A Voice From…

This Fourth of July, as families and friends gather across the nation to enjoy a holiday weekend and celebrate, we’re united in our celebration. It’s important that as America celebrates her birthday, that we look back with admiration and respect at our founders, and maybe even learn something from their example.

Peggy Noonan takes a  moment in the Wall Street Journal to reflect on history, and a little known piece of history in the beloved Declaration of Independence.

The tenderest words in American political history were cut from the document they were to have graced.

It was July 1, 2 ,3 and 4, 1776, in the State House in Philadelphia. America was being born. The Continental Congress was reviewing and editing the language of the proposed Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson, its primary author, was suffering the death of a thousand cuts.

The beginning of the Declaration had a calm stateliness that signaled, subtly, that something huge is happening:

“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 separate.”

Such a modest tone for a not so modest revolution, says Noonan.

We began with respect. America always gets in trouble when we forget that.

Catches your breath a little. Respect, something that is lacking so much in the political arena and it’s in many ways getting us in trouble. Which is why the next paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is so compelling and etched in the mind of so many Americans.

“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.”

We weren’t living this perfectly when these words were penned. We’re still working through them. But they are there, for all of us to remember. We can point to them when government does not run as it should, reminding them what we’re founded on. We can similarly point to them when good decisions are made in government, praising leaders for upholding the intent of the founders.

But there was one intent of the founders that did not make it into the Declaration that Thomas Jefferson always regretted. And according to Peggy Noonan, America should regret too.

Jefferson had, in his bill of particulars against the king, taken a moment to incriminate the English people themselves—”our British brethren”—for allowing their king and Parliament to send over to America not only “soldiers of our own blood” but “foreign Mercenaries to invade and destroy us.” This, he said, was at the heart of the tragedy of separation. “These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us renounce forever” our old friends and brothers. “We must endeavor to forget our former love for them.”

Well. Talk of love was a little much for the delegates. Love was not on their mind. The entire section was removed.

And so were the words that came next. But they should not have been, for they are the tenderest words.

Poignantly, with a plaintive sound, Jefferson addresses and gives voice to the human pain of parting: “We might have been a free and great people together.”

“To write is to think and to write well is to think well,” Thomas McCullough once said. In this section, Jefferson was recalling the old friendships and relationships that were being cut by this ‘modest’ revolution.

Seventeen seventy-six was the beginning of a dream. But it was the end of one too. “We might have been a free and great people together.”

But tensions and irreconcilable differences prevented that dream from becoming a reality. The American Revolution was bloody, it was brutal and grueling. But the toll it took on the hearts of these men and women, who believed so strongly in the freedoms they saw to be self evident, was greater.

America and Britain do hold a special bond. We have in sense have lived great and free together, while separated by the ocean we call a pond.

But today, our own united nation stands very divided in the political arena. And while we’re not at the bloody point we were at with our British brothers, we need to remember their example. We need to lead all dialogue with respect, recognize self evident liberties, and aim to a be a great and free people together. This Fourth of July, let’s unite under that promise. Then maybe we’ll see that all people gain the respect and dignity that they deserve.

Tags: Declaration of Independence, Fourth of July, Freedom