Let freedom ring

"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."

Two hundred and thirty years ago today, delegates from each of the thirteen British colonies in North America assembled in Philadelphia to sign the Declaration of Independence. At the time of the Continental Congress's meeting on July 4, 1776, the Revolutionary War was just over a year old - the "shot(s) heard 'round the world" had been fired at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775 - and in the months since, many American colonists had maintained hope of an eventual reconciliation with Britain. The mother country showed little appetite for compromise, however, and the war would last for another five years, ending with Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown in October, 1781. (The formal end to the war came even later, at the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783.)

For much of the Revolutionary period, it must have seemed to many Americans that their Declaration was little more than a suicide pact. The colonies were not prepared for war. General Washington had a devil of a time trying to organize the militia into a disciplined army capable of taking on the most powerful empire in the world. Funding for the war effort was scarce. Soldiers often went without pay, and adequate supplies and munitions were hard to come by. The Continental Congress questioned the competence of the Generals, and the Generals questioned the fortitude of the Congress. In the end, though - whether by skill or by Providence - the Americans managed to win the war.

To some, the Americans' victory in the Revolutionary War meant that the "world had turned upside down." To a certain degree, that is true, but not entirely, for theirs was essentially a conservative revolution: the colonists did not intend to destroy their civilization, but rather to preserve it. As Russell Kirk stated in The Conservative Mind:

By and large, the American Revolution was not an innovating upheaval, but a conservative restoration of colonial prerogatives. Accustomed from their beginnings to self-government, the colonials felt that by inheritance they possessed the rights of Englishmen and by prescription certain rights peculiar to themselves. When a designing king and a distant parliament presumed to extend over America powers of taxation and administration never before exercised, the colonies rose to vindicate their prescriptive freedom; and after the hour for compromise had slipped away, it was with reluctance and trepidation they declared their independence. Thus men essentially conservative found themselves triumphant rebels, and were compelled to reconcile their traditional ideas with the necessities of an independence hardly anticipated.

We've latched onto a good thing here in America, and it's worth preserving. Our liberty was not secured by armies of lawyers and politicians; it was won by the blood of patriots. It was not concocted by political scientists and philosophers; it is the culmination of thousands of years of tradition - formed through trial and error, turmoil and triumph, victory and defeat. As heirs of the "triumphant rebels" who won America's independence, our greatest duty - besides that which we owe to our Creator - is to defend the civilization and the liberties that so many others have fought and died to protect.

Happy Fourth of July!