Happy
4th of July, I know, I 'm late with a Supernatural Friday past, but I'd been signing my books for three days at a local Army base Friday through Sunday. Anyway, I hope that you don't overeat all those burgers, hot dogs and
barbecued ribs today, along with everything else delicious. There are myths connected with the Fourth. It's something
different to learn about this holiday, showing that we have much to learn about
it.
4th
of July is a celebration of the U.S. Constitution.
The
U.S. Constitution’s purpose was to remake the American governments of the
Revolution by making the system less democratic. The delegates from 12 states
who met in Philadelphia in summer 1787 had been sent by the states to recommend
amendments to the Articles of Confederation. Instead, they instantly decided to
meet in secret, and then the nationalists among them tried to win adoption of a
national – rather than a federal – constitution.
The 4th of July was the day that the
13 states established their independence.
No, it was not. Virginia established its independence on May 15, 1776, when its
revolutionary Convention adopted resolutions for a declaration of rights, a
permanent republican constitution, and federal and treaty relationships with
other states and foreign countries. It was because the Old Dominion had already
established its independence – had, in fact, already sworn in the first
governor under its permanent republican constitution of 1776, Patrick Henry, on
June 29 – that Virginia’s congressmen, uniquely, had been given categorical
instructions from their state legislature to declare independence. Virginia was
not the only state whose independence was not established by the Declaration on
the 4th, as New York’s congressional delegation did not then join in the
Declaration. In short, the states became independent in their own good time –
some on July 4, some before it, some after the date.
The chief legacy of the 4th of July
is the political philosophy set out in the Declaration of Independence.
Since the 18th century, political radicals have argued for understanding the
Declaration as a general warrant for government to do anything it likes to
forward the idea that "all men are created equal." Yet, that was not
what the Declaration of Independence meant. The Declaration of Independence was
the work of a congress of representatives of state governments. Congressmen
were not elected by voters at large, but by state legislatures, and their role
(as John Adams, one of them, put it) was more akin to that of ambassadors than
to legislators. They had not been empowered to dedicate society to any
particular political philosophy, but to declare – as the Virginia legislature
had told its congressmen to declare – that the colonies were, "and of
right ought to be, free and independent states." In other words, the
Declaration was about states’ rights, not individual rights, and the Congress
that adopted it had no power to make it anything else. All the rest of the
Declaration was mere rhetorical predicate.
The 4th of July is a non-partisan
holiday dedicated to recalling the legacy of the American Revolution.
In the Founders’ day, the 4th of July was a partisan holiday. Celebrated in the
1790s and 1800s by Jeffersonian Republicans to show their devotion to
Jeffersonian, rather than Hamiltonian, political philosophy. If a Federalist in
the 1790s, you would celebrate Washington’s Birthday instead of the 4th of
July. If you believed in the inherent power of the Executive in formulating
foreign policy, in the power of Congress to charter a bank despite the absence
of express constitutional authorization to do so, and in the power of the
federal government to punish people who criticized the president or Congress,
you would not celebrate the 4th. The 4th was the holiday of the Virginia and
Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, those great states’-rights blasts at federal
lawlessness. It was the anti-Hamilton, anti-Washington, anti-nationalist
holiday.
The fulfillment of the 4th of July
lay in the establishment of a powerful national government.
Celebrants of the 4th of July in the Founders’ time rejected the idea that the
Constitution had created a national government. They insisted that it was
federal instead and that Congress had only the powers it had been expressly
delegated. This was chiefly through Article I, Section 8, that the federal
courts had no more jurisdiction than they had been assigned through Article
III, and that the vast majority of government functions had been kept by the
states. When federal courts grabbed for more power in 1793, these people added
the Eleventh Amendment to the Constitution. In response to the nationalists’
war on France and Alien and Sedition Acts, they first adopted the Virginia and
Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, then elected Republicans – Jeffersonian
states’-rights/laissez-faire advocates – to run their government.
The
Declaration of Independence was written for all.
No,
it stood for the rights of white, male property owners alone. The philosophical
material in the first section of the Declaration, although commonplace at the
time, had no legal or moral weight. Congress didn't have power to commit the
states to it. Now, revolutionaries who accepted the Lockean version of social
compact theory did not necessarily believe that only white, male property
holders had rights. Thomas Jefferson, for example, who was the author of the
draft Lockean section of the Declaration, followed his belief in the idea that
all men equally had a right to self-government, coupled with his belief that
white and black people could never live together peacefully as equal citizens
in America, to the conclusion that blacks must be colonized abroad to someplace
where they might exercise their right to self-government.
The fulfillment of the 4th of July
will come when the United States has sponsored democratic revolutions
throughout the world.
No. George Washington--in an address he co-wrote with Alexander Hamilton and
John Jay-- along with Thomas Jefferson counseled that the U.S. avoid foreign
entanglements, and of course, foreign wars.
