Independence Day

A recent poll of teens found that most surveyed identified with traits such as “courage” and “perseverance” as the highest prized when pondering the Fourth of July.

Some 235 years since a group of men gathered in a sweltering Philadelphia courthouse to sign the Declaration of Independence, courage and perseverance are needed in large supply.

These were bold men, these Founding Fathers, but they were also men of a passion for one thing.

They wanted a say into how they were governed. They had become upstarts, in the eyes of their rulers. Royal decree no longer suited them.

But they were hardly a country.

That was the view of King George who saw in the rebellion a group of miscreants who needed a noose over their head or to face a firing squad.

These Founding Fathers faced death, they were traitors, for speaking their minds and lambasting a king who took his ransom and provided little but a standing army and navy at the ready to suppress any dissent.

A series of taxes represented the gasoline to the fire, but they were only the final straws in what had become a protracted breakaway by an unhappy youngster.

The king had better things to do than deal this rebellion and since he had the finest navy in the world and one of the finest armies, this folderol of requesting independence had to stop.

But the toothpaste, as they say, could not be put back in the tube.

Men such as Thomas Paine and John Adams and Samuel Adams had in words made clear the ideal of a free country, of a country that shed the shackles of perceived tyranny.

They published, often under pseudonyms to avoid detection, essays on the rights of the common man, mapping out the concepts of liberty and freedom that Thomas Jefferson would so eloquently put into words.

But they were seen as rabble rousers. There were citizens who were just fine under British rule and wanted no part of any new country.

There were also factions among the states, with the idea of a centralized federal government anathema to many, seeing in such a system, and the later election of George Washington, a replacement of one aristocracy with another.

To understand what these men, and women, overcame is the stuff of history books too long left to dust and goes to the heart of what we believe are the American ideals of self-reliance, liberty, freedom and the rights of man to not be unjustly shackled by religion or government.

They were tough men hardened by tough times.

When the Declaration of Independence was signed, there was no Constitution – that would come nearly a decade later – and there was no army.

Washington would be appointed general but even he, according to history books, wondered what he had been put in charge of.

Washington had under his command rag-tag troops from militias throughout the 13 original colonies. Disease and defections were common. Marching on command and in step was a challenge.

The British military looked on their foes as vanquished from the outset. Washington himself had only limited experience in the French and Indian War and was considered inferior to his English counterparts.

And what Washington and his men had to defend, the document called the Declaration of Independence, was one of ideals, soaring words that detailed the colonies grievances against the king and their desire for freedom from English rule.

The marriage was irrevocably broken, a divorce inevitable.

Saying so, however, did not make it so, as the king reminded the colonies when he sent his troops to quell the rebellion.

And within weeks and months of July 4, 1776 the prospects for this new United States of America appeared bleak, all but non-existent.

Washington was routed on the battlefield and attempts to secure funding for the war effort was hindered by France’s game-playing and slow communication that made the horse and buggy the equivalent of an Internet portal.

After five years Washington pulled an upset on the battlefield and the British surrendered. The king had enough and washed his hands of his prodigal “children.”

A Constitution would follow and though the boil of slavery was left to fester, a country was birthed, a country that would expand by leaps and bounds in the ensuing decades as the Louisiana Purchase pushed France from the country and Lewis and Clark explored that expanse of land.

To call it all a long shot does not give gambler’s credit.

And on this weekend, never has it seemed more appropriate to acknowledge and honor the courage and perseverance these founding men and women, who braved so much with so little prospect of the success to come.

We face great anxiety over events in the Gulf of Mexico, over intransigence in Congress, of two wars, a teetering economy and of a government – local, state and federal – that no longer seems to speak or act as if occupying another world.

But if there is a lesson from that signing in a hothouse courthouse in Philadelphia 235 years ago, one to be celebrated during this holiday weekend, it is that common men and women can enact change of monumental proportions.

Courage and perseverance: from the mouths of the teenagers comes wisdom.