Treason - and a New Birth of Freedom

It was treason for those founding fathers to gather together in Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Putting pen to paper condemned each of them to the gallows or the headsman's tender mercies. It was the brink that they couldn't step back from, and yet they did it.

A woman asked Dr. Benjamin Franklin as he left the hall what kind of government they created. He responded, "A Republic, if you can keep it." 

Sometimes I feel as if the Constitution hangs by a thread, and the Republic, under God has been diluted through the lusts of the 'progressive'. The 'new morality' is simply the old immorality. There's really no other way to couch it. We will survive so long as we are a moral nation. Yet the most dangerous place to be a black person is in the womb...in New York City. You can't separate the sanctity of life from the sanctity of freedom.

The men who signed the Declaration 235 years ago. Understood this. It's a pity that so many of us do not.

What manner of men were they? Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists, 11 were merchants and tradesmen, and nine were farmers. They were soft-spoken men of means and education; they were not an unwashed rabble. They had achieved security but valued freedom more. Their stories have not been told nearly enough.

John Hart was driven from the side of his desperately ill wife. For more than a year he lived in the forest and in caves before he returned to find his wife dead, his children vanished, his property destroyed. He died of exhaustion and a broken heart.

Carter Braxton of Virginia lost all his ships, sold his home to pay his debts, and died in rags. And so it was with Ellery, Clymer, Hall, Walton, Gwinnett, Rutledge, Morris, Livingston and Middleton. Nelson personally urged Washington to fire on his home and destroy it when it became the headquarters for General Cornwallis. Nelson died bankrupt.

But they sired a nation that grew from sea to shining sea. Five million farms, quiet villages, cities that never sleep, 3 million square miles of forest, field, mountain and desert, 227 million people with a pedigree that includes the bloodlines of all the world. In recent years, however, I’ve come to think of that day as more than just the birthday of a nation.

It also commemorates the only true philosophical revolution in all history.

Oh, there have been revolutions before and since ours. But those revolutions simply exchanged one set of rules for another. Ours was a revolution that changed the very concept of government.

Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people.

            - President Ronald Reagan

I wish you all the best of Independence Days. And may Freedom reign in the Spirt of '76!