To mark the Fourth of July, then, is to mark the founders’ decision to unite so that a common life could be possible for us. From the point of view of the political descendants of the founders, the founding was more a marriage than a divorce. We are not children of divorce but the heirs of a commitment to chart a future together.
An anniversary, in this respect, is a better analogy than a birthday. It marvels not only at our country’s beginning but at the span of time over which it has persisted—through affection, commitment, effort, and no small measure of luck. And a wedding anniversary is not merely retrospective. It suggests that with continuing devotion, the union can deepen and strengthen.
It also points to a commitment that remains binding. The Declaration did not merely do something once upon a time. It continues to do its work because it continues to call us to live according to the dedication it announced.
Here too, Lincoln can help. After the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision in 1857 denied citizenship to black Americans, Lincoln argued that the justices had rejected the Declaration’s premise. If the document’s purpose had merely been separation, he said, then “that object having been effected some eighty years ago, the Declaration is of no practical use now.” But it was, and is, of continuing use, because it asserted a substantive fidelity that must continue to bind (and therefore liberate) Americans in every generation.
So America’s 250th is not just a birthday; it is also an anniversary. But even this still doesn’t quite capture what this occasion needs to be for us.
We can see what’s still missing by focusing on another simple question: For whom is this occasion? Your birthday points to your own beginning. Your parents’ wedding anniversary commemorates something other people did from which you have benefited. Which applies to a celebration of the founding? Is it about “us” or “them”?
The nation’s founding is our beginning in the sense that this is our nation, and it has existed continuously since the founding era. But you and I did not found it. We inherited it.
Maybe you were born here. Maybe, like me, you came here from somewhere else and in time embraced American citizenship. Either way, America was here. We didn’t create it. And most of us are not descended from the founders in any biological sense. Who are the founders to us? In what sense can we celebrate what they did as ours?