5 Must-Read Independence Day Speeches Vol. 1

For generations, great American speechmakers have aimed to articulate the illustrious principles contained within our Declaration of Independence. Today, as we commemorate 248 years of American independence, let us revisit five of the best, most poignant 4th of July orations.

1. On American Independence - Samuel Adams

When the Father of the American Revolution delivers a speech entitled “On American Independence,” the nation is obliged to listen. Emotional, feverish, and, at times, analogous to Frederick Douglass’s belligerent Civil War rhetoric, this speech encapsulates the popular American sentiment concerning the British at the time.

On August 1, 1776, the statesman Samuel Adams confessed that he once venerated the English. But recent events had shattered his respect. Now, he was filled with rage. “[W]hen I behold my country,” he said, “once the seat of industry, peace, and plenty, changed by Englishmen to a theater of blood and misery, Heaven forgive me if I can not root out those passions which it has implanted in my bosom, and detest submission to a people who have either ceased to be human, or have not virtue enough to feel their own wretchedness and servitude!”

An archetypal piece of wartime propaganda, Adams characterized the enemy in the worst possible terms, justifying the document which he and his colleague would sign the next day (the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, but did not sign it until August 2). The severity of the motherland’s action against them, he argued, left them with “no other alternative than independence, or the most ignominious and galling servitude.”

In the face of these stakes, Adams did not take kindly to those who ignored the “mangled corpses of our countrymen” and called naively for reconciliation. With a ruthless style akin to Douglass’s contempt for Northerners who refused to acknowledge his abolitionist aims during the Civil War, he wrote, “If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude than the animating contest of freedom—go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!”

Seventeen seventy-six, Samuel Adams knew, was the year of patriots, not conformists; heroes, not cowards. His speech served as an ultimatum to the colonists: join the cause for independence and wage righteous war against England’s tyranny, or kowtow to oppression and be forever excluded from the great American story.

2. Abraham Lincoln’s Electric Cord Speech

Controversial, witty, inspiring, and triumphant, Lincoln’s Electric Cord Speech is, first and foremost, a political debate. As such, it speaks to many contemporary issues that are no longer relevant—The Lecompton Constitution, Judge Trumbull, the cranberry laws of Indiana, etc. Moreover, Lincoln’s sometimes controversial comments on race have historically provided ammunition for his critics. But beyond these criticisms, his 1985 speech in Chicago showcases Lincoln, the debater and Founding Era apologist, at his finest.

I cannot help but quote from the address at length:

“We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years,” Lincoln said near the conclusion of the speech, and we “find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us. We hold this annual celebration to remind ourselves of all the good done in this process of time of how it was done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it; and we go from these meetings in better humor with ourselves—we feel more attached the one to the other and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live for these celebrations.”

But that was only a part of what made America unique. “There is something else connected with it,” he continued. “We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.”

“That,” the future Great Emancipator declared, “is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

In other words, the Founders did not fight only for their offspring; they fought for all men. Amazingly, Lincoln believed, men who did not share in our history could, nevertheless, lay “claim” to being “blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration.”

According to Lincoln, that was what made America beautiful. Additionally, it laid the groundwork for his moral opposition to slavery. How long, he wanted to know, would we allow for exceptions to the founding tenet that all men are equal? “If one man says it does not mean a negro,” he pressed, “why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!”

“Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position—discarding our standard that we have left us,” he urged. “Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”

Just as Samuel Adams endeavored to prevent the enslavement of white Americans through the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln championed the abolition of chattel slavery using the very same principles and document. As we study these speeches and the Declaration that inspired them, may we be reminded of just how blessed we are to live in a nation founded not upon race, ethnicity, or lineage but creed.

Stay tuned for part two of this series later today. To join us in our grassroots movement to revive that creed, sign the Convention of States petition below.