It was, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail the next day, a day that “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.”
But Adams was talking about July 2, the day the Continental Congress voted to break with Great Britain, not July 4, the day the delegates signed the formal declaration, which he considered little more than a glorified press release. But what a press release!
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …” There you have the American creed in one short sentence: Every one of us is just as important as everyone else. It wasn’t literally true then, and it still isn’t, but it’s the ideal we keep striving for. Unlike the countries our ancestors fled from, America was not founded on blood and soil, which today’s alt-right seems so obsessed with. It’s founded on this simple idea.
Why did Adams want us to celebrate the vote on July 2 as our national holiday instead of the signing of the Declaration on July 4? Because he was the floor manager, the guy who pushed the resolution through the Congress. He would have been the hero of the story. Jefferson, as the author of the Declaration, took the opposite view and thought July 4 would do just fine. At the time, they were the closest of friends.
Adams was even responsible for Jefferson being chosen to write the Declaration instead of him, explaining, “First, I am obnoxious, and you are not. Second, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian should be at the head of this business. Finally, you can write 10 times better than I can.”
But, as often happens after successful revolutions, the winners started fighting over the spoils of victory. The two men ended up on opposite sides, Adams defeating Jefferson for the presidency in 1796 and Jefferson defeating him in 1800. Adams was so angry that he refused to attend his successor’s inauguration, the only outgoing president — so far — to leave in such a snit except his son, John Quincy Adams, who did the same thing in 1829.
And they didn’t speak to each other for years. But in 1818 Jefferson broke the impasse by sending Adams a sympathy letter after Adams’ wife Abigail died, and they started writing each other again, and their friendship blossomed anew. They exchanged 380 letters over the next eight years until 1826, when they died on the same day: July 4, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Adams’s last words were “Thomas Jefferson still lives!” Jefferson’s last words were “Is it the Fourth?”
If these two men could bridge their animosities and learn to love America more than they hated their fellow Americans, why can’t we? Meanwhile, the Declaration itself has had a bumpy history. Throughout the war it was kept rolled up and carried from city to city to escape British troops. Unfortunately, all that rolling and unrolling took its toll on the parchment and ink. But the greater danger came from attempts in the 1820s to make copies by pressing a damp sheet of paper against the original to soak up some of the ink. The trouble was it also blurred the ink on the original.
In 1820 Secretary of State Daniel Webster got the bright idea of framing the document behind glass and hanging it on the wall of the old Patent Office (now the National Portrait Gallery). And there it hung — right across from a large window, exposing the Declaration to bright sunlight for the next 35 years. By the hundredth anniversary in 1876 the parchment looked old and yellowed, and the signatures were bleached so badly they were barely legible.
During World War II, when the Declaration was hastily transferred to Fort Knox for security purposes, the top right corner was torn and got a sloppy patch-up job with Scotch Tape and glue. After the war professional archivists removed the tape, reattached the corner, and placed the document in a helium-filled frame that protects it from humidity, air pollution and harmful light. It now hangs, presumably safe from more harm, in the National Archives next to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Reach Martin Snapp at catman442@comcast.net.
