The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

So begins the “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,” which was ratified by representatives of all of those states 240 years ago Monday. Fifty-six of those representatives signed the document.

The signing of the Declaration was only the beginning of a long and painful process in which the United States extricated itself from British rule to become an actually independent nation.

As I was searching around for the text of the Declaration so that I could copy and paste part of it into this space, I learned some interesting things.

Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration’s primary author, was part of a committee of five that was assigned by the Continental Congress to draw up the document. They presented their draft on June 11, 1776. Here’s what happened next, according to Wikipedia:

“Congress ordered that the draft ‘lie on the table.’ For two days Congress methodically edited Jefferson’s primary document, shortening it by a fourth, removing unnecessary wording, and improving sentence structure.” (As a newspaper editor, I have to love that.)

Then the citation continues… “Although Jefferson wrote that Congress had ‘mangled’ his draft version, (of course he thought that) the Declaration that was finally produced, according to his biographer John Ferling, was ‘the majestic document that inspired both contemporaries and posterity.’”

The Fourth of July has always been an important celebration of our nation’s birth, which is signified by the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

And so it should be. Picnics and fireworks and a day off work allow us to appreciate how fortunate we are to be Americans, and to celebrate the wisdom and foresight of our nation’s founders.

But amid the celebration, we should not forget that the Declaration was the beginning a very painful period. None of the members of that Constitutional Congress got exactly what they wanted. And the United States spent the ensuing years fighting protracted wars with Britain in order to gain the independence they sought.

The end result was never guaranteed.