Saturday, July 4, 2026 – Orlando, Florida
“When in the Course of human events…” With those words, the Continental Congress introduced a document that would reshape the world — not by creating a nation overnight, but by declaring that the old bonds between Britain and its colonies had finally snapped.
Setting the Stage
Hi, everyone.
Today is July 4, 2026, and here in the United States we’re marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It’s a milestone that invites celebration, reflection, and — if we’re honest — a reckoning with the stories we tell about how this country began.
What the Declaration Actually Did
The Declaration was adopted in what we now call Independence Hall in Philadelphia, about 15 months after the American Revolution began at Lexington and Concord. Thomas Jefferson drafted it; Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and others helped revise it. But the Declaration didn’t start the Revolution. It simply made official what many Patriots had already come to believe: the relationship between the colonies and the British Empire had broken beyond repair.
By mid‑1776, the hope that King George III might intervene and restore the old hands‑off imperial approach was fading fast. The Patriots’ goal had shifted from protest to something far more radical — a permanent break from imperial rule and the creation of a new republic.
Independence Wasn’t Inevitable
That may sound obvious today, but independence was not a popular or inevitable goal at first. The familiar schoolbook version — echoed by some conservative politicians and commentators — makes it seem as though Americans were clamoring for independence from the moment the first musket fired at Lexington.
They weren’t.
From April 1775 into early 1776, many rebelling colonists still believed George III might come to their aid in the dispute with Parliament. Even after the bloody Battle of Bunker Hill, the king was widely seen as a moderate constitutional monarch. It wasn’t until Thomas Paine published Common Sense that many Patriots began to see the king himself as part of the problem. As strange as it seems now, even George Washington did not initially view independence as the solution.
Beyond the Powdered Wig Myth
The United States was not born in a serene, wood‑paneled chamber filled with refined men in powdered wigs, solemnly dipping quill pens into ink. Yes, the Revolution drew on powerful ideas about rights and self‑government. But it was also a violent civil war — one that split families, communities, and friendships from Massachusetts to Virginia.
The Revolution was not just a principled stand against “taxation without representation” or the quartering of British troops. It was also driven by something more practical, and more unsettling: the colonists’ determination to push westward across the Appalachian Mountains, even though doing so meant displacing Native peoples who had lived on those lands for countless generations.
The Harder Truth About Expansion
Behind Jefferson’s soaring words about human rights and self‑determination lay a hard-edged ambition for continental empire. The legislature that first met in late 1774 called itself the Continental Congress. Washington’s forces became the Continental Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. The very language of the Revolution hinted at a future that stretched far beyond the Atlantic seaboard.
And for many leading Founders, western expansion wasn’t abstract. Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hancock, and Patrick Henry all had financial interests tied to western lands or land speculation. So when Britain issued the Proclamation of 1763, drawing a line along the Appalachians and restricting settlement to the west, it didn’t just frustrate ordinary settlers — it threatened the ambitions and investments of the very men who would later lead the rebellion.
Manifest Destiny, anyone?
America at 250
As we mark the Semiquincentennial, I keep thinking about the Bicentennial — not because 1976 was perfect, but because it felt like a moment when Americans still believed they shared something. Even in the middle of inflation, recession, Cold War anxieties, racial tension, and the long shadow of Watergate, people found ways to celebrate together. The Spirit of ’76 wasn’t triumphalist; it was hopeful. It was a country trying to stitch itself back together after a bruising decade.
This year doesn’t feel like that. America at 250 feels fragmented, suspicious, exhausted. The loudest voices insist that patriotism means reciting myths, ignoring complexity, and treating the Founders as marble statues rather than flesh‑and‑blood men who argued, compromised, stumbled, and sometimes acted out of self‑interest. They were not demigods. They were not monsters. They were human beings navigating a world of empire, ambition, fear, and possibility — and they built something that was both visionary and deeply flawed.
Maybe that’s why the Semiquincentennial feels muted: because honest patriotism requires maturity, and maturity is in short supply. It requires acknowledging that the Revolution was a civil war, that independence was not inevitable, that expansion came at a terrible cost to Native nations, and that liberty coexisted with slavery. It requires admitting that the American story has always been a struggle between our ideals and our appetites.
The Story Isn’t Finished
But it also requires believing that the story isn’t finished.
If the Bicentennial was a moment of shared optimism, maybe the Semiquincentennial can be a moment of shared honesty — a chance to look at the country not as we wish it were, but as it is, and decide whether we still have the courage to make it better. We don’t need the powdered‑wig mythology. We don’t need the culture‑war theatrics. We need something simpler, and harder: the willingness to imagine a future worth celebrating.
The Founders didn’t give us a perfect nation. They gave us a beginning. What we do with the next 250 years is up to us.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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