalization of civic responsibility. They were the odd couple of the American Revolution, the words and music of ``the spirit of '76,'' the abiding reminder that what we celebrate on the Fourth is not just a set of platitudes, but an ongoing argument about our mutual rights and responsibilities as Americans.
Joseph J. Ellis, the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College, is an authority on Jefferson and Adams.
LENGTH: Medium: 90 linesby CNB