Opinion | What We Celebrate When We Celebrate the Fourth of July

Which brought Lincoln to his extraordinary conclusion.

All honor to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

What is it, then, that we celebrate on the Fourth of July?

Not the long litany of overwrought and misdirected complaints that makes up the bulk of the Declaration of Independence. Not the glaring hypocrisy of men who held others in bondage from the moment of their birth while insisting that all men are born equal.

And not the example of those for whom the pursuit of happiness was not a universal ideal. As Lincoln wrote in his letter, “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.”

What we celebrate, instead, is a decision: one that would outgrow the circumstances of the American Revolution, outstrip its significance as a historical event and outshine the men who waged it, and perhaps, eventually, will outlive the nation for which it was conceived. It was the remarkable decision by Jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries to do something more than revolutionary: to implant a philosophical truth in a foundational document, so that nobody then or in the future could call himself a patriot or a traditionalist without also subscribing to a universal principle that goes beyond patriotism and tradition.

That is why every great champion of freedom looks to our Declaration. That was true of Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke of it as a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” And of the brave protesters in Tiananmen Square, who in 1989 built a 33-foot-tall papier-mâché Goddess of Democracy that recalls the Statue of Liberty before they were gunned down by their own regime. And of Volodymyr Zelensky, who in a Wall Street Journal essay on Sunday compared July 4, 1776, to Feb. 24, 2022, when the Ukrainian people also chose to fight for freedom and independence.