Today, as we fire up our grills and crack open our beverages, let us remember why we even have a July 4th holiday: To commemorate the greatest act of shared, selfless courage the world has ever seen.
Everybody should know that Thomas Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence. Most people know the names of a handful of the 56 men who signed it, such as John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, and of course Jefferson himself. But few people seem to realize that when those men signed their names, they were committing what was considered an act of treason against the British crown, punishable by death.
Those men were property owners who were successful in their lives and businesses. Their lives were comfortable and they stood to lose everything they had on Earth, incuding their lives, by signing the Declaration. Yet they chose to sign it anyway, because they knew that casting off the crown and forming a new government based on individual liberty was the correct course of action to take at their moment in time. They knew it was the correct course of action not only for themselves and their own descendants, but for all of humanity. And here is what happened to some of those men after they signed the Declaration:
Five of them became prisoners of war.
Nearly one-sixth of them died before the war ended.
British forces burned, and/or looted, the homes and properties of nearly one-third of them.
When the British did that to the property of William Floyd, he and his family fled and spent the next seven years living as refugees without income. His wife died two years before the war ended.
After being forced into the wilderness by British forces, John Hart struggled to make his way home. When he finally got there, he found that his wife was dead and his 13 children were missing. He died without ever seeing them again.
Richard Stockton was dragged from his bed and sent to prison while his property was ravaged. From the day of his release from prison until the day he died, he had to rely on charity from others to feed his family.
Francis Lewis’s wife was imprisoned and beaten. Meanwhile, his wealth was plundered. His last years were spent as a widower living in poverty.
Thomas Nelson Jr.’s home was captured and occupied by British General Cornwallis, who used it as what we would now call an operations center. Therefore, Nelson ordered his troops to destroy his own home with cannon fire during the Battle of Yorktown. To assist in funding the war, he used his own credit to borrow 2 million dollars, which would equal more than 72 million in today's dollars. Repaying that debt bankrupted him, and when he died he was buried in an unmarked grave.
It is a safe bet that fewer than one percent of our citizens have ever heard of these people, much less know anything about the devastating sacrifices they made so that future generations could have the freedom necessary to build the kind of upward, progressing, opportunity-rich society we would come to take for granted.
It is also a safe bet that most people today fail to see what should be obvious: That nobody takes the kind of peril-fraught step America's Founders took unless they know they are serving something much greater than themselves by taking it. The Founding Fathers saw liberty as being necessary not so that people could act with libertine abandon, but so that people could be free to do what is right. This is abundantly clear to anybdy who has taken the time to study their words and actions in context.
Some people overstate the case that the Founders were uniformly Christian, seeing as how only one (John Witherspoon) was a clergyman and at least one (Thomas Paine) was openly Deist and some (Benjamin Franklin comes immediately to mind) expressed uncertainty about the divinity of Jesus. What is not an overstatement, however, is that none of them were atheist, all of them affirmed the existence of a single God, and it was through this lens -- and this lens alone -- that they viewed freedom as being an "inalienable" right belonging to all human beings. This is a lesson which people in the twenty-first century must relearn in order for freedom to survive.
The Founding Fathers bequeathed to us a wonderful gift called America, and we owe it to our children to make sure we don’t allow that gift to be destroyed. We should never hear the words “Fourth of July” without feeling a skip in our heart and a tear in our eye.
Much thanks to Jeff Jacoby, the late Paul Harvey, and all the others who have written and spoken about the fates of the signers, to keep their story alive.
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