This Fourth of July, Americans rightly celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—the document drafted in Philadelphia, then debated, amended, and approved in the Pennsylvania State House, the building posterity would know as Independence Hall.
We remember Jefferson’s timeless words, which still echo today. We remember the delegates pledging to one another their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. We remember the parchment that proclaimed a new nation and announced to the world the principles upon which it would stand.
But while one declaration was taking shape in Philadelphia, another was issued less than a hundred miles away in New York.
It came not from Congress, but from the commander in chief of the Continental Army. It was not written to justify independence before the nations of the world, but to prepare ordinary men to fight—and perhaps die—for a country that had scarcely begun to exist and for the principle upon which the American experiment would rest: liberty.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member