Self Evident

John Trumbull's Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence is one of the documents that remains permanently on the (appropriately) right side of my blog. So I won't re quote it.

I will however re quote the final sentence because it gives me chills:

And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

What great men signed the Declaration. They knew they were risking their lives, and many lost all in the defense of freedom. As Benjamin Franklin famously said upon signing this great document:

We must hang together, gentlemen...else, we shall most assuredly hang separately

Ronald Reagan detailed the cost to several of the signers of the declaration in his 1981 Independence Day address [h/t conservapedia]

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.

Praise be to God for such men of courage and altruism. Hopefully I'll spare them more than one thought as I attend parades and barbeques tomorrow.

Happy Independence Day.