John Hancock & George Bancroft on the complementary significances of July 2nd & 4th 1776

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The Declaration of Independence, the American nation’s state charter:

The cornerstone of the nation’s July 2nd Independence; The foundation stone of July 4th union as the ground of the nation’s future constitutions.

 

John Hancock to the New Jersey Convention on the essential meaning of the Declaration of Independence. (Letters of Delegates to Congress: 1776)

Philadelphia. July 5th. 1776 Gentlemen:

I do myself the Honor to enclose, in Obedience to the Commands of Congress, a Copy of the Declaration of Independence, which you will please to have proclaimed in your Colony in such Way & Manner as you shall Judge best. The important Consequences resulting to the American States from this Declaration of Independence, considered as the Ground & Foundation of a future Government, will naturally suggest the Propriety of proclaiming it in such a Mode, as that the People may be universally informed of it. I have the Honor to be, Gentlemen, your most obedient. and very humble Servant, John Hancock, President

 

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION by George Bancroft: (from: volume II, pp. 474-75; Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1866)

A colonial nation creates 13 sovereign states, and so the Civil War turned Revolutionary War:

“The republic was to America a godsend; it came, though unsought, because society contained the elements of no other organization. Here, and, in that century, here only, was a people, which, by its education and large and long experience, was prepared to act as the depositary and carrier of all political power. America developed her choice from within herself; and therefore it is, that, conscious of following an inner law, she never made herself a propagandist of her system, where the conditions of success were wanting”. The war was no longer a civil war; Britain was become to the United States a foreign country.”

 

The Declaration as ground for constitutional government:

“Finally, the declaration was not only the announcement of the political birth of a people, but the establishment of a national government; a most imperfect one, it is true, but still a government, in conformity with the limited constituent powers which each colony had conferred upon its delegates in congress.

The complementary difference between July 2nd and July 4th:

“The Declaration was not signed by the members of congress on the day on which it was agreed to, but it was duly authenticated by the president and secretary, and published to the world. The nation when it made the choice of a day for its great anniversary, selected not the day of the resolution of independence, when it closed the past, but that of the declaration of the principles on which it opened its new career.”

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