"What to an American is The Fourth of July?"
Our Country has been in a constitutional crisis since January 20, 2025.
The country in to which your children or their children or their children’s children were born on January 20th or will be born thereafter is no longer the country we declared to be free in 1776.
THEREFORE, I ASK, “What to an American is the Fourth of July in 2025?”
JULY 4TH WAS THE BIRTH of our country’s independence and of our political freedom.
On that day in 1776, Congress declared the following truths to be self-evident: “That all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
Congress further declared:
“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.”
Moreover, “[W]hen 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.”
In support of its determined act to separate from the King and Great Britain, Congress proclaimed that “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.”1
That was 249 years ago.
LOOKING BACK IT SEEMS EASY to say that our country was right to dissolve its bonds with England.
But do we remember, as Frederick Douglass reminded us in 1852:
“[T]here was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit.
But, with that blindness which seems to be the unvarying characteristic of tyrants, since Pharoah and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea, the British Government persisted in the [wrongs] complained of.
The madness of this course…is admitted now…but we fear the lesson is wholly lost on our present rulers.”2
FOR 249 YEARS we have celebrated the incredible act our forefathers took on July 4, 1776, when they signed the Declaration of Independence and “brought forth onto this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”3
THE PRINCIPLES contained in our Declaration of Independence “are saving principles. We must stand by them and be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost,” Douglass said.
ON THIS OCCASION of the birth of a new nation and government of the people, by the people and for the people, we cannot look away from the truth - we cannot pretend that we are the same country we were before January 20, 2025.
RATHER, WE ARE COMPELLED AS CITIZENS to remember the truths that were and remain self-evident. And in remembering those truths, we are equally compelled to support and defend the form of government we chose 249 years ago when we declared our independence from a tyrant – a government ruled by its citizens and not by a King.
“A PRINCE whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”4
WHAT, THEN, DOES JULY 4TH, 2025 MEAN TO AN AMERICAN? It means that we today, and every day to follow, rededicate ourselves to our founding principles, to our Constitution, and to the Rule of Law.
THEREFORE, WE THE PEOPLE, “Highly resolve…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”5
Declaration of Independence, In Congress, July 4, 1776.
All quotes from Frederick Douglass come from his “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” address delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, on July 5th, 1852. He declined to deliver this address on July Fourth because the great principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence did not yet apply to everyone in practice.
Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863.
Declaration of Independence.
Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address.