For nations the world over, July 4 is just another day on the calendar; but for Americans, this date is the reason for our republic’s greatness. Prior to July 4, 1776, many nations had sought independence from other empires. Our founding fathers who gathered in Philadelphia that day could have simply followed historical precedent by declaring their separation from Great Britain and then being done with the matter.
Instead, they did something truly revolutionary. They went beyond declaring independence from the British crown and “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
On July 4, 1776, for the first time in human history, a nation was born not on the basis of ethnicity or religion, but on the principle of human equality. What makes all mankind equal are our natural rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness – rights coming not from the government, but from almighty God. These God-given rights are inalienable. That is to say that no power on Earth can legitimately give or take away those rights from the people.
As Thomas Jefferson would put it years later, there is a “palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride legitimately, by the grace of God.” Rejecting the divine right of kings, Americans were to be citizens, not subjects.
Our founders sought to create a government to protect our natural rights – a government constructed not by accident or threat of force, but firmly built on the principle of consent of the governed. By ignoring and abusing the natural rights of Americans, George III was a tyrant and “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” As such, the American people had a right and a duty to revolt against the tyranny of the British crown 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” as a free people in a free land.
These principles, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, make America exceptional among all other nations. Those 56 patriots at Independence Hall who risked everything sought to establish a “new order of the ages.” They believed the principles they were putting to parchment were not meant to apply only to America in 1776. These principles were and continue to be universal – applicable to all mankind in all times.
What makes our nation so exceptional and revolutionary, what has brought generations of immigrants to our shores, is that from our country’s birth, we have declared that all people – everywhere in every age – are created equal and entitled to the universal rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Admittedly, we have struggled to live up to these ideals in our nation’s history, but what other country can claim to be so conceived and so dedicated? What other nation has “laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom,” losing hundreds of thousands of lives in civil and world wars, so “that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earth”?
So today, as we gather with friends and family to celebrate Independence Day, reread the Declaration of Independence and take a moment to reflect on the true meaning of the day. The same moral truths of that document and that generation are eternal and as relevant now as they were on this day in 1776.
As the inheritors of this exceptional nation, we have been entrusted by the founding generation to keep burning “the sacred fire liberty” for ourselves and our posterity. America’s founding generation, our “pillars of the temple of liberty,” are long gone. Yet the spirit of 1776 is alive and well in the heart of each of us who remain dedicated to those same eternal truths for which they risked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.
State Rep. Tim Derickson, R-Oxford, represents the Ohio House’s 53rd District.