Happy Birthday, America

Independence Forever: Why America Celebrates the Fourth of July  . . . "As a practical matter, the Declaration of Independence publicly announced to the world the unanimous decision of the American colonies to declare themselves free and independent states, absolved from any allegiance to Great Britain. But its greater meaning-then as well as now-is as a statement of the conditions of legitimate political authority and the proper ends of government, and its proclamation of a new ground of political rule in the sovereignty of the people. "If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence," wrote the great historian Samuel Eliot Morrison, "it would have been worthwhile.' " . . .  
And, sadly:

One charge that Jefferson had included, but Congress removed, was that the king had "waged cruel war against human nature" by introducing slavery and allowing the slave trade into the American colonies. A few delegates were unwilling to acknowledge that slavery violated the "most sacred rights of life and liberty," and the passage was dropped for the sake of unanimity. Thus was foreshadowed the central debate of the American Civil War, which Abraham Lincoln saw as a test to determine whether a nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" could long endure. . .

 Lincoln's vital understanding of July 4th  "British prime minister Margaret Thatcher famously once said, "Europe was created by history.  America was created by philosophy."  Nearly all European nations trace their beginning to a common ethnic kinship or a cultural characteristic, but America was created by exiles united in voluntary assent to shared political beliefs.  That's why British writer G.K. Chesterton visited the United States for the first time and remarked that America was "a nation with the soul of a church" – not because of its religiosity, but because of a common creed enshrined in "sacred texts" of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution." . . .

Obama warns Americans about too much patriotism — on July 4th weekend!  Sorry. I must have got carried away. TD