We will celebrate the Declaration of Independence tomorrow in our accustomed style, quoting Abraham Lincoln and Calvin Coolidge. Implicit in the tributes of Lincoln and Coolidge to the Declaration is an expression of gratitude — for our liberty — to the men who pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to win it.
To express our gratitude properly, we need to bring them to mind, recall their names, understand their cause, and learn more about them. We must seek to understand the risks they took as well as the sacrifices they made to deliver us to this day. We are in need of knowledge in order to give true thanks.
Justice Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze express it this way in their Free Press essay “The heroes of 1776”:
The people waiting to be met in the pages of the Declaration’s history—the signers, soldiers, farmers, fifers, spies, and messengers—still have much to offer us. People like Caesar Rodney who, suffering from cancer, rode 80 miles through the night in a thunderstorm to break a tie vote in the debate over independence. Or Mary K. Goddard, who first printed the Declaration with the names of the signers and boldly added her own, even though the act identified her as a traitor in British eyes. Or Thomas Nelson Jr., commander of Virginia’s militia at the battle of Yorktown who, legend has it, ordered his troops to open fire on his home after learning the British were using it as their headquarters. After the war, and having spent much of his wealth on the patriot cause, Nelson was left with little to his name and was buried in an unmarked grave. Before he passed, some say he was asked if he felt bitter about his fate. He replied, “I would do it all over again.”
George Washington was not on hand to sign the Declaration, but he will stand in for my expression of gratitude to the founders today. It would all have come to naught were it not for the leadership of Washington.
Washington was otherwise engaged commanding the Continental Army in New York. Washington led the army to its unlikely victory in the Revolutionary War and then resigned as head of the army. When told by the American artist Benjamin West that Washington was going to resign, King George III said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world,” as indeed he was.
And yet he continued to serve at the request of his fellow citizens. He was persuaded to attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia during the fateful summer of 1787 and was unanimously elected its president.
In a statement involving three future presidents, as James Thomas Flexner observes, Madison wrote Jefferson about Washington: “To forsake the honorable retreat to which he had retired & risk the reputation he had so deservedly acquired manifested a zeal for the public interest that could, after so many and illustrious services, scarcely have been expected of him.”
Flexner aptly dubbed Washington The Indispensable Man in his one-volume rendition of Washington’s life (rewritten from Flexner’s four-volume biography of Washington published by Little, Brown).
Eight of the signers of the Declaration, by the way, were among the 55 men who attended the Constitutional Convention. As Wilfred McClay puts it in Land Of Hope: “The high intellectual and moral caliber of the fifty-five men who represented the various states at the Constitutional Convention is staggering, particularly given how young they were, with an average age of forty-two.”
Presiding over the convention during that fateful summer, Washington said virtually nothing. In his excellent book on Washington, Richard Brookhiser notes: “The esteem in which Washington was held affected his fellow delegates first of all…Washington did not wield the power he possessed by speaking. Apart from his lecture on secrecy, Washington did not address the Convention between the first day and the last.”
He went on to serve as our first president for two terms in office, proving the indisensable man yet again. Finally retiring to Mount Vernon, he proved himself the greatest man in the world yet again.
We live in a heyday of engrossing popular biographies of the founders. We — the American reading public — have a voracious appetite for them. I am not sure what set off the wave of first-rate popular biographies. Did the Broadway musical 1776 help set it off? I saw it in its original run in the summer of 1969. It certainly piqued my interest. Whatever set the wave off, let us continue to ride it.
In August 1790, when Rhode Island became the last state to ratify the Constitution, President Washington visited Newport to celebrate the occasion. In anticipation of Washington’s visit to Newport, the members of one of America’s oldest Jewish congregations prepared a letter welcoming Washington for presentation to him at a public event on the morning of August 18.
The letter was authorized by the congregation’s board and signed by its president, Moses Seixas. It is Washington’s magnificent letter responding to Seixas that that has become famous as one of the classic statements of religious toleration in America.
The congregation’s letter to Washington is not so well known, although the most prominent line in Washington’s letter echoes that letter. By far the most striking feature of the congregation’s letter is its expression of gratitude to Washington himself and to America for the freedom and equal rights the congregants had attained as American citizens. I seek to emulate the congregation’s expression of gratitude today.
This is the text of the congregation’s letter:
Permit the children of the stock of Abraham to approach you with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits ~~ and to join with our fellow citizens in welcoming you to NewPort.
With pleasure we reflect on those days ~~ those days of difficulty, and danger, when the God of Israel, who delivered David from the peril of the sword, ~~ shielded Your head in the day of battle: ~~ and we rejoice to think, that the same Spirit, who rested in the Bosom of the greatly beloved Daniel enabling him to preside over the Provinces of the Babylonish Empire, rests and ever will rest, upon you, enabling you to discharge the arduous duties of Chief Magistrate in these States.
Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People ~~ a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance ~~ but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: ~~ deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine: ~~ This so ample and extensive Federal Union whose basis is Philanthropy, Mutual confidence and Public Virtue, we cannot but acknowledge to be the work of the Great God, who ruleth in the Armies of Heaven, and among the Inhabitants of the Earth, doing whatever seemeth him good.
For all these Blessings of civil and religious liberty which we enjoy under an equal benign administration, we desire to send up our thanks to the Ancient of Days, the great preserver of Men ~~ beseeching him, that the Angel who conducted our forefathers through the wilderness into the promised Land, may graciously conduct you through all the difficulties and dangers of this mortal life: ~~ And, when, like Joshua full of days and full of honour, you are gathered to your Fathers, may you be admitted into the Heavenly Paradise to partake of the water of life, and the tree of immortality.
Done and Signed by order of the Hebrew Congregation in NewPort, Rhode Island August 17th 1790.
Moses Seixas, Warden
As I note annually on Washington’s birthday, today we contend with the contemporary equivalent of “the Babylonish empire.” Tomorrow let us send up our thanks to the Ancient of Days for the men who set off our great experiment in ordered liberty with the Declaration of Independence.
