July 4th isn’t really Independence Day. And we Americans get other history wrong, too | Opinion

To all Americans on this Independence Day: You’re doing it wrong.

Upon the successful vote in the Second Continental Congress confirming American independence, Massachusetts delegate John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail:

“I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty; it ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”

Yet the day he was praising was July 2, the day independence was declared by the Second Continental Congress, not July 4. Yes, folks, we Americans are doing it wrong by celebrating Independence Day on the wrong day.

Once Congress had voted in favor of political separation from Great Britain, it was left to the congressional secretary Charles Thomson to produce a clean charter for all the members to sign at a later date, as the original document was in rough draft form and had myriad clauses scratched out and added, as well as word and grammatical corrections. It took Thomson two days to accomplish this task. But rather than placing the date on which Congress had approved the measure at the top — July 2, 1776 — he placed the date on when he had finished copying it — July 4. Henceforth, that typographical error gave us the anniversary that we Americans celebrate as Independence Day.

Furthermore, the sole delegate to have signed the document on July 4 was John Hancock, the president of the Second Continental Congress. Most members did not sign it until late August 1776, after Congress had reconvened following a summer break. One delegate, Charles Carroll of Maryland, chose not to sign the document until after the battle of Yorktown in 1781. Thus, the famous John Trumbull painting we are all familiar with, with the delegates standing around waiting to place their signatures upon the document, was a figment of the artist’s imagination. This is the reason why, upon viewing it, Adams showed contempt: “I consider the true history of our revolution to be lost forever.”

Jefferson didn’t write Declaration alone

Among the most popular myths of Independence Day is that Thomas Jefferson was the sole author of the Declaration of Independence. This is simply not true. Once the congressional declaration committee members were appointed, Adams took it upon himself to write the first two drafts, both of which are still extant and housed at the Adams manse and museum Peacefield in Quincy, Massachusetts. After presenting his second draft to the full committee, its other members — Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston — made sizable contributions before it was handed off to Jefferson to complete in a polished draft to be presented to Congress. In short, Jefferson’s primary contribution was to clean up the language and add the linguistic flourishes for which his skills were already well noted throughout the American colonies.

Afterward, three days of heated debate ensued in the Second Continental Congress, during which several clauses were added and deleted. At one point, the Declaration teetered on the brink of becoming a mere footnote to American history, as all the Southern delegation’s members refused their ascent to the document over its anti-slavery clause, a leftover from Adams’ drafts included at the ardent behest of its original author. It was only after the offending clause was removed and the final vote was taken that the document was approved by the entire delegation. It was then given to Thomson to produce a clean copy for all the congressional members to sign. Thus the handwriting of the document that hangs at the National Archives, and which we Americans so venerate, is not that of Jefferson’s as we have been dutifully taught, but Thomson’s.

But is the July 2 truly Independence Day?

If we were to celebrate the actual day of our separation from British rule, should it not be on the day when the Treaty of Paris was approved by the British government? It was on Sept. 3, 1783, that both King George III and Parliament formally recognized the American colonies’ liberation from their authority. This is a valid question, because the fact that a group of disgruntled colonists proclaims itself free from its mother country does not make it a reality. Obviously, the king, George Lord Germain and all the British troops stationed throughout the Atlantic seaboard thought otherwise. That is why it ultimately took a six-year war to determine the question of American independence.

So, while Americans celebrate in a cacophony of fireworks as Adams had predicted, they will be oblivious that they are celebrating American independence on the wrong day and honoring the wrong person as the Declaration’s sole author. Their ardent patriotism will have blinded them to the ignorance of their own national history — a rather interesting and disturbing irony. It does, however, make me wonder what the founding generation would have thought of all of it.

Popular history is like internet advertisements

Much of what we were taught as American history is a nationalistic fable, or as historian Richard Shenkman has accurately termed them, “legends, lies and cherished myths” purveyed as fact. Consistently, so many people challenge the historical foundations of my social media posts because what I have written is wholly inconsistent with what they were taught in school. Disturbingly, even popular historians — a totally different breed from the scholarly type — have either been taken in by the hoopla or merely reiterate the common fables cynically to sell books.

Such popular historical lore, however, is akin to internet advertisements. They seem to have a life of their own, destined to live forever, and they believe this as a fact. As the English fiction writer E.M. Forster observed, “Nonsense of this type is more difficult to combat than a solid lie. It hides in rubbish heaps and moves when no one is looking.” And American Independence Day is truly the foremost among them.

So let us set the record straight here and now: The Fourth of July is not Independence Day, and yes, all Americans are doing it wrong by celebrating it on that day.

Michael J C Taylor is an author and historian with a doctorate in history and political science from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He lives in Overland Park.