Tomorrow is the Fourth of July for the United States. It
is a celebration of the winning of our independence back in the 18th
century.
There are
myths connected with the Fourth. It's something different to learn about this holiday,
showing that we Americans have much to learn about our history.
The 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
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.
