Bobby Jones Fourth of July Message
Two hundred fifty years ago, a bold group of men decided to break away from the most powerful empire in the world. Their reason was simple: they wanted to live their lives the way they intended, not how it was dictated to them. On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted a document drafted primarily by Thomas Jefferson, working alongside a five-man committee that included John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. For the first time in human history, the inherent rights of mankind were declared in writing, with the explicit intention of building a government founded on those principles. That bold proclamation set in motion a movement that did not just create a new country; it helped create a new world.
The men who crafted this document were not perfect. In fact, they were deeply flawed. They understood that their own words carried a sense of hypocrisy, since many of them enslaved other human beings. But their living up to their verbiage was never the point. The point was to create a nation where their descendants could strive toward those lofty goals. Their backgrounds, desires, and motivations varied but they agreed that whatever course they took, they would take it together, and that they alone would chart it. Nearly a century later, Frederick Douglass would give voice to that unresolved tension in his 1852 address "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?", forcing the nation to reckon honestly with the distance between its founding words and its founding practices; a reckoning that, in many ways, continues today.
The founding of the United States has never been about creating a perfect union; it has always been about the pursuit of one. As mankind has reached out and literally touched the heavens, our ideas, values, and philosophies have changed. What has not changed is America's core commitment to self-determination; the right of a people to govern how they live. As our nation has aged, the rights once reserved for landowning white men have rightfully expanded to all citizens within its jurisdiction, through amendments, struggle, and generations of citizens insisting the promise be kept.
The truest measure of America's founding is simple: that each generation of its citizens becomes the proper torch-bearer of an idea. A nation, in Lincoln's words at Gettysburg, "of the people, by the people, for the people." Not one individual. Not a group of oligarchs. But the average, everyday American, regardless of background, creed, color, gender, or identity. Because that is what freedom truly is — the ability to live your life the way you choose, and to pursue happiness on your own terms.
https://navshad.substack.com/p/fourth-of-july-message