Why do we celebrate Independence Day?

Writing to his wife Abigail on July 3, 1776, John Adams got carried away with enthusiasm, caught up in the excitement of a world-historical moment. He declared to her that the Second of July would be “the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America,” the “Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty”; it would 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.”

Well, Adams was mostly right in the substance of his prediction, but a bit off on the precise date.

So why did we settle on the Fourth? The Second, after all, was the day that the deed was done formally and legally, the day that the Second Continental Congress voted to adopt Richard Henry Lee’s proposal for independence, which resolved “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” That would seem to have done the job. In the Lee Resolution, there are only two additional sentences, one promising to deal with foreign alliances in some unspecified way, and the other with a “plan for confederation” at some sketchy time in the future. A lot was being left up in the air. But one would have thought that the question of independence was settled once and for all by the Resolution’s adoption.

But that is only partly true. We celebrate the Fourth because it was the date when the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, the document that would explain and justify our act of rebellion to the rest of the world in a way that the near-telegraphic Lee Resolution never could. It did so in part by brandishing a long list of grievances against the Crown and Parliament. But that was not all it did.

It represented a great advance in the process of defining who and what we were to be. By declaring to the world the rationale for the American cause, we also declared ourselves to ourselves, as a people among the peoples of the earth, with a shared consciousness of a common life and shared aspirations, rather than existing as a scattered group of disparate colonial outposts with the mother country as the only thing they shared in common.

“Something we were withholding made us weak,” wrote the poet Robert Frost, “Until we found out that it was ourselves / We were withholding from our land of living.” The Lee Resolution had been entirely negative; it spoke only of what we no longer were, of the political connections that we were renouncing, the dependencies we were leaving behind. There was nothing designed to persuade any reader of the necessity and rightness of the separation.

But the Declaration, which was largely the handiwork of Adams’ rival Thomas Jefferson, laid a positive foundation for the new thing that we were becoming. Jefferson did so in soaring language that described the event as our coming-of-age as a distinct “people,” but that also laid down a foundation of powerful and enduring truths—that all men are created equal, that they come into the world possessing rights that derive from a power higher than any government, that the purpose of government is the protection of those rights, and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed—truths that would guide and inspire this nation’s progress in the years ahead. No government had ever before committed itself to these principles as truths. Their influence would spread far beyond our shores and make the United States an enduring example to the rest of the world in the years to come.

No one then could have guessed that today, 250 years later, we would still be quoting this document, still referring ourselves back to it, in order to remind ourselves of who we are, and what truths we aspire to live out. Its sheer longevity and vitality point to the fact that what happened on the Second of July was not enough to sustain. Our separation would have to serve a larger purpose. And it has.