The American Continental Congress actually voted for and declared independence on July 2nd. John Adams, in a letter to wife Abigail, thought this date would become a special holiday:
But the Day is past. The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.
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. [x]
He was technically right…just off by two days! July 4th was the date written on the final copy of the Declaration, and it stuck. The signing was staggered, complicated by the fact that all the delegates were never in the same room at the same time. Most signed on August 2nd, but the last signature was not placed until 1777. [x]
Happy 4th of July!! If you’re a genealogist or just interested in history and family, check out the new video created by Ancestry.com. The video shows the descendants of the signers and places them into the positions from the famous painting by John Trumbull. The video is short but to the point. Very nicely done Ancestry.com !
Don’t miss your chance to attend the last @usnatarchives sleepover of the year! Kids become superhero citizens and meet heroes from history throughout the night before sleeping next to America’s most precious treasures: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
History, Heroes & Treasures is supported by the National Archives Foundation; John Hancock; Susan Gage Catering; and American Heritage® Chocolate. Chocolate history demonstrations led by Mars Chocolate History Ambassadors.
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.
NARA’s copy of the first printing of the Declaration of Independence, more commonly known as the “Dunlap Broadside” underwent extensive conservation treatment this past summer. The document, printed in Philadelphia the afternoon or evening of July 4, 1776 by John Dunlap, was originally tipped into the Rough Journal of the Continental Congress and had been extensively repaired over its lifetime. A NARA conservator carefully removed a fabric lining that was probably done in the early 20th century, followed by washing with buffered deionized water on a suction table to reduce discoloration and acidity. Remaining treatment steps included filling losses in the paper with a cotton/linen paper pulp followed by lining with two sheets of very thin Japanese mulberry tissue.
[RG 360, Paper of the Continental and Confederation Congresses and the Constitutional Convention]
Progressives: We don’t hate America! Being proud of your country doesn’t mean you ignore the problems!“
Also Progressives: America was always bad, actually.
…I guess I fail to understand the issue here. I get the whole “liberals/left-wing people aren’t patriotic and like to shit on the 4th of July” or not celebrate it thing, but other than the first tweet (and I guess some of the stuff in the video/ some of the stuff from the 1619 project) I really don’t see that with NPR?
I thought that we were all…kind of in agreement that the Declaration of Independence was inherently flawed when it was written in that it didn’t include the right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” to slaves, Native Americans, etc. I thought we had all accepted that the ideas in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were good, but there were some problems with the execution. That’s why speeches like Frederick Douglas’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” is so powerful. So the NPR article, at least to me, just kind of reads an an acknowledgement of the point and a recognition that these issues shape the understanding of the Declaration of Independence–as well they should.
Furthermore, the discussion of the slur within the Declaration is important. Do you think that you might be affected by the fact that a founding document, a document that is known worldwide to espouse freedom and liberty and that has become the bedrock of one of the most powerful nations on the planet, has a slur in it relating to your race or ethnicity? Personally, I don’t think it would bother me very much. And it doesn’t bother some Native Americans either. That’s kind of the point of acknowledging the different opinions. But it does bother some, and I don’t see that as inherently illegitimate or irrelevant when discussing the Declaration. Like it or not, that slur is in the document.
Recognizing that a document is flawed does not make that document any more or less important. Historically contextualizing a document does not mean that one is providing a “trigger warning.” There is no trigger warning in the NPR article. Readers are not asked to look away from the Declaration in shame and disgust. Instead, they are asked to look at the Declaration as something more than an absolute good–to critically examine a founding document that has become perhaps more important over the years and a foundational principle of the United States. To, as the article states, examine a document that contains “flaws and deeply ingrained hypocrisies” but also “laid the foundation for our collective aspirations, our hopes for what America could be.”
The Declaration is all of those things. The good and the bad. And nothing about that sentence implies or otherwise states any kind of rejection of the 4th of July.
In July of 1776, Timothy Matlack was the scribe charged with writing out the Declaration of Independence. He would have dipped his quill pen into iron gall ink.
Watch now as Rachel Bartgis, a conservation technician for Preservation Programs at the National Archives, shows us the unusual ingredients commonly used to make iron gall ink at the time the Declaration was written.
Learn more about the creation and preservation of the Declaration of Independence: http://bit.ly/2s0j3Bd
How is Robert Carter (1728-1804), one of the wealthiest slave-owners in all of American history; his Deed of Gift set in motion the single largest act of liberation prior to the Emancipation Proclamation (1791 vs 1865), related to -~-~ Benjamin Harrison (1726-1791), a signatory of the Declaration of Independence?
✨ Happy 4th of July! ✨ Here we have the second edition printing of the Declaration of Independence; the most accurate and beautiful early printing of the founding document of the United States.
The copper plate for this printing was commissioned in 1820 by William Stone under the sponsorship of the Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who was keen to create a facsimile of the original engrossed document, which was already beginning to show signs of deterioration. This was a sagacious course of action, as the engrossed copy continued to suffer through wear, exposure to sunlight and poor restoration, so much so that it is now barely legible.
Stone’s copper plate was completed in 1823 and 200 copies were printed on vellum. This exact facsimile is the source for most subsequent reproductions of the Declaration.
In 1833 Peter Force received authorisation from Congress to reuse the plate to produce this printing of the Declaration as part of his “American Archives” which published, often for the first time, texts from the founding of the nation.
The multi-talented Force, was an archivist, editor, historian and politician. He also served in the War of 1812. He is best known for “American Archives”, which he operated for twenty years, until it was cancelled in 1853 by then Secretary of State William Marcy. Force’s collection was subsequently sold to the Library of Congress.
This porcelain figurine depicting the signing of the Declaration of Independence was made by Aldo Falchi in Italy. Officers from the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution personally presented this figurine to President Ford in the Oval Office on January 24, 1975.
“On this day in 1776, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Continental Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims the independence of a new United States of America from Great Britain and its king. The declaration came 442 days after the first shots of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts and marked an ideological expansion of the conflict that would eventually involve France’s intervention on behalf of the Americans.
The first major American opposition to British policy came in 1765 after Parliament passed the Stamp Act, a taxation measure designed to raise revenues for a standing British army in America. Under the banner of “no taxation without representation,” colonists convened the Stamp Act Congress in October 1765 to vocalize their opposition to the tax. With its enactment in November, most colonists called for a boycott of British goods, and some organized attacks on customhouses and homes of tax collectors. After months of protest in the colonies, Parliament finally voted to repeal the Stamp Act in March 1766. Most colonists continued to quietly accept British rule until Parliament’s enactment of the Tea Act in 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering British East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a monopoly on the American tea trade. The low tax allowed the company to undercut even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders, and many colonists viewed the act as another example of taxation tyranny.
In response, militant colonists in Massachusetts organized the “Boston Tea Party,” which saw British tea valued at some £18,000 dumped into Boston Harbor. Parliament, outraged by the Boston Tea Party and other blatant acts of destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts, called the Intolerable Acts by the colonists, in 1774. The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America and required colonists to quarter British troops.
In response, the colonists called the first Continental Congress to consider united American resistance to the British. With the other colonies watching intently, Massachusetts led the resistance to the British, forming a shadow revolutionary government and establishing militias to resist the increasing British military presence across the colony. In April 1775, Thomas Gage, the British governor of Massachusetts, ordered British troops to march to Concord, Massachusetts, where a Patriot arsenal was known to be located. On April 19, 1775, the British regulars encountered a group of American militiamen at Lexington, and the first shots of the American Revolution were fired. Initially, both the Americans and the British saw the conflict as a kind of civil war within the British empire. To King George III, it was a colonial rebellion, and to the Americans, it was a struggle for their rights as British citizens. However, Parliament remained unwilling to negotiate with the American rebels and instead hired Hessians, German mercenaries, to help the British army crush the rebellion.
In response to Britain’s continued opposition to reform, the Continental Congress began to pass measures abolishing British authority in the colonies. In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, an influential political pamphlet that convincingly argued for American independence and sold more than 500,000 copies in just a few months. In the spring of 1776, support for independence swept the colonies, the Continental Congress called for states to form their own governments and a five-man committee was assigned to draft a declaration. The Declaration of Independence was largely the work of Virginian Thomas Jefferson. In justifying American independence, Jefferson drew generously from the political philosophy of John Locke, an advocate of natural rights, and from the work of other English theorists. The declaration features the immortal lines, “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.” It then goes on to present a long list of grievances that provided the rationale for rebellion. On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted to approve a Virginia motion calling for separation from Britain. The dramatic words of this resolution were added to the closing of the Declaration of Independence.
Two days later, on July 4, the declaration was formally adopted by 12 colonies after minor revision. New York, the 13th colony, approved it on July 19. On August 2, the declaration was signed. The American War for Independence would last for five years. Yet to come were the Patriot triumphs at Saratoga, the bitter winter at Valley Forge, the intervention of the French and the final victory at Yorktown in 1781. In 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris with Britain, the United States formally became a free and independent nation.”
This week in History: July 1, 1867 - Canadian Independence Day July 2, 1964 - President Johnson signs Civil Rights Act July 3, 1890 - Idaho becomes 43rd state July 5, 1921- Chicago White Sox accused of throwing World Series July 6, 1957 - Althea Gibson becomes first African American to win Wimbledon July 7, 1930 - Building of Hoover Dam begins
