Hope for a return to the Constitution is hope for political Revolution in our time.  How far away it seems now, however, the year 2008 from the Year of Our Lord 1789 when the Constitution was ratified.  Further back still, some thirteen years to the marvelous Spirit of 1776, when the American Revolution was formally proclaimed by that eloquent and audacious document penned by Thomas Jefferson and adopted by Congress on July 4^th.  John Adams knew and wrote his wife Abigail, that to maintain the Declaration of Independence would take years of “toil and blood and treasure.”  Indeed, the fighting had started the year before.  Great Britain was not about to let her colonies peaceably secede.  Adams and other representatives of the rather presumptuous “United States of America” (56 signatories in all by August) were under no illusion.  They steeled themselves to face challenges and accept the risk and dire prospects of failure, pledging all they had to the cause of maintaining that Declaration. 

Think about it.  In 1776 the Declaration of Independence was a fiction on parchment, ink on mere paper until facts on the ground were borne out repeatedly, after years of bloody struggle.  To that end knowingly, they pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor on Independence Day! 

For hope the Founders plied, willing to die for a faint promise of fulfilling the dream to be free.  Our ancestors were men and women of exquisite character, yet they expected as much or more of their posterity. 

At the storming of Fort Ticonderoga, Ethan Allen—famed leader of the Green Mountain Boys of Vermont, so startled the British commander that he capitulated.  Allen loudly declared the American cause to be “in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!”  Many Americans believed this, that their cause was just and holy.  It gave the people’s representatives heart, and also reason to break away from their king and country.  No political assemblage had ever done anything like it.

The Declaration of Independence is based on natural rights political philosophy.  Jefferson traced numerous abuses and usurpations attributed to the King of Great Britain, King George III, and he argued these showed a design to subject Americans to tyranny and arbitrary rule.  He asserted that no people have a right to govern any other people without the consent of the governed; hence in the case he outlined, American colonies had the right and duty to dissolve political bands with the central government in Great Britain.  Of course, he assumed in his argument the British Empire was a confederation of free peoples—but this was something of a contested theory or concept, not necessarily the way monarchies ran in England or anywhere else! 

The abuses and usurpations Jefferson delineated were also based on presumed moral foundations, which he like Allen, asserted in the name of the Great Jehovah.  “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” were rights from God not government, and governments are subject to being changed by the people whenever governments subvert those rights.  According to Dr. Roger Pilon at the Cato Institute, “It is not political will, then, but moral reasoning, accessible to all, that is the foundation of our political system.”   

Americans in 1776 were convinced of the moral authority they held as a people, indeed as thirteen states and peoples united to wage war during the American Revolution.  They were convinced in the righteousness of their cause.  On July 4^th, 2008 the American people could stand to remind themselves of at least two things: first, of a truth based on natural rights, that our ancestors did indeed possess the moral authority they claimed to found this great nation; and second, of a potential inside of us, because we are the Founders’ posterity after all—to find the essence of character in a personal commitment to the righteous cause of freedom. 

God gave us rights, and he also made us capable of guarding and protecting those rights as Americans.  We are capable of recapturing that spirit of sacrifice and selfless motivation necessary to sustain the American Revolution in our day.  This at least is my hope, and the best way to celebrate Independence Day this year is to hope and also pray. 

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