July 4, 1776.

Nobody was partying at Independence Hall.

No cookouts, no fireworks, no quaint hometown parades, no patriotic bloviating.

Inside that hot, stuffy room on the first floor of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, with the windows shut for secrecy, none of the 50 delegates were in the mood for a party.

The most vivid first-hand account of the mood in the room comes from Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer himself. Recalling it decades later in an 1811 letter, he described the mood as a “pensive and awful silence” that “pervaded the house when we were called up, one after another, to the table of the President of Congress.”

And aside from the fact that they were about to go to war with the most powerful military on earth, they had one more reason to be pensive.

By agreeing to sign the Declaration of Independence, the delegates were committing an act of high treason against the Crown, effectively signing their own death warrants.

And, in 1776, men convicted of high treason were hanged, drawn and quartered.

Drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, hanged by the neck and, while still alive, cut down, your bowels torn out and burned before you, your head severed, and your body divided into four quarters, to be disposed of at the King’s pleasure.

The ideas of America had been around since Aristotle.

The fundamental political principles of the Idea— natural rights, consent of the governed, popular sovereignty, the right of speech — were not American inventions.

And by the 18th century, those ideas were in wide circulation among European philosophers.

In fact, what the Founders were doing, Jefferson insisted, was not “to find out new principles... never before thought of.”

What they would do with those ideas would change the world.

From the Declaration to the Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence was the first national founding document to assert that a government’s legitimacy comes not from divine right, hereditary bloodlines, or conquest, but from the consent of the governed — and the Constitution then “wove the American creed” into an actual operating government.

It was the first time the people exercised their right to establish a government based on their consent.

“America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed,” set out “with theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.”

(G.K. Chestern, writer, journalist, philosopher)

On the day the Constitutional Convention wrapped up in Philadelphia in September 1787, an 81-year-old Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government the delegates had created.

The questioner was Elizabeth Willing Powel — a prominent Philadelphia salon hostess and wife of the city’s mayor, Samuel Powel — and she put it pointedly:

“Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

Franklin’s reply was equally pointed:

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

(That question, can we keep it, has never been more urgent than it is this July 4th. What follows is where we actually stand right now, how far we've fallen, and what “We The People” can still do about it before it's too late. The rest is for members.👇)

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