Four(th)

Happy Independence Day! We celebrate our nation's birthday today and mark how many years we've made it around the sun since 1776, the year of our nation's birth. Or was it 1776? Quite a bit of controversy has been stirred the last few years since a group of journalists at the New York Times launched an endeavor urging Americans to think of 1619 as the year of our origin. That, by the way, was about a dozen years after a colony emerged in present-day Virginia. Our Constitution was drafted on September 17, 1787, a day we mark as Constitution Day. And on January 1, 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. Could these, also, mark our beginning as a people? 

But even if one were to focus in on the Revolutionary Era, the story gets messy. The Second Continental Congress began meeting in 1775. The Boston Tea Party took place in 1773. Any of those events could mark our genesis as a nation-state. If we were to go later, our treaty of friendship with France in the winter of 1777-78 short-circuited a plausible chance at a negotiated peace with Britain. And the fighting of the Revolution didn't end until 1781, the treaty formalizing our peace settlement two years after that. Any of these years could claim to be our starting spot. 

Oh, and the Declaration of Independence itself wasn't promulgated on July 4. Actually, on July 2. And as soon as the ink was dry, our Founding Fathers (or at least the most noteworthy of them) fled Philadelphia for their states believing that the most important work of nationhood would be happening in those thirteen units. Thomas Jefferson, often credited as the Declaration's chief author, was one of those who returned home for the important statecraft. Who was left in Philadelphia minding the store? Young bachelors and old widowers. The B-team of the Founding Fathers. 

Dates are fun, but history is messy. Major eras don't start and end as cleanly in real time as they do in our rear-view mirror. When was our nation born? There's a lot of plausible answers to that. The totemic importance we put on the precise date of July 4 might catch the signers of that document a bit surprised if they were alive today. July 4, 1776 is a good compromise date for a long and complicated story. A story that involves the messy emergence of this country I love, and that's why I celebrate this day.