Tag: John Adams

Two Days & 50 Years

American Independence, July 4, July 2, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson

Tomorrow is Independence Day in these United States.

But so was yesterday.

It was in the papers:

This day the Continental Congress declared the United Colonies Free and Independent States.
Pennsylvania Evening Post, July 2, 1776.

For it was two days before revising and accepting Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence that Congress officially declared its independence from King George III.

This Common Sense site has explained this quirk of history before. The Lee Resolution of July 2 declared that

the colonies should be “free and independent States”
they were “absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown” and that the connections should be “totally dissolved”
New “foreign Alliances” should be formed
And a “plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.”

Congress also commanded that a declaration be drawn up, and it was done quickly, accepted two days later.

The confederation document, on the other hand, took another year to work up, and four years beyond that to adopt.

John Adams, for all his faults as the Second President under the later U.S. Constitution, was a true friend of liberty and regarded the day as historic. “The second day of July, 1776,” he prophesied, writing to his wife on July 3, 1776,

will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

He was off by two days. It was the Fourth that would be celebrated.

Fifty years later he was off by much less: he died on July 4, 1826, uttering “Thomas — Jefferson — still surv —”

Jefferson had died a few hours earlier.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Lockdown and Shut Up

John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, free speech, 1st Amendment, First Amendment,

“I think it’s a shame,” HBO comedian Bill Maher told Dr. David Katz, “that people like you who sound reasonable — maybe it’s not the exact one true opinion you hear somewhere else — has to go on Fox News to say it.”

For years, I have told liberal friends that they miss important stories by not paying attention to Fox, because most other TV media eschew non-progressive perspectives they oppose (but perhaps fear we might support).

Last month, Katz wrote a New York Times op-ed, entitled, “Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease?” Rather than the current lockdown strategy, the physician advocates “a middle path” where “high-risk people are protected from exposure” and “low-risk people go out in the world.”

Once upon a time, social media promised regular folks a chance to communicate and even organize without government interference or media filters.

Not so much these days.

Last week, I decried Facebook removing posts informing people about planned anti-lockdown protests, reportedly “on the instruction of governments” in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska because those protests might violate “stay-at-home orders.”

This week, YouTube removed a video that you and I must not see, with California Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi explaining why they think the lockdowns are bad policy.*

“Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations,” clarified YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, “would be a violation of our policy” — and will be blocked.

Our society’s first principle is freedom of expression.

The idea? Unfettered information will best lead us to the truth.

Increasingly, our social media and news outfits no longer trust us with information not heavily controlled by them.

Which means we cannot trust them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The doctors also confirm, as I suggested might happen, that medical personnel are being pressured to “add COVID” to death reports.

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Opposites for Independence

Could any two men be more different than John Adams and Thomas Jefferson? And yet, I doubt if the United States would exist were it not for both. Somehow, they worked together when it counted. And worked against each other, when it seemed necessary.

Yet they respected each other (in their different ways), and before the end, after a long estrangement, became close friends. Thomas Jefferson

The story is well known: on his deathbed on July 4, 1826, Adams whispered, “Thomas Jefferson survives!” He was wrong. Jefferson had died earlier that day, on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Adams was also wrong about Independence Day. On July 2, 1776, after the Lee Resolution for independence passed the Continental Congress, he wrote that “the second day of July” would become the day of “a great anniversary festival.” But “by 1777,” Steve Tally noted in Bland Ambition, his jovial history of the vice presidency, “people were already celebrating the Fourth of July.”

John Adams But give him his due: it was Adams who insisted that Jefferson write the Declaration, and it was indeed its words — especially that of its “mission statement” preamble — that resonate almost universally to this day. And gave birth to the annual festivities.

Adams, Tally tells us, was “short, round, peevish, a loudmouth, and frequently a bore.” Jefferson, on the other hand, was tall, handsome, polite, and much more popular. And a much better writer. Which is why he was given his great job, to produce the Declaration.

Great writer or no, it’s not as if the tall redhead’s initial draft was acceptable as it flowed from the pen. Adams, Franklin, and the whole congress got in on the editing job. “Jefferson liked to recall that his document survived further [extensive] editing,” Tally explains, “because of the meeting hall’s proximity to a livery stable.” Still, it’s obvious that Jefferson wasn’t the only genius in the room, and that without Adams’s tireless work, independence might not have gotten off the ground. Declaration of Independence

The later history of both men, in service to the country they helped found, is riddled with ambiguities and even horrible moral and political lapses. Adams was the kind of politician who not only opposed term limits, but opposed terms: he thought men raised to office should be kept there forever. Jefferson leaned not merely the other direction, but flirted with the notion of a revolution every generation.

I adhere to the anti-federalist slogan of their day, “that where annual elections end, tyranny begins.”

Between the two extremes of these two great men, somehow, the republic survived. And thrived. Their correspondence is a mine of great wisdom, their biographies well worth reading.

Most of all, their legacy — of July 2 and July 4, 1776, and the universal rights of man — remains worth fighting for.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.