Last week I repeated what has become an annual ritual for
me: each Fourth of July I read the Declaration of Independence anew. As always, I was affected to the verge
of tears. Why? Because a band of revolutionaries again
spoke directly to me across a span of almost 250 years.
I am forever stunned that colonial America, sparsely
populated as it was, could accumulate one of those rare "clots of excess
genius" about which I have previously written [1,
2]. To see how rare it was, consider
this: If one were to count only seven
key founding fathers—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John
Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington—and scale their
number up from the population of the colonies to America's present population,
one would have to find over a thousand today who have such political and
philosophical brilliance. I would
be hard put to name half a dozen.
What brings me to tears is not just the Enlightenment ideals
of the revolutionaries—as valid today as they were then—and the fact that they
were acted on so valiantly. I am
also carried away by the soaring prose of the Declaration. As familiar as the words are, I cannot
help but quote from them here—not from the litany of grievances against George
III, trenchant as it is, but from the timeless response to those
grievances:
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.—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. …
We, therefore, … solemnly
publish and declare, 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 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.
Don't those words still speak to
billions of people now living, who need their encouragement?
The
Declaration united what until then the British had belittled as a ragtag,
leaderless collection of insurrectionary militias. Were it not for the Declarations's stirring articulation of colonial aspirations,
the rebellion might indeed have fizzled.
Instead, it created a nation, thereby standing as a major
turning point in human history.
Yet here we are, a quarter millennium later, still
witnessing insurrectionary movements the world over that are trying, in the
words of the Declaration, "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." Most are inchoate, unable to create a vision for a
prospective nation, and for that reason often cannot establish a coherent
polity even if the insurrection itself succeeds.
How fortunate for America that our clot of revolutionary
leaders coalesced so successfully when it did! I can never complete my celebration of the Fourth without
yet again entering their minds by reading the Declaration and thanking them for
the heritage they passed on to us.