July 4, 1776 and 2022: The Declaration Still Empowers Good to Triumph

Most Americans celebrating the July 4th holiday today don’t fully realize that it was the power of ideas in the Declaration of Independence that was the critical enabling factor for the Americans to win the War of Independence.

Compared to the British professional military, the American colonial army was simply no match — being undermanned, underfunded, underequipped, inexperienced, and undertrained. At the outset of the war, the British Royal Navy had 270 warships deployed in American waters, while the Continental Navy had seven ships.

On July 4, 1776, in what is now Manhattan, New York, Gen. George Washington was preparing for battle. He had no idea that a Declaration of Independence was being released in Philadelphia that day as he pondered the sobering reality of a continuous stream of British ships coming through the Narrows and anchoring off Staten Island in New York Harbor.

A month before, Washington had written a letter to his brother, saying: “We expect a very bloody summer of it in New York … If our cause is just, as I do most religiously believe it to be, the same Providence which in many instances appeared for us, will still go on to afford its aid.”

On July 4th in Philadelphia, it was also a somber day when those 56 members of the Continental Congress committed themselves to signing the Declaration of Independence. Each of them knew that becoming a signatory put a death warrant on their heads for being a traitor to Great Britain.

Thus, the first Declaration of Independence that was signed on July 4, did not have signatures identifying the committed delegates. Rather, there were two signatures on that first document: John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress and Charles Thomson, secretary of the Continental Congress.

It took more than two weeks for the Declaration to be “engrossed” — that is written on parchment in a clear hand. Many of the 56 delegates to the Continental Congress who had agreed to sign the document did so on August 2, but there were new delegates who replaced some six of the original delegates, and there were an additional seven delegates who could not sign until many weeks later. Recognizing the long odds against the small and underequipped American Continental Army defeating the British army and navy — the most formidable military force in the world — the Continental Congress decided to hold the 56-signatory Declaration for a release at a later time.

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