Independence Day (the Fourth of July)

By the summer of 1776, after more than a year of war, a royal proclamation declaring the colonists in “open and avowed rebellion,” and news that the king had hired German mercenaries, many Americans were convinced that Britain was treating the colonies as a foreign entity. On June 7 Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed in the Continental Congress that the colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” While Congress postponed the vote, a Committee of Five — John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman — prepared a declaration explaining the decision to the world, and Jefferson wrote the draft.

The holiday grew directly out of the vote for independence. Adams believed that the occasion should be remembered “as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty” as well as by public festivities, and Americans agreed.

On July 2, 1776, Congress voted for independence, with twelve colonies in favor and New York not voting. It then debated and revised Jefferson’s draft through July 3 and into the late morning of July 4, when the Declaration was adopted. John Adams, writing to his wife on July 3, believed that July 2 would be “the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America,” and that 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.” Americans took up his program — but celebrated July 4, the day the Declaration was adopted.

For half a century after 1815 the Fourth was one of only three national holidays, along with Washington’s Birthday and the anniversary of Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans. Orators used the day for causes of every kind: William Lloyd Garrison gave an address on slavery at Boston’s Park Street Church on the Fourth of July, 1829, and on July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass asked an audience in Rochester, New York: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” In 1870 Congress made Independence Day one of the first four federal holidays.

The anniversary became the centerpiece of American civic life. On July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson — members of the committee that prepared the Declaration, and once fierce political rivals — died. For the Centennial in 1876 the original Declaration went back to Philadelphia, where it was shown to a crowd on Independence Square on the Fourth and greeted with “cheer after cheer.”

The original Declaration has been kept at the National Archives in Washington since 1952 and was first displayed there on Independence Day in 1953, and the Archives’ annual celebration — begun for the Bicentennial in 1976 — includes a public reading of the document. In 2026 the Declaration turned 250. The holiday’s deeper meaning lies in the document it honors: a statement of ideals that Americans have repeatedly invoked to demand that the nation live up to them.