The Fourth of July is a wonderful opportunity to meet up with friends and relatives, enjoy fireworks, picnic, and party (responsibly, please!). It is the dearest American holiday because it marks our birth as a nation and marks the moment when our forefathers declared that they weren’t going to take it anymore.

Of course, they also had to sell the idea of independence from Great Britain. Most colonists were not ready to go to war against their mother country, and this group of men, fashioning themselves as leaders of a new nation, barely had two nickels to rub together.
Their document was a call to arms to fellow countrymen, and a call out for funding to enemies of the British crown to fight a war with the odds stacked against them.
That’s where the Declaration of Independence came in.

The United States Declaration of Independence is an act of the Second Continental Congress, adopted on July 4, 1776, which declared that the Thirteen Colonies in North America were “Free and Independent States” and that “all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.” The document explained the justifications for separation from the British crown.

Below is an excerpt from the beginning of the document. We thought it appropriate to remember what this holiday is all about.

“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 the separation.

“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, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Selling a war isn’t easy, as our current president can assure you. But no matter what your opinion is on the war in Iraq, we can all appreciate all of the men and women who have served and who are serving to defend our freedom. Independence Day is an appropriate holiday to remember them – and thank them.