The Birthday of Independence
There are many popular misconceptions concerning the incidents attending the birth of American Liberty and the Proclamation of Independence. Erroneous traditions gained credence in the early days, and romanticists and poets have perpetuated them through successive generations. It is important, therefore, to note the facts as given by historical scholars who have made a careful study of original records, and whose evidence may, in consequence, be relied upon.
The Fourth of July is observed as the Birthday of Independence. This is the date the Document bears. The events leading up to the adoption of the Declaration are recounted in Monograph Five in this number of The Mentor. Subsequent events were as follows: On July fifth Congress authorized the official promulgation of Independence, ordering that broadsides, signed by John Hancock and Charles Thomson, the President and Secretary of Congress, be sent to the several assemblies, the army, and other colonial bodies, and “that it be proclaimed in each of the United States.” On July sixth it was ordered “that the Sheriff read or cause to be read and proclaimed at the State House, Philadelphia, on Monday, the eighth of July, instant at 12 o’clock noon, the Declaration of the Representatives of the United States of America.” July 8, 1776, broke “a warm, sunshiny morning.” Officers, constables, members of committees and the people at large assembled in the State House Yard, and there amidst the waving of flags and the fluttering of banners, the Declaration was read by John Nixon “in a voice clear and distinct,” and greeted with loud cheers.
This was the first time the Declaration was read in public. The stories of the bright-eyed boy, and immense crowds storming the doors of Congress on July fourth, and of the Declaration being read on that day from the steps are pronounced “pure inventions” by historical authorities. We have the record, also, that on the eighth of July, “near the hour of twelve,” the bell was first rung for the Proclamation of the Declaration.
John Adams designated the second of July, on which day the Resolution of Independence was confirmed by the Representatives, as the anniversary that should, in future years, be celebrated by bells, fireworks and cannon. On July fourth the Declaration was adopted, and the document was authenticated by the signatures of the President and Secretary and all the members present, except Mr. Dickinson of Pennsylvania. Several days later the Declaration was engrossed on parchment and, on the second of August, the first signatures were affixed; the other signatures followed later. This is the Declaration that has been preserved as the original, the first signed paper having probably been destroyed. “If,” as one writer puts it, “the natal day of American Independence is to be derived from the ceremony of the signing, and the real date of what has been preserved as the original of the Declaration, then it would be the second of August. If derived from the substantial, legal act of separation from the British Crown, it would be the second of July. But common consent has determined the date of the great anniversary from the apparently subordinate event of the passage of the Declaration, and thus we celebrate the Fourth of July as the birthday of the nation.”
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