(HOST) Celebrating Independence Day has special significance in an election year, when we consider where the country’s headed next. Teacher and historian Vic Henningsen reflects on the politics of independence and its meaning to those who made it.
(HENNINGSEN) John Adams had a hard time with July 4th. He could never understand why Americans believed it marked the moment of their independence. As far as he was concerned independence had already occurred – weeks, months, or even years before. The Fourth was merely the moment when the Continental Congress formally recognized the fact.
What really galled him was that Americans associated independence with Thomas Jefferson, particularly because throughout his career Jefferson made a point of playing up his authorship of the Declaration. Americans didn’t remember that Adams was the one who’d convinced Congress to act. They didn’t realize that there’d been a five-man drafting committee, all of whom edited Jefferson. Congress itself spent three days as a committee of the whole reviewing and significantly revising Jefferson’s draft.
The final document was truly – and appropriately – the product of many hands.
Still, it caused Adams exquisite agony to recall that he was responsible for Jefferson’s assignment to write the original draft.
He recognized that he’d made himself so obnoxious to Congress in maneuvering for independence that anything he wrote would be attacked. Of their fellow members of the drafting committee, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston had other assignments that limited their participation and Benjamin Franklin was ill – though there’s a persistent legend that Adams didn’t want Franklin’s hand in the document lest he slip in a joke that Adams wouldn’t understand. Jefferson, a Virginian who’d said virtually nothing in Congress but was known as a good writer, was the obvious choice to do the heavy lifting and it was Adams who nominated him for the task. Adams saw himself as the architect of independence and viewed Jefferson merely as a draftsman; yet he recognized the irony that he’d been the agent of his own frustration. If Americans regarded Jefferson as the father of independence, it’s because Adams put him in position to claim the role.
By the end of his long life though, Adams had not only reconciled with Jefferson, from whom he’d long been estranged, but became resigned to the fact that he’d never get full credit for his role in achieving American freedom. Increasingly he and Jefferson both focused on the meaning of independence to the new republic they’d helped create. As the fiftieth anniversary of July 4th approached – the day, coincidentally, on which both would die -each issued a public statement about its significance.
Characteristically, Jefferson viewed American independence as but a moment in the inevitably triumphant march of human freedom. Adams was more cautious and, perhaps, more realistic. Americans, he wrote, were "destined in future history to form the brightest or the blackest page, according to the use or the abuse of those political institutions by which they shall in time to come be shaped".
In other words, independence was what Americans made of it and would make of it in the future. Independence was not so much a fact as a challenge.
It still is.