From The Files: 2 July 1776 ..the 5th of 70 Items (Final one for today)

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[1876] THE NATIONAL CENTENNIAL COMMEMORATION IN PHILADELPHIA:

PROCEEDINGS ON THE ONE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE INTRODUCTION AND ADOPTION OF THE "RESOLUTIONS RESPECTING INDEPENDENCY." Held in Philadelphia on July 1, 1876, at the Hall of Independence (Philadelphia: Printed for the Committee, 1876. 89 pp):

Three Contributors, among others:

Frank M. Etting, Philadelphia historian

"It was here in Independence Hall just one hundred years ago today, July 1st, that the Founders of the Republic met together predetermined to call into being a new power upon the earth. At the instance of one of their number the final vote was put off until the morrow. Thus it was on the SECOND of July, 1776, that the final act was done---The United States became a Nation." (p.36)

John William Wallace, President of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania:

"Let me say a word as to the history of the Second day of July 1776, and why we celebrate that day. On that day--after our fathers had consulted, and pondered much, that resolution was passed; and, so far as anything but actual and successful war could complete it, revolution was accomplished, and the British Provinces of America were free and independent States." (p. 45)

"This resolution of the 2nd, as I have said, was really the act which made us independent of Great Britain. But Congress in those days sat with closed doors. Its sessions were secret. But few outside knew that independence had been resolved on, and therefore the Declaration, both of the act of independence, and of the causes which impelled us to it--that paper required by "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind"--was made in the most solemn form, and published to the world." (p.46)

William V. McKean, Historian

"That which is the immediate subject of the commemoration today is the adoption by Congress of Richard Henry Lee’s Virginia Resolution, whereby all political connection between the United Colonies and the State of Great Britain was ‘then’ totally dissolved, and the colonies were ‘then’ declared to be Free and Independent States." (p. 49)

"This brings us to the second day of July, 1776, the real date of the birth of the United States as an independent nation. From the hour when that vote was taken, and that record made, the United States of America "assumed among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them." It is the Centennial anniversary of that great event-the most momentous event in the political history of mankind-that you are commemorating by your presence here to-day." (p. 54)

"The great importance--the decisive and controlling factor of the Resolution of Independence, adopted on the Second day of July, 1776, have been obscured to the popular vision by the fame and splendor of Jefferson’s immortal Declaration of the reasons for the adoption of that Resolution. Yet Jefferson himself never allowed the one to overshadow in his estimation the importance of the other. The Declaration, in his mind, was intended to be "an appeal to the tribunal of the world" as a justification of what had already been done." (p. 57)

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