What Do We Celebrate of Fourth of July?

On Sept. 3, 1783, the Treaty of Paris officially ended the American Revolutionary War. Against all odds, the makeshift American militia, having endured eight years of fighting, defeated the world’s strongest military to bring independence to the American people at last. Despite this great achievement, we observe Independence Day not on the 3rd of September, but instead on the 4th of July to celebrate the day in 1776 when the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration of Independence is more than a statement of political autonomy. It plainly identifies a number of grievances against the King of Great Britain. But above all, it sets forth the fundamental principles that form the basis of American political thought. It acknowledges the inherent supremacy of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It proclaims that governments are established by the consent of the people to secure their natural rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And it asserts that the people are not bound to sustain a government that infringes upon their rights, for it says that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government” committed to these ideals. 

We celebrate Independence Day on July 4 because it marks the day when our nation formally dedicated itself to the preservation of our inalienable rights. Although the American people had endured the infringement of their rights for many years under British rule, on July 4, 1776, they made it known to all that they would suffer injustice no more.

Of course, many of the injustices listed in the Declaration of Independence were not so unbearable. Despite all the outrage over colonial taxation, for example, Americans were paying a lot less in taxes than their British counterparts in those days. But the American people revolted as a matter of principle—against the idea that an unrepresentative government could tax them at all—not because they regarded government as excessively oppressive.

Moreover, our founders feared that the British government’s illegitimate exercise of power, left unopposed, would grow stronger in time due to the apparent authority bestowed on precedential action. Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense that “a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.” The Declaration of Independence also pointed out “that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

And James Madison observed, “Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people, by the gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations[.]” Our founders dreaded the thought that government’s slow advance against individual liberty in America might continue unchallenged, strengthening Britain’s hold on power and inviting further abuse.