Independence Forever
"Independence Forever" is excerpted from What America Is: The Moral Logic of the American Revolution and Other Essays by C. Bradley Thompson.
In 1826, a month before he died, John Adams was asked to deliver a toast to honor a local July 4th celebration as well as the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Unable to attend in person due to failing health, Adams sent just two words to the organizing committee to be read on his behalf: “Independence Forever!”
I can think of no two words that better explain the meaning of America and its highest aspirations. Adams’s two words mean a great deal to me, and now more so than ever.
On July 4th 2021 I celebrated my first ever Independence Day as an American citizen! After living in the United States for almost 40 years as legal alien, I became an American citizen on July 14, 2020. Because of the anti-independence COVID-19 lockdowns, I did not have the opportunity to enjoy the standard swearing-in ceremony with dozens of other immigrants. There was no whoopin’ and hollerin’, and no hugging, flag waving, and photographs. Instead, my swearing-in took place in a small and dingy room in some nondescript government building attended by only one other person, the inducting officer from the U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
On that day I was asked to repeat these words:
I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.
Everything was going along swimmingly as I took the Oath of Allegiance until I was prompted to say these words: “that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” As if out of nowhere, a Tsunami of raw emotions—emotions that had built up over the course of a lifetime—rushed to my throat and my eyes filled with tears. I stopped. The words wouldn’t come, and I couldn’t go on. The officer looked at me with a knowing smile. He’d seen it before. It seemed as though minutes passed before I could gather myself and continue to the end.
And now, two years later, I prepare to celebrate my second July 4th as a proud citizen of the United States of America. It will be a glorious day, but I also recognize—as we all should—that Independence Day in 2021 is now contested. There are some in this country who wish to cancel our past, tear down statues and memorials, and declare July 4th a day of national mourning—a day in which we declare our independence from America’s evil past. The goal of the new Vandals is to cure us of what the Khmer Rouge called “memory sickness.”
I’m not having it. I for one will not permit that to happen—not in my house on my day.
I take seriously—very seriously—the pledge I took one year ago that “I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The oath I took on that day is a promissory note to my fellow citizens that you can take to the bank.
During these troubling times, it is critical that Americans understand, defend and restore the principles on which this country was founded. It may be even more important that we not only recall the ideas of 1776 but also the actions of the Patriots who defended those ideas.
No principle better united the American’s theory and practice than the notion of a “spirit of liberty.” American Patriots spoke repeatedly about the need to ignite the spirit of American liberty. Even British observers of American affairs, such as Edmund Burke, took note of, and attributed causal force to, the colonists’ “spirit of liberty.”
In his 1775 speech on conciliation with the colonies, Burke was moved to explain that the single most important factor in understanding the Americans’ resistance to British legislation was their “Temper and Character.” By studying the colonists’ moral character, Burke thought he had located the deepest source of their behavior over the course of the previous decade. In the American temper and character, he wrote,
a love of Freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole: and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your Colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of Liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth.
The Americans’ “spirit of liberty,” according to Burke, provided the primary, causal explanation for why they reacted to the Stamp, Declaratory, Townshend, Tea, Coercive, and Prohibitory Acts in such a fearless, determined, and principled way.
In response to these unjust laws and an advancing British Deep State, the colonists’ moral principles—their spirit of liberty—motivated them to act in a certain way (i.e., with vigilance, integrity, and courage). Failure to do so meant a concession to tyranny, which could only result in oppression and then enslavement.
American revolutionaries refused to compromise. They had to act because of who and what they were, because of the choices they had already made, because of the values they held, because of the moral law they chose to live by, because of the kind of society they chose to live in, and because George III and the British Parliament threatened to rob them of all that.
The Declaration of Independence represents a precis of the American’s moral and political philosophy, but it is also a call to action—the kind of action that leads in the short term to hardship, penury, and possibly even death, but in the long term to the blessings of a free society.
The Declaration also tells us a good deal about the men who signed it and led the Revolution. They declared to the world their right to self-government and they backed it up with their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. They demonstrated to the world that ideas and actions can and must be unified.
They held their moral principles as absolutes, and they attempted to practice them without compromise or contradiction. They chose to act in ways they thought right and just, regardless of the immediate consequences, precisely because they understood the value of acting in their long-term self-interest.
Despite the many challenges thrown at them by fate, American Patriots met their problems head on and remained loyal to their principles. They attempted to lead an integrated moral life. If integrity is the principle of being principled, then the Revolutionary generation of 1776 embodied that virtue in spades.
Despite the vicissitudes that befell them—the hardships of war, the blood and toil, the starvation, the imprisonment and torture, the destruction of home and property, the loss of family and loved ones, and finally death itself—American Revolutionaries refused to compromise, or to surrender their lives, their fortunes, or their sacred honor.
Independence forever!!!
C. Bradley Thompson teaches political philosophy at Clemson University and is the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He is the author most recently of America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It (2019) and What America Is (2023).
