Dividing Lines

 It’s been said that there remains more that unites us than divides us—but that’s not how it feels most days. 

However, such times are not all that unusual for this diverse nation. Indeed, if today’s battle lines do seem harsher and more extreme, my sense is that it’s only because they are magnified by media and social media, transported to us every minute of the day and night by devices we dare not relinquish any longer than to recharge the battery.

Consider the nation’s declaration of independence which we will commemorate on Monday. Students of history—not to mention aficionados of the musical 1776 or readers of David McCullough’s John Adams or viewers of its HBO miniseries adaptation—know that the decision to declare independence was no easy matter. Indeed, the political bartering and frustrations involved in getting to a “unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America” would have been all-too familiar to the legislators of today. Even then, it was declared to be “unanimous” only because one of the 13 colonies voting was persuaded to abstain from the vote rather than oppose it. 

While we celebrate the Fourth of July as Independence Day, that is neither the day on which the Continental Congress passed the resolution (July 2), nor the day on which the declaration was signed by the members of that Congress (only President of Congress John Hancock and Charles Thomson, Secretary, signed it on the 4th (the former in a hand “large enough for King George to read without his spectacles”). Most delegates didn't sign it until August 2. One didn't sign until 1781. Three delegates never signed.

The signers—who stood to lose everything they possessed, including their lives—surely did so with trepidation. Indeed, Hancock reportedly said at the signing (on August 2) that they must all stick together—to which Benjamin Franklin reportedly responded, “Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” 

Of course, that declaration was neither the beginning nor the end. Hostilities with England had already been underway for more than a year, the terrible winter at Valley Forge was more than a year in the future, General Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown was still more than five years off, and an official end to the hostilities would not come until 1783. 

Invoking the Vision

Less than 100 years later, even as the nation approached another Independence Day celebration, President Abraham Lincoln would find himself in the middle of an enormously unpopular war fought to keep the nation together, while two American armies converged at Gettysburg for what would be the bloodiest battle in the nation’s history. Even so, President Lincoln later that year invoked the vision of the nation’s founders to launch his Gettysburg Address with the words; “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” This at a time when the outcome of that conflict—and his own reelection prospects a year later—were anything but certain. 

Without question we live in times of great social distress, where it seems that everything, literally everything, has been polarized and politicized into divergent and irreconcilable camps. Those looking for common ground or points of potential agreement seem to be few and far between, while those seeking compromise are typically condemned for trying. Indeed, the choices our nation faces today—on terrorism, the fighting in Ukraine, health care, energy costs, inflation, the economy, and yes, even retirement savings[i]—seem relatively modest in scope when considered next to the daunting prospects our forefathers faced in 1776. What they could not have had at that time—but what their vision has surely bequeathed to us—is a confidence in what we now consider American ideals and the resilience of the American spirit.

Their sacrifices were made a long time ago—and the liberties they fought to win, and later to preserve, are so interwoven into the fabric of our day-to-day expectations that it is easy to forget just how precious and rare they remain in this world. 

With all its faults, all its frailties, what we have here remains a special gift. It’s a national treasure we should appreciate every day—even if we only celebrate it once a year. 

- Nevin E. Adams, JD

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[i] Those of us who have committed ourselves to build, expand and nurture a more secure retirement for American workers have to find solace in the overwhelmingly bipartisan legislative efforts—both in recent months, and before—in support of that goal.