and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.
New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton
Massachusetts:
John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery
Connecticut:
Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott
New York:
William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark
Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross
Delaware:
Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean
Maryland:
Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia:
George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton
North Carolina:
William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn
South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton
Georgia:
Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton
geg6
Always very proud of the representation of my commonwealth in the brave men (and their women) who stood up to the mad king and his minions. I believe PA had the largest number of signers. “We must, indeed, all hang together or we shall, assuredly, all hang separately.”
JR
“John Brown’s Body”
West of the Rockies
OMG, Clump just keeps blathering on…
West of the Rockies
You can almost hear the BB’s rattling around in Pence’s empty head…
Anyone else watching any of this travesty?
Adam L Silverman
@West of the Rockies: Stephen Miller is a terrible speech writer.
Ohio Mom
@West of the Rockies: Nope, not watching, eating in a Chinese noodle house with Ohio Family and Ohio MIL. MIL is increasingly deaf and this restaurant is noisy — the conversation between Ohio Dad and his mom is a comedy of errors.
I’m just as happy to hear your reports of the travesty. You’re doing a public service by allowing the rest of us to skip it.
Cheryl Rofer
I hope that, three years from now, President [Harris, Warren, Buddigieg] will be spending the day with their family and we will recall this idiocy with laughter and relief.
hedgehog mobile
Thank you, Adam.
Hotdogs and sides here at Chez Hedgehog, good cold Pacifico beer, Ghostbusters II on the tube to be followed by 1776. Avoiding fireworks.
West of the Rockies
@Ohio Mom:
You missed nothing. Lethargic, wet crowd, fly-overs that don’t translate well on a TV screen, a comb-over that was sorry and untelegenic.
SRW1
Guardian says Trump overtaxed his crowd with all that history stuff:
Indeed, there were some points when the crowd – dare I say it – even seemed a little bored. Certainly, at some moments during these scripted historical sections when Trump stopped for applause, it took a long while for a very muted cheer to struggle free from the crowd.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
Does anyone have a favorite founding father?
Mnemosyne
There’s always the musical about Button Gwinnett …
https://youtu.be/uhFeQSBZUSk
jl
With Trump, always need to hope for the best and be prepared for the worst.
Good that a proto-fascist military display couldn’t come off because of an Act of God, a few hours of rain on summer afternoon on the eastern seaboard (wonder of wonders, hoocuddanone?). But Trump will be grumpy. If it all came off, then Trump would be happy watching Fox News reruns for a few days, might forget about anything else for awhile. The census forms might have gotten printed before he remembered about it again.
Trump wants to model his stupid military show on French Bastille Day. Thing is the French military played an important role in the early stages of their revolution. So, a legitimated reason to include them in commemorations. Though even so, been periodic debates in France on how to do that appropriately. As a tweet in a previous thread said, the Declaration of Independence was a political ans social revolution. Military played no role. And we have several other holidays devoted to the military, and the troops, those living with us now, those who are departed and those who gave their lives in battle.
Sure, it is just symbolism, but that symbolism means something.
Quotes I’ve read from the troops on the scene at the Trump fest are encouraging, in that they are not buying into the hype, or grousing about missing picnics and family celebrations.
geg6
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
No question, Ben Franklin. Besides being the pride of Pennsylvania, he was a super interesting dude.
Mnemosyne
Ah, I had gotten Franklin’s reply to Adams slightly wrong earlier. It’s actually, “The hell I am.” ?
https://youtu.be/9owHQ96Nms4
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@geg6:
From what I’ve read, Franklin was one of the most progressive of the Founders. And he was very accomplished. A modern renaissance man if there ever was one
Dan B
I’m hoping for highlights including Ivanka riding atop Air/Space Force One with scarves streaming behind her.
jl
@geg6: Franklin was a genius. Interesting that scientific biographies of him that I’ve read pay a lot more respect to his research than you see in popular lore, where he is more like an old crank who few a kite (though whether he gussied up that stunt to make it more dramatic is an open question, but other other scientists have done that too);
His intellectual evolution is remarkable. He started as a narrow minded bigot who didn’t like German immigrants, because they weren’t really ‘white’, wouldn’t learn English and wouldn’t assimilate, and worked to hard for too little who would lower the living standards of good English stock working man, and who didn’t have much problem with slavery. Ended up as someone with views more than a hundred years ahead of his time (at least judging from the push back White people like US Grant and Twain got for some of their thinking).
And, if pundits today think the Democratic Party is going too left and socialist, should get a load of some of Franklin’s economic and social thinking. Good day for some Franklin quotes.
jl
Tom Paine, if you want to consider him a Founder. I think he should be.
And, though some of his thinking was flawed on social justice and importance of public education and popular democracy, Alexander Hamilton.
jl
Actually though, it is hard to judge Franklin’s true intellectual evolution. Much of his writing up to the Revolution was designed for business success and political self-promotion. I’ve read that his Autobiography was a public relations effort, much like modern campaign biographies. It was designed to restart his political career after two successive failures in politics. First his defeat in trying to get rid of the Penn aristocracy in Pennsylvania that had grown anti-democratic and corrupt, and then his failure in England when he tried to get US independence, or at least some sort of self-governance without war.
Dev Null
Bravo, Adam!
Mnemosyne
@jl:
Not sure if I get your Hamilton comment on public education since he was one of the trustees of a school that was designed to educate white and Oneida students on an equal basis:
https://itshamiltime.com/tag/hamilton-oneida-academy/
I also think that a lot of people fail to put the Alien & Sedition Acts into the context of the times, which was a fear that a French Revolution-style Terror was brewing. As a fluent French speaker who became friends with many of the notable emigrés (particularly Talleyrand), Hamilton had good reason to be wary of unchecked populism.
Franklin and Adams are my longtime favorites, but I’m happy to give Hamilton third place behind them.
jl
@Dev Null: Yes, thanks to Adam for putting up the text. I think this phrase from the Declaration is important, something the Founders, for all their flaws, thought important but that our contemporary jingoistic reactionaries hold in contempt:
” a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes “
jl
@Mnemosyne: Thanks for that link. I’ve been looking recently for thoughts on the Founders on the importance of public education. Adams, Madision, Jefferson, and Franklin were fanatics for it, and easy to find their arguments online and in biographies. I didn’t find much on Hamilton.
But i know Hamilton was an advocate of child labor in the up-and-coming factories of the day. I’d like to find a source that gives the whole picture, but no luck so far.
But I’ll add Hamilton to my list when I am arguing with people who are dismissing of good old fashioned public education.
The Hamiltime blog looks great.
SiubhanDuinne
So cool to see Josiah Bartlett as one of the signatories (even if he did spell his last name wrong).
#DevotedObsessiveWestWingFan
#JedBartlet4Ever
#LetBartletBeBartlet
SiubhanDuinne
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
I also come down on the side of Dr. Franklin. Amazing man.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mnemosyne:
It’s all too easy to forget that the Storming of the Bastille and the adoption/implementation of the U. S. Constitution happened within a couple or few months of each other.
rikyrah
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
Ben Franklin???
SiubhanDuinne
Adam, once again, many thanks for posting the entirety of the Declaration of Independence throughout this day in a series of timed posts.
The last bit of the Declaration always gets me:
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
No small thing by any means as the customary sentence for conviction of treason was to be hanged “by the neck but not till you be dead, for then your bowels must be taken out and burnt before your face, then your head must be severed from your body, and your body divided into four Quarters, and these must be at the disposal of the Supreme Authority in the State.”
Mnemosyne
@jl:
Hamilton’s feelings on child labor may have been influenced by the fact that he had been a child worker himself — his age is a bit in dispute, but he was working as a fairly senior clerk by the age of 12 or 14, writing letters under his own name to scold his employer’s ship captains.
But Hamilton is also an example of a guy who understood how government finance should work but was an absolutely shitty businessman. Every venture he tried to invest in was a flop, and unfortunately his finances were on a downswing when he got himself killed in that duel, so his wife was forced to sell their home to settle his debts. (Fortunately, his friends took up a subscription to buy it back and gave it to her — it’s now a National Park site in NYC).
Ron Chernow’s biography of him is really excellent and not a hagiography. Chernow definitely admires Hamilton’s accomplishments but doesn’t sugar-coat his faults or errors.
Mnemosyne
@NotMax:
IIRC, that sentence was last carried out during the Regency, shortly after Princess Charlotte died in childbirth. Everyone — including the Prince Regent — was so grossed out that it was never done again. And they had done it the “kind” way by making sure the convicts were dead before they mutilated their corpses.
billcoop4
Hamilton College is the descendant of Hamilton-Oneida Academy.
BC
Hamilton ‘82