Why Do We Celebrate July 4?
Actions, and not mere words, won America's independence
Today flags are flying, barbecues are flaming and there are parades in many communities to celebrate Independence Day. It was on this day in 1776 that the Declaration of Independence was published in Philadelphia, two days after the Continental Congress had voted for independence, and a three-man committee — Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams — was appointed to draft the formal declaration. John Adams wrote to his wife:
“I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
Adams said that with reference to July 2, rather than the Fourth of July, and the “Bonfires and Illuminations” now take the form of those booms and bangs as your neighbors shoot off their fireworks, but in spirit, Adams got it right.
The Declaration is today best-known for a few phrases from the preamble: "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," etc. Even those who know next-to-nothing about the American Revolution or the men who fought it generally recognize those phrases, and it is a pity that the full history of that struggle is so inadequately taught in schools.
Were there one point which I could get every young person to understand about the Revolution, it would be this: It is not to Jefferson’s eloquent phrases that we owe our liberty, but rather to the toil, suffering and dogged persistence of the men who served in the ragtag band of Patriots who defeated the British army in a long war.
From Lexington to Yorktown
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Concord Hymn"Do schoolchildren even memorize poetry anymore? Are they taught about those “embattled farmers” — local Massachusetts members of the Patriot militia — whose repulse of British troops at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, is recognized as the beginning of our War for Independence? For that matter, does anyone under 40 nowadays know the first damned thing about that war, or what it took to win it?
Many years ago, in a used book store, I got my hands on an excellent old history of the Washington’s first year in command of the Patriot army — alas, it is now stored away, or I’d cite it by title — and was struck by the events that led up to his famous crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776. The campaign had opened in New York late that summer, with British Gen. William Howe defeating the colonial forces in a series of battles so that by late November, Washington’s army was forced into a retreat southward across New Jersey with Howe’s redcoats in hot pursuit. The Americans were fortunate to make their escape across the river into Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in early December, but the situation was sufficiently dire that Congress fled from Philadelphia to Baltimore, fearing a further British advance.
Washington made it to Pennsylvania with about 6,000 men, and many of their enlistments were due to expire in a matter of weeks. Howe put his army into winter quarters, declaring that he was waiting only for the Delaware River to freeze over so he could cross it to “catch Washington and end the war.” It was this situation that inspired the pamphleteer Thomas Paine’s famous words about the crisis:
“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us—that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
What happened next was simply one of the most daring operations in military history. Learning that Howe had left Trenton garrisoned with a force of 1,400 Hessian mercenaries, Washington hatched a desperate plan. Boats and ferries were gathered from along the river, and about 2,400 Patriot troops — each issued 60 rounds of ammunition and three days’ rations — were assembled for the crossing. Many of the men’s shoes had been worn out in the long weeks of marching across New Jersey, and some had their bare feet wrapped in rags. Witnesses recorded that there were bloody footprints left in the snow along the route they marched to the river that cold Christmas night, and then from the river crossings toward Trenton, where they caught the Hessians almost completely by surprise, routed them, and then proceeded the next week to smash another British force at Princeton.
Washington’s brilliant attack inspired one of my favorite memes: “Americans — Willing to cross a frozen river to kill you. In your sleep. On Christmas. Totally not kidding. We've done it.” It also saved the American Revolution from being snuffed out just a few months after the Declaration of Independence. The victories at Trenton and Princeton restored the sagging morale of the Patriot cause, proving that the colonial forces were capable of beating the redcoats, if the tactical situation was right.
The next great Patriot victory — at Saratoga, New York in September 1777 — was sufficient to gain France’s entry into the war on the American side, but victories for the colonial rebels were few and far between over the next three years, as the war turned into a stalemate. The British decided that the key was to turn their attention away from the New York/New Jersey/Pennsylvania region and instead focus on the South. The redcoats captured Savannah, Georgia, in late 1778, and in May 1780, British forces under the command of Henry Clinton and Charles Cornwallis captured Charleston, South Carolina. From there, Cornwallis’ army (augmented by Tory militia) began advancing into the interior and at Camden, South Carolina — about 120 miles north of Charleston — inflicted on the Americans ”one of the worst defeats in U.S. military history” in August 1780, with the Patriots losing nearly 2,000 men.
Story of a Teenage Patriot
Not long after the American defeat at Camden, a boy in Laurens County, South Carolina, signed up with the state militia. Abraham Isham Bolt had just turned 16 when he enlisted in Capt. John Thompson’s company of militia, which was part of Col. Thomas Brandon’s 2nd “Spartan” Regiment. This information comes from Bolt’s later application for a pension, and is attested by records showing that he was paid the sum of £12, 17 shillings, 1½ pence for his six months of militia service.
Abraham Bolt was my great-great-great-great-grandfather, but I never knew anything about him until I started doing some research in 2020, tracing back through the generations from my grandmother McCain (née Perlonia Bolt), whose father, Winston Wood Bolt, was an Alabama infantryman captured during the Battle of Gettysburg.
It so happens that Abraham Bolt’s service in the South Carolina militia put him in one of the decisive battles of the War for Independence, the Battle of Cowpens, which is depicted in the climactic scene of the 2000 movie The Patriot (Amazon Affiliate link). It was at Cowpens that the militia played a crucial role in Brig. Gen. Daniel Morgan’s defeat of Banastre Tarleton’s redcoats. Wikipedia:
"Tarleton suffered an 86 percent casualty rate, and his brigade had been wiped out as a fighting force. ... "In the opinion of John Marshall, 'Seldom has a battle, in which greater numbers were not engaged, been so important in its consequences as that of Cowpens.' It gave General Nathanael Greene his chance to conduct a campaign of 'dazzling shiftiness' that led Cornwallis by 'an unbroken chain of consequences to the catastrophe at Yorktown which finally separated America from the British crown' [George Trevelyan]."
What Were They Fighting For?
Having boasted of my ancestor’s historic role in winning America’s independence, permit me now to return to the Declaration of Independence, with its “self-evident” truths about the “unalienable” rights of mankind. Question: If this was so self-evident to the Founding Fathers, why is it that most people in the world at the time had no such conception of their right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," etc? All across Europe in 1776, men lived as the subjects of kings, most of whom ruled by absolute authority, and this is to say nothing of others around the world — in Asia, Africa and elsewhere — who had no inkling of these “self-evident" truths.
The teaching of history in recent generations has failed quite generally in explaining why it was that the Americans gathered in Philadelphia in 1776 — and not some other people in some other place — came up with this tidy formula of “unalienable rights.” To summarize the case briefly:
The Founding Fathers were Englishmen, and the ideas they asserted about liberty (vs. the tyranny of which they accused King George) were decidedly English ideas.
Furthermore, the experience of the colonists managing their own affairs, on the frontier of a remote wilderness, for some 150 years had accustomed them to self-reliance and self-government.
Finally, the Founders looked to the history of England — particularly the English Civil War (1642-1651), the Commonwealth (1649-1660) and the Glorious Revolution (1688) — as precedents for their actions.
As to the first point, we have the brilliant Edmund Burke’s testimony:
"In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole: and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people of the earth; and this from a great variety of powerful causes; which, to understand the true temper of their minds, and the direction which this spirit takes, it will not be amiss to lay open somewhat more largely. "First, the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen. England, Sir, is a nation, which still I hope respects, and formerly adored, her freedom. The colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands. ... "If anything were wanting to this necessary operation of the form of government, religion would have given it a complete effect. Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. ... The colonists left England when this spirit was high, and in the emigrants was the highest of all; and even that stream of foreigners, which has been constantly flowing into these colonies, has, for the greatest part, been composed of dissenters from the establishments of their several countries, and have brought with them a temper and character far from alien to that of the people with whom they mixed."
Even as they spoke of “all men” as inherently “endowed by their Creator” with rights, our Founding Fathers were not just any random gathering of “all men”; rather, they were Englishmen, knowing the pedigree of their liberties, dating back as far as 1215, when the barons compelled King John to accept Magna Carta. The rights of Englishmen, obtained through five centuries of struggle, were most keenly sensed among the American colonists because, as Burke said, they emigrated here during a period when the contention between Parliament and the Crown was so fierce as to lead to the execution of King Charles I in 1649. The victory of the “Roundheads” in the English Civil War led to the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell — England did without a king for more than decade — before the restoration of Charles II in 1669.
The specifically English character of the ideas about liberty expressed in the Declaration of Independence were given practical force because of the circumstances under which the American colonists had learned self-government. From the establishment of the first successful colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, the population of the first English colonies grew at first gradually — to about 4,000 in 1630 and to about 50,000 in 1650 — and then rapidly, so that by the time of the Revolution there were more than 2 million people in the 13 colonies. And anyone who has studied this period of American history knows that the earliest pioneers faced formidable obstacles — disease, hunger, hostile natives — which they had to overcome by their own efforts, far from any assistance. Even after the coastal settlements became bustling cities (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, etc.), the colonists as a whole maintained their self-reliant pioneer spirit, as they pushed out toward the Appalachian frontier. It is too little appreciated by most Americans that, at the time of the Revolution, what is now the city of Pittsburgh was then a remote outpost on the westernmost fringe of colonial civilization.
Colonial Americans had not only learned resourcefulness and self-reliance by their pioneer experience, but had become accustomed to self-government. In his monumental History of the English-Speaking Peoples (Amazon Affiliate link), Winston Churchill emphasized this point as a decisive factor leading up to the Revolution. For a crucial period of about two decades (from the outbreak of the English Civil War to the Restoration in 1660), the situation in England had been such that there was no possibility of the mother country exercising meaningful authority over her colonists on this side of the Atlantic. Americans got used to running their own affairs through colonial assemblies and local councils, and eventually lost any conception of themselves as being subjects who owed service to a distant King.
Between 1688 and 1763, the Americans found themselves drawn into a series of four conflicts known collectively as “The French and Indian Wars.” This gave them some familiarity with organizing military efforts, and it was while serving in the fourth of these wars that a young Virginia named George Washington acquired his earliest military experience, serving as an aide to Gen. Edward Braddock.
Ask yourself this question: Why would a bunch of provincials decide, in the 1770s, that they stood a chance of defeating the British army, arguably the most powerful in the world at that time? The simplest explanation is, it had been done before. The victory of the Roundheads in the English Civil War certainly demonstrated that commoners could fight successfully against royal armies. And from what they had witnessed during the French and Indian Wars — e.g., Braddock’s disastrous 1755 expedition — they knew British military leadership was not infallible.
There was a definite chain of events, a series of historical precedents, that inspired the Americans to issue the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and then endure the hardships of a long war to make their independence a reality. The Americans of that era knew their own history and they knew, for example, that King George III never could have become England’s monarch had it not been for the Glorious Revolution that ensured a Protestant succession of the crown, first to William of Orange in 1689, and subsequently, in 1714, to the George I, the Elector of Hanover. Their English ancestors had established their own rights — the 1628 Petition of Right and the 1689 Bill of Rights — and the colonists did not believed that they had forfeited any of those rights merely by relocating to this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
The Declaration of Independence begins thus:
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. ..."
Some people would today view those phrases about “the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God” as expressions of right-wing extremism. Then follows the oft-quoted passage about "all men are created equal" with "unalienable rights," and then:
"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. ... "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. ..."
What follows is a laundry list of specific grievances against the Crown, and then, in conclusion, they declare that the former colonies “are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States ... as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
So they said, and after five more years of war, they were able to make good on their vow, so that we celebrate today as Independence Day. God bless America!
—RSM, July 4, 2024
Thank you, Abraham Bolt!
(And my William Henry Sanford, Peter Northen, and James Alderson.)