The True Meaning of Independence Day...

New American
July 5, 2016

In the American holiday calendar no day is more significant than the Fourth of July, in which we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. That Declaration proclaimed to the world our separation from Great Britain and our emergence as a new sovereign nation, as we state in the pledge to our flag, “under God, with liberty and justice for all.”

The Declaration stated unequivocally: “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.”

Those few words sum up the divine source of our unalienable rights and our philosophy of government. Nothing quite so revolutionary had been proclaimed anywhere by any people. But those beliefs had to be affirmed by a long, bloody war, which was finally won. The result has been this shining light on a hill, the United States of America, the freest, most creative, productive, and richest nation in the history of mankind.

The Beginning of the End for Slavery

Today, the Declaration of Independence is celebrated as the centerpiece of American political philosophy. It clearly spells out the purpose of government, which is to secure our God-given unalienable rights. A government limited by its basic purpose does not need to incur a back-breaking debt of trillions of dollars. Our legislators have obviously forgotten what is written in the Declaration.

But what about slavery, you might ask? Why didn’t the liberty-loving Declaration also abolish slavery? First, the Declaration was not a set of laws. It was a statement of principles — and its principles clearly were anti-slavery. However, they could only be implemented after winning a long, bloody war. Also, at the time the Declaration was written, indentured servitude and slavery were centuries-old worldwide practices that could not be done away with overnight. The truth is that the Declaration did serve as the basis on which slavery was finally abolished in the United States, for it was the Declaration that Lincoln insisted on using in his argument for abolishing what the great Southern statesman Henry Clay called “a foul blot upon our nation.”

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