What is the Big Deal About the Fourth of July, Anyway?
It is not just hot dogs and blowing stuff up!
What is the Big Deal About the Fourth of July, Anyway?
The Fourth of July is perhaps America’s best known holiday; it certainly is this country’s most important holiday. After all, without the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, there would be no America to celebrate. Of course, the little matter of winning the war against the British played a role there as well.
This piece of paper (actually parchment) not only launched a new nation, but changed world history immensely. Even not considering the impact the U.S. has had on the rest of the world economically, politically, culturally, or militarily, the American Revolution, and the ideas espoused in the Declaration of Independence reverberated throughout the world of the late 1700s and early 1800s, inspiring millions who suffered under the rule and misrule of kings, queens, and other potentates.
First though, let us not forget that the Declaration on that most significant of all Fourth of Julys, was in the midst of America’s most significant war. The Revolutionary War against the British Empire began in April, 1775, with the English-American colonial rebels establishing a conventional standing army and a more-or-less functioning government. Until independence was declared, this war was actually little more than a colonial rebellion, or, as some saw it at first, a British civil war.
The significance of the Declaration of Independence, besides birthing a new nation, lay in the sheer audacity of the document. Not only separating the American colonies/states from the Empire, this document also gave sovereignty to the people, not to an individual ruler (i.e. the King). This was a VERY big deal. European nations frequently began huge wars** over which one person, from a so-called royal family, would sit on a throne and make life-or-death decisions for millions of their “subjects.” The new United States actually set up a government established by voting, not by whose ancestor won the local game of thrones (see what I did there…lol).
Even keeping in mind that “voters” in the new America meant only people who were adult, white, male, who (in most states) had to be considered property owners. Also remember that most Black people were denied personal freedom and were kept in chattel servitude. [I highly encourage you to read Frederick Douglass’ critical speech, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?]
Despite these obvious flaws in this American experiment in government, the idea of WE THE PEOPLE, and not a king or queen or religious leader, could now decide their nation’s fate, was an immensely radical and truly revolutionary concept in the 18th century.
The French Revolution, and the multiple Latin American Wars of Independence (1808-1825) both borrowed ideas and inspiration from the American separation from their old king and country.
The period from the American Revolution to about 1850 is referred to as an Age of Revolutions, as anti-royalist, and anti-colonial rebellions and revolutions broke out in France (The French Revolution), Haiti (1791), Spanish America (multiple Latin American Wars of Independence from 1808 to 1825), Ireland (1798), and a Europe-wide spate of Revolutions in 1848 (France, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and other nations and regions).
As Americans light off fireworks, eat too many hot dogs and too much potato salad this Fourth of July, remember that this holiday celebrates an amazing idea: That no one man, no king, no dictator, no autocrat, has the right to suppress freedom and the rights of WE THE PEOPLE to determine our own fate. Our rights have been paid for in blood by our war veterans, and the work of the civil rights activists who labored and suffered to bring the vote to women and Americans of all races.
Remember that the true meaning of the Fourth of July is not about eating potato chips while blowing stuff up, but in the rejection of the old ways of running nations, and, to quote Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The governed are us, the American people, who decide who makes our laws and runs the nation, in OUR name. Think about that the next time you vote.
Happy Fourth of July and Happy Birthday, America!
**For example:
The Hundred Years War(s) over whether the English king was also really the French king. (1337-1453)
The Wars of the Roses, over which side of the royal family would rule England. (1455-1487)
The War of the Spanish Succession, over who would rule Spain. (1701-1713)
The War of the Austrian Succession, basically over whether a woman could inherit the throne of the Austrian Empire. (1741-1748)
There are others, but you probably get the idea.