Today, kids will decorate wagons with streamers and drag them down small town streets while big marching bands play John Philip Sousa tunes. There will be floats and beauty queens with big smiles (and even bigger hair). Smells from cookouts and barbecues will fill neighborhoods as folks fire up the grill to make hotdogs, hamburgers and pulled pork. Picnic tables will groan underneath the weight of piles of cole slaw, potato salad, baked beans, fresh tomatoes out of the garden and spectacularly decorated red, white and blue cupcakes. Grown ups will kick back a few beers as kids run around with glasses of freshly squeezed lemonade. Politicians will make speeches and kiss babies. Fireworks will light up the night sky.
All over the country, folks will have a fantastic day. It will be classic Americana.
And then we will all go to bed and forget that it all happened.
That last part will be a shame. Not just because those memories are really lovely memories to hold onto (and they are) but because the Fourth of July is pretty darn important. And we shouldn’t forget that.
You see, on July 2, 1776, our Congress (the then Continental Congress) acted in a manner in which they haven’t for awhile: they were bold, decisive and courageous. They voted to declare independence from Great Britain. At the time, King George III ruled Great Britain and by extension, the colonies.
Great Britain had gotten itself into quite a pickle after the Seven Years’ War which had been expensive to fight. As a result, Britain needed to raise revenue – and quickly. What better way than a series of taxes and tariffs?
The first in the series, the Stamp Act of 1765, required that materials which were printed and used in the colonies, like magazines and newspapers, be produced on stamped paper and embossed with revenue stamp. The revenue stamp indicated that a tax had been paid on the materials. The idea of the tax didn’t go over very well and the act was repealed the very next year.
Britain tried again a year after the repeal by passing a series of acts which came to be known as the Townshend Acts of 1767. Individually, they were known as the Revenue Act of 1767, the Indemnity Act, the Commissioners of Customs Act, the Vice Admiralty Court Act and the New York Restraining Act. The idea behind the series of taxes, after the failure of the Stamp Act, was to try a system of indirect taxes since the colonists had reacted so strongly to the direct stamp tax. However, the result was no different. The colonists were not pleased with the new system which required them to pay taxes on imports of paper, paint, lead, glass and tea; opposition started the same year. Three years after the taxes were imposed, they were partially repealed.
One of the pieces of the Townshend Acts of 1767 that stayed, the tax on tea, became glaringly obvious as a result of the Tea Act. The Tea Act, passed in 1773, did not actually impose any new taxes on the colonies. It was actually a means of keeping the East India Tea Company in business by limiting the source of tea to the colonies. Together with the Townshend Act, the colonists viewed this as yet another source of control from King George, resulting in the infamous Boston Tea Party.
The stage had been set for a revolution.
Here’s what really irked the colonists: under the British Constitution, no British subjects could be taxed without the consent of their representatives in Parliament. But the colonies didn’t elect representatives to Parliament. The colonists considered the constant imposition of taxes on them under those circumstances to be unconstitutional. It was, they felt, “taxation without representation.”
Many colonists worried that the attempts to impose taxes would only get worse. They decided to do something about it. Led by Thomas Jefferson, they penned a letter – a declaration of their rights – to be delivered to the King. On July 4, 1776, the day we officially celebrate Independence Day, the wording of the Declaration of Independence was approved by Congress. It was printed out and handed out to the public (in many different languages) and read out loud. Out loud. It was that important. And here’s what it said:
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.