The Founding Father anticipated “Pomp and Parade” to mark America’s birthday. But he didn’t think it would happen July 4.
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In early July 1776, John Adams penned a euphoric letter to his wife, Abigail.
Something had happened a day earlier that citizens of the new country would commemorate every year, far into the future, Adams predicted.
It “will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.— I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival,” Adams wrote.
He imagined “Pomp and Parade with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
And he got it right, with one glaring exception: Adams was certain we would be doing all this on July 2.
That was when the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia a year into a revolution, had passed a resolution, put forward by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, formally severing ties with Britain and establishing the 13 colonies as “free and independent States.”
Two days later, on the Fourth, the delegates approved a declaration, drafted largely by Thomas Jefferson, explaining their reasons for what was by then a fait accompli.
The delegates held no ceremony around the approval, nor even a public reading. Jefferson went about his errands, which included buying seven pairs of ladies gloves to be sent home to Monticello.
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Two hundred copies were hastily printed and dispatched throughout the colonies, but the actual Declaration of Independence was not “engrossed” — that is, officially prepared and signed — until August. Nearly a dozen of the 56 men who put their signatures to the parchment weren’t even present when its language was approved on July 4, according to Michael Auslin, author of a new book, “National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America.”
So is it possible the country has, for more than two centuries, been celebrating the wrong date? And how was it that July Fourth, not the second, came to be regarded as “Independence Day”?
By a year after the events in Philadelphia, July Fourth was the anniversary date that had taken hold. In 1777, Adams was again writing his wife from Philadelphia, this time noting that the Fourth “being the anniversary of American Independence, was celebrated here with a festivity and ceremony becoming the occasion.” On July 4, 1778, Adams and Benjamin Franklin hosted an Independence Day banquet in Paris. During the Revolutionary War, George Washington marked the date by ordering cannon salutes and double rations of rum for his troops.
Part of this confusion and contradiction relates to varying accounts of what had actually happened in Philadelphia, as well as the fact the leaders of this new country had a war to win. So documenting an accurate record was not high among their priorities. Also, the first, unofficial printing of the text, known as the Dunlap broadside, was titled: “In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776,” so readers could easily have made their own assumptions about how everything transpired.
And some of it may have been deliberate. The identities of the signers, for instance, were kept secret for months because they could be risking their lives and livelihoods if identified by the British as having committed treason.
So the legends around Independence Day unspooled on their own, leaving history to catch up.
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