It is interesting that many folks regard July 4, 1776 as "the birthday
of the United States." When the Declaration of Independence was signed,
little changed for the 13 colonies. They had been fighting the British
for about a year and the war was to last until 1783 when the Treaty of
Paris was signed by the Kingdom of Great Britain and the United States
of America, which ended hostilities and recognized the sovereignty of
the US. Therefore one could say that September 3, 1783 is the “birthday
of the US,” however it was not until the following year that the Treaty
was ratified by the US and Great Britain. The Congress of the
Confederation ratified it in January of 1784 and Great Britain did the
same in April, with the ratified documents being exchanged on May 12,
1784. Then, one may ask, the “birthday of the US” is sometime in 1784? I
would answer no.
It would be another three years, on September
17, 1787, until the Constitution was adopted by the Constitutional
Convention and George Washington elected the first President of the
United States. In the years between 1781 (when the Articles of
Confederation were adopted) and 1787 the United States was a
confederation of largely independent states who handled their own
foreign and military policies, produced their own currencies, etc. The
Articles of Confederation made state’s rights the priority and
established a weak central government which turned out to be
unsustainable, a lesson that was to be relearned in the Civil War when
the Confederate States of America were severely hampered by the priority
of state’s rights.[1]
Though the Constitution was adopted in
1787, it was not ratified by all 13 states until May 29, 1790 and in
March of the following year the Bill of Rights was ratified. So in all
honesty, the United States of America, as we know of it today, did not
reach infancy until 1790, a full 14 years after the signing of the
Declaration of Independence in 1776. If we are going to celebrate the
“birthday of the US” we should really be celebrating it on May 29, not
July 4 which celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence
which was the first explicate statement of the intentions of the
rebellion of the colonies.
[1] A good example of this was
the different gauges of rail roads in the southern states. Because each
state had its own gauge goods had to be moved from one trail to another
when being transported across state lines. In times of war this is a
huge hindrance when troops and supplies need to be moved quickly and
efficiently.
Lincoln expressed an opinion on this question at Gettysburg, in 2 ways: a birth date "Fourscore and seven years ago" points to 1776, not 1790, and the phrases quoted are from the Declaration, not from the Constitution. From a national standpoint, it's consistent with the pro-life idea that life begins at conception (Lincoln also used the phrase "conceived in liberty") rather than at birth.
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