The countdown to next year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence starts on Friday.
It might seem odd that our focus isn’t the first shots fired at Lexington and Concord (April 19, 1775), the British surrender at Yorktown (Oct. 19, 1781) or the signing of the peace treaty (Sept. 3, 1783).
Instead, our attention is on the Declaration’s approval on July 4, 1776. The reason? It was the seminal event in the creation of the United States, and world-changing too.
The “self-evident” truths that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”—alongside the explanation that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”—outlined a Novus Ordo Seclorum, a New Order of the Ages. There had never been anything like it.
Requiring consent, majority rule, and equality before the law ensured that people no longer existed “in a fixed hierarchical order,” overseen “by divinely chosen kings,” as historian Allen Guelzo argues in his new volume, “Our Ancient Faith.” Instead, they were citizens in a representative democracy, free to debate the merits of leaders and choose them through elections.
Abraham Lincoln understood the magnitude of what had happened. What held the nation together through the American Revolution and after “was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land,” he said. It was “that sentiment in the Declaration . . . which gave liberty, not only to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time.”
Yet many Americans have seemingly lost sight of the treasure those 56 delegates who met in Philadelphia left us. We should heed the words of one of the American Revolution’s greatest historians, Gordon Wood. In a recent speech he called the Declaration “the most important document in our history,” for “it sums up the principles by which the nation lives. Indeed, it is what holds us together as a nation.”
The Declaration’s 250th anniversary, Mr. Wood said in another recent talk, would be “a good time to find out what our Revolution was all about.”
Wise counsel. We’d be better off as a country if, individually as well as in our families, neighborhoods and communities, we use the next year to read, think and talk about the American Revolution. That would help us realize how significant the U.S. founding was to world history and our responsibility in the timeless struggle to live up to the Declaration’s ideals.
We’ll have help. On Nov. 16, Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt will premiere a six-part, 12-hour PBS documentary, “The American Revolution.” Written by Geoffrey Ward, it took eight years to make.
Despite having done films on the Civil War and Vietnam, Mr. Burns told me he was taken aback by the Revolution’s brutality. One of every three deaths was by bayonet. Warriors were often teenagers and the violence deeply personal, as when a young Vermont loyalist killed his best friend in hand-to-hand combat at the Battle of Bennington in 1777. Per capita there were more deaths in the Revolution than during the Civil War. Yet out of the carnage emerged the world’s first continent-spanning democracy.
Americans who want to dig deeper need not wait for November. There are many new books on the Revolutionary War that are well worth the read. The best are from Pulitzer-Prize winning military historian Rick Atkinson, who crafted a trilogy on the war for America.
