While COVID-19 restrictions, nationwide protests, hurricane season and the cancelling of 4th of July celebrations are all converging, your friends at Rytech wish you a safe 4th of July. We will be celebrating and will continue to do our jobs as professionally and safely as we can, following all CDC protocols, while providing water mitigation and mold remediation services of the highest possible quality.
Meanwhile, we thought you’d like to know exactly what did, and did not, happen nearly 250 years ago on the 4th of July 1776.
The Declaration of Independence
We celebrate American Independence Day on the fourth of July every year. We think of July 4, 1776 as a day that represents the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the United States of America as an independent nation.
But July 4, 1776 was not the day the Continental Congress decided to declare independence, something it did on July 2, 1776. It wasn’t the day the American Revolution started either. That happened two years earlier, April 1775.
Nor was it the day Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. That was June 1776. Or, the date the Declaration was delivered to Great Britain which didn’t happen until November of 1776. Or, the date it was signed which was August 2nd, 1776.
So what did happen on the 4th of July 1776?
Members of the Continental Congress approved the final wording of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 after a draft was submitted on July 2nd and all of the edits and changes were agreed upon.
July 4, 1776 became the date that was included on the Declaration of Independence and the fancy handwritten copy that was signed in August–the copy now displayed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. It’s also the date that was printed on the Dunlap Broadsides, the original printed copies of the Declaration that were circulated throughout the new nation. So when people thought of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 was the date they remembered.
In contrast, we celebrate Constitution Day on September 17th of each year, the anniversary of the date the Constitution was signed, not the anniversary of the date it was approved. If we’d followed this same approach for the Declaration of Independence we’d being celebrating Independence Day on August 2nd of each year, the day the Declaration of Independence was signed!
How did the 4th of July become a national holiday?
For the first 15 or 20 years after the Declaration was written, people didn’t celebrate on a specific date. It was too new and too much else was happening in the young nation.
By the 1790s, a time of bitter partisan conflicts, the Declaration had become controversial. One party, the Democratic-Republicans, admired Jefferson and the Declaration. But the other party, the Federalists, thought the Declaration was too French and too anti-British, which went against their current policies. By 1817, John Adams complained in a letter that America seemed uninterested in its past. But that would soon change.
After the War of 1812, the Federalist party began to come apart and the new parties of the 1820s and 1830s all considered themselves inheritors of Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans. Printed copies of the Declaration began to circulate again, all with the date July 4, 1776 at the top. The deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on July 4, 1826 may even have helped to promote the idea of July 4 as an important date to be celebrated.
Celebrations of the Fourth of July became more common as the years went on and in 1870, almost a hundred years after the Declaration was written, Congress first declared July 4 to be a national holiday as part of a bill to officially recognize several holidays, including Christmas.
Further legislation about national holidays, including July 4, was passed in 1939 and 1941.
