Why July 2 Was Independence Day and Other Fourth of July Questions Answered

Folks, we have a problem, and it is sitting in your backyard next to the potato salad. The Fourth of July is the best holiday America has, and most of the people grilling for it are celebrating the wrong day for the wrong reason, with the wrong picture of how it went down. I say this with love and with a spatula.

The good news is that the real history is stranger and richer than the cookout version, and it takes about fifteen minutes to learn. So let me do what a good host does at a barbecue and answer the questions people actually ask, in order, with the dates. These answers come from the record, and where the record is thin, I will say so. For the longer dating story, see July 2, July 4, August 2, the Dates Behind the Declaration of Independence.

The Vote That Made Us Independent

Was independence declared on July 2 or July 4?

Both dates matter, and they mean different things. Independence was voted on July 2, 1776. The Declaration, the document explaining the decision, was approved on July 4. The vote was the act. The Declaration was the argument. A country celebrates the argument because the argument is what the rest of the world could read.

What was the Lee Resolution?

On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, speaking for his state's delegation, put a resolution before the Continental Congress. Its core reads:

Resolved, 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.

That is the resolution. It is short, and it is the legal act of independence. Congress postponed the vote to give the more hesitant colonies time to consult their own assemblies, and meanwhile it appointed a committee of five to draft a declaration explaining the decision: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston.

Why did it pass on July 2 and not earlier?

Because the delegates were voting under instructions from their home colonies, and some of those instructions had not yet changed. Congress voted by colony, one vote each, and a resolution of this magnitude needed near unanimity to be credible. By July 2 twelve of the thirteen colonies voted yes. New York's delegates abstained because they had not yet received authority from their provincial congress, which gave it a few days later, on July 9. The vote was therefore twelve to none, with one abstention, and it became unanimous in effect when New York came around.

What did John Adams predict?

He got the date right and the way of celebrating it wrong, and the second error is the funnier one. On July 3, 1776, Adams wrote to his wife Abigail:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.

He went on, in a passage whose exact wording I give only in part because printed editions differ, to say that the day would be celebrated as the great anniversary festival, commemorated with solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty and solemnized with "Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations" from one end of the continent to the other.

Read that twice. He predicted the festival, he predicted the pomp, the guns, the bells and the bonfires, and he was off by two days. The man who argued harder than anyone for independence was also the man whose calendar missed by forty-eight hours. We forgive him. It is remarkable how much of the modern Fourth, the parade, the games, the noise, the lights, he laid out in one sentence on the day after the vote.

He also gets credit for the first item in that list. He said the day should be marked with solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty before it was marked with sports and guns. Adams knew that gratitude comes before noise.

The Parchment and the Printers

When was the Declaration actually signed?

Not on July 4. Congress adopted the text on July 4 and ordered it printed. The handsome parchment copy that we picture, with the famous signatures, was prepared afterward, and most delegates signed it on August 2, 1776. Some signed later still. The scene of fifty-six men crowded around a table on Independence Day is a painting, not a photograph. John Trumbull's famous painting of the presentation of the draft shows a moment, the presentation of the committee's draft to Congress, not the signing.

What are the Dunlap broadsides?

They are the first printed copies of the Declaration. On the night of July 4, Congress sent the approved text to a Philadelphia printer, John Dunlap, who produced it as a large single sheet, a broadside, overnight. Copies were dispatched to the other colonies, to military commanders and to local assemblies. The Dunlap broadside carried the printed names of only the president of Congress, John Hancock, and the secretary, Charles Thomson. About two dozen of these copies are known to survive today, and finding one in an attic would make you a very happy person indeed.

The point to remember is that the text went public before it was signed. That is what the founders wanted. The Declaration was a message to the world, in the words of its own opening, written out of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," and it was printed first and signed later.

When was it first read aloud?

On July 8, 1776, in Philadelphia, in the yard of the State House, to a gathering of citizens. Copies were read to the army in New York on July 9 on Washington's orders, and in Boston on July 18. In those days a text reached most people by being read to them, and a public reading was how a new nation announced itself. If you want to see how that tradition still works, How to Mark America's 250th Birthday in Your Own Town and With Your Own Family has a plan for reading the Declaration in your own town.

Who wrote the thing, and who edited it?

Jefferson wrote the first draft, with edits from Adams and Franklin, and then Congress went through it with a pencil and cut and rewrote parts. Among the passages struck was a long condemnation of the slave trade, which Jefferson had included and which some delegates would not accept. The story of the second paragraph, the "all men are created equal" part, is told in The Declaration's Second Paragraph Is a Complete Theory of Government, and the list of grievances is in The Grievance List in the Declaration Reads Like a Charge Sheet Against Power.

The Coincidence Nobody Would Believe

How did Jefferson and Adams both die on July 4, 1826?

On July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of each other. Jefferson died at Monticello in Virginia, and Adams at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. They had been rivals, then enemies, then, in old age, friends who exchanged letters for years about government and life.

According to a tradition, Adams's last words were that Thomas Jefferson survived him. If he said it, he was mistaken, since Jefferson had died earlier that day. I give this as a family tradition and not an exact quotation. The facts that matter are not in dispute: the second and third Presidents, one of them the Declaration's principal author and the other its fiercest advocate in Congress, died on the fiftieth Fourth. A third President, James Monroe, the fifth, died on July 4, 1831.

If a novelist put that in a book, an editor would send it back as too neat. History does not have editors.

The Holiday

When did the Fourth become a federal holiday?

The Fourth was celebrated for generations before Congress made it official. In 1870, Congress passed a law making several days, including the Fourth of July, Christmas Day and New Year's Day, holidays for federal employees in the District of Columbia, in an act signed on June 28. That was without pay. In 1938 Congress made it a paid holiday for federal workers. So the nation was celebrating Independence Day for nearly a century after the Revolution on the strength of custom alone, which says something about how this country works. The people got there first, and the government followed.

Why fireworks?

Because Adams asked for them, in effect. His list of bonfires and illuminations is a call for fire and light, and the earliest celebrations delivered. In Philadelphia in 1777, on the first anniversary, the city marked the day with bells, a parade, a naval salute, and fireworks in the evening. The tradition took hold because gunpowder was the way an eighteenth-century people made a noise that carried across a town, and because the colonists had just learned what gunpowder could do. Cannon fire marked the day in the early years, and fireworks took its place as the safer descendant.

Should we celebrate July 2 instead?

There is a case for it, and it is worth hearing, but I would argue for staying with the Fourth. Here are three reasons, numbered, because this is the point where a bit of argument belongs in a holiday column.

1. The Declaration is the thing we can all read. The vote on July 2 was a resolution of a few lines. The document of July 4 is the founding statement of American principle, and it is what the nation has quoted for two and a half centuries.
2. The date on the text is the date people knew. The first public printing carried July 4, and the date stuck in the public mind from the first anniversary. Customs are built by repetition, and this one is older than most of our institutions.
3. Both dates tell the same story. July 2 was the decision and July 4 was the reason, and a nation needs both. Mark July 2 with a quiet reading of the Lee Resolution, and the Fourth with the noise.

Does the Fourth belong to everyone?

Yes, and the sharpest argument for that is also one of the hardest. On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech asking what the Fourth of July meant to an enslaved man. He was not rejecting the Declaration. He was holding the country to it. For that speech, see What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July and Why Douglass Kept the Constitution. For the other great defense of the Declaration, read Coolidge's 1926 Declaration Speech Is the Best Answer to Progress Talk.

Did the Liberty Bell ring on July 4?

The familiar scene of the bell ringing out the news of independence is a nineteenth-century legend. A story published in the 1840s dressed it up with a boy at the door and an old bellman in the tower. There is no good contemporary record of it. The bell was used to summon the public, and it may well have rung for the public reading on July 8, but the dramatic version is fiction. The bell got its name, Liberty Bell, later, when abolitionists adopted it as a symbol.

What the Day Is For

What does the Declaration actually claim?

It makes one argument in three steps. First, that people have rights that come from their Creator and not from any government, among them "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Second, that governments exist to secure those rights and hold "their just powers from the consent of the governed." Third, that when a government becomes destructive of those ends, the people may alter or abolish it, and the Declaration then spends most of its length on a list of facts to show that this was what the king had done. It is a short brief, with a thesis, a principle and a set of exhibits, and a lawyer would call it a model of the form.

Why read it aloud when everybody has a copy?

Because a text that is heard is remembered differently from a text that is skimmed. The Declaration was written to be read to crowds, and its rhythm shows it: the long chain of "he has" charges builds like a drumroll. Read it once with your family and you will notice sentences you have never seen in print, including the closing pledge, in which the signers mutually pledged to each other "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." Fireworks last twenty minutes. That sentence has lasted two and a half centuries.

The Case in Brief

1. Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776, on the Lee Resolution of June 7, and approved the Declaration's text on July 4.
2. Adams predicted that July 2 would be celebrated with pomp and parade, games, guns, bells and bonfires, and he had the celebration right and the date wrong.
3. The Declaration was printed first, in the Dunlap broadsides of July 4 and 5, and signed mostly on August 2, and the parchment signing scene is a myth.
4. Jefferson and Adams both died on July 4, 1826, and the Fourth became a federal holiday in 1870, nearly a century after custom made it one.
5. The right way to keep the day is to read the document, mark July 2 quietly and July 4 loudly, and remember what the fireworks are celebrating.

What you can do: on the next Fourth of July, gather your family or neighbors and read the Declaration of Independence aloud, start to finish, before the first sparkler is lit.