The Shade and the Start

It’s hot out there today. It will be all week long. 236 years ago it was just as hot as a delegation of men worked to put the finishing touches on a declaration. The British soldiers were already on the shores of New York by July 3, 1776 and George Washington was urging his fellow founding Fathers to act. A vote was taken regarding independence and it was a tie. The representative from Maryland had yet to arrive so they decided to wait 24 hours and then take another vote on the Declaration of Independence. So the Fourth of July could have very well been the Third of July, if Maryland’s delegate hadn’t been delayed.

The thing I remember most about history, about this moment, is how terribly hot it was. I seem to remember stories from my grammar school days wherein the teacher stressed how brutally hot it was in Philadelphia as the Declaration of Independence was being worked on. All those men in their puffed up finery, sweating through their clothes and wigs, trying to establish how a new nation could be formed based on the ideals of freedom from tyranny. I sort of remember imagining myself as a young boy, sitting on a tree branch outside Independence Hall, trying to stay cool under the shade of the leaves, peering in the windows, trying to get a look inside to see what was happening.

I could see myself in a little blue tri-corner hat, a slightly dingy white shirt, a brown vest, knee length dark breeches and little black leather shoes. My feet, dangling from the branch of the tree over the heads of all the other interested people that slowing milled about in front of the hall, wondering what those men inside were doing to direct the fate of a nation. I wonder what it would have been like to actually have been there; to actually bear witness to a moment when a tiny colonial nation decided to take on the largest superpower in the world at the time.

I can imagine the conversation:

“Can you believe it sir, a new country, free from the King, on our very own”, I would say.

“It is any cooler up in the tree?”

“What’s that?”

“I said, is it any cooler up in that tree?”

“Um, yes. A bit cooler, there’s a slight breeze”, I would say.

“Nice”.   

Simply a momentous moment in history I assure you.

As you are out and about tomorrow, blowing things up while trying not to spill your drink I think it’s important to remember that our little country had a very rough and hard birth. There was immense sacrifice to get to this point of harsh political contention between the two parties. It’s just amazing that we do have this system of government at all. All based on a radical idea, worked on in a really hot day in Philadelphia, that all men are free.

Have a very Happy Fourth of July dear readers!