“Listen,” my mother said, “here it comes.” I heard the sound of drums and then horns in the distance, my first glimpse of a marching band. This was my first Fourth of July parade.
That morning was warm and sunny. At home, my mom told my dad to “hurry up,” we had to get there or we wouldn’t be able to see. My dad hoisted me up in his arms and then up over his head so I straddled his shoulders.
Off we went. We didn’t have a car, so it seemed like a long walk before I was on the ground and sitting on the curbstone across from the Everett Mill building in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Before long, a man came by selling balloons. My mom bought me an ice cream bar from a car and a crowd began to gather on the other side of the street ad behind us, three deep. Many of them held small flags.
As a young child, the Fourth of July was just a day for a parade with marching bands, girls twirling sticks, local Boy Scout troops trying to walk in step, policemen marching, some soldiers or sailors, and fire trucks at the end of the parade. There was music and flag waving and cookouts and summer fun.
At some point, however, I began hearing about the Declaration of Independence and that Thomas Jefferson wrote it. School textbooks were of little interest to me; they seemed so dull, even boring. The books had dates and dry facts: John Adams was born on October 30, 1735 and became the second president of the United States in 1797. No history teacher stirred my interest, either.
I was out of high school before I really felt, understood, and appreciated that these men — many who were men of wealth and means — had so much to lose and literally risked hanging as traitors guilty of treason. Still, they boldly and courageously signed their names to the document that accused King George III of multiple offenses and declared their independence.
Who knew what would happen next? A group of colonies had declared war on a powerful nation with a mighty military. The colonies had no army when they took on King George.
In August 1776, British troops, some 34,000 of them, were prepared to invade New York. About a year earlier Patrick Henry told angry colonists meeting at St. John’s Church in Richmond Virginia: “Give me liberty or give me death.” The sentiment grew among the colonists.
The Declaration of Independence was born during the summer of 1776. It did not flow unimpeded from Thomas Jefferson’s pen. He was the original wordsmith, but over 17 days, a committee and representatives at the Continental Congress made more than 80 changes to Jefferson’s draft. They voted for independence on July 2 and released the final signed declaration on July 4.
John Hancock, the first to sign it, stressed the need for unity when he said, “We must hang together,” to which Benjamin Franklin added, “Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
They pledged to each other “our fortunes and our sacred honor.”
They knew independence would not come easily. John Adams said “the object is great which we have in view, and we must expect a great expense of blood to obtain it. But we must remember that a free constitution of civil government cannot be purchased at too dear a rate.”
The king called them traitors. They called themselves patriots. The colonists did indeed shed their blood and win their independence, setting the stage for the creation of a unique government that persists today, in spite of social upheaval, unrest and pandemic.
And, on a much smaller scale, they saved me that space on the curb in Lawrence, Massachusetts so many years later, and the right for my mother to say, “Listen, here it comes.”
by Bill Johnson
Bill Johnson is a retired news reporter and congressional aide who is now a freelance writer.