July 4, 1776: America Adopts Its Declaration

It is the strangest thing about the Fourth of July: the date America celebrates was not the day independence was declared — only the day the declaration was adopted.

On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia's Pennsylvania State House, voted to approve Richard Henry Lee's resolution that the colonies "are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states." John Adams was so sure July 2 would become the great anniversary that he wrote home predicting it would be celebrated with "pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations."

He was off by two days. Congress spent July 2 through 4 debating and revising the document that would explain the decision to the world — a draft written mostly by the 33-year-old Virginian Thomas Jefferson, reviewed by fellow committee members John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. On the morning of July 4, 1776, the delegates adopted the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration did three things at once. Its preamble announced a radical idea — that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The words outran the reality: the new nation still held enslaved people in bondage, a contradiction the country would spend centuries confronting. Then came 27 grievances against King George III, the legal case for the break. And finally the conclusion: the colonies were absolved of allegiance to the British crown, free to make war, make peace, and trade as independent states.

Philadelphia printer John Dunlap worked through the night to set the text in type; the first printed copies — the Dunlap broadsides — were rushed to colonial assemblies and to George Washington's army. The Declaration was read aloud to the troops in New York on July 9 and to a crowd in Philadelphia on July 8. Congress ordered a formal parchment copy on July 19, and most of the 56 delegates signed it on August 2.

In the years since, the Declaration has become one of the most quoted documents on earth — invoked by abolitionists, suffragists, and civil rights leaders, and echoed in independence movements around the world. Adams's July 2 never caught on. But his bonfires and illuminations found their date: the Fourth of July, the day the words were adopted, became the birthday of the United States.

Photo: John Trumbull's "Declaration of Independence" (1819), public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).