Independence Day

Since this is indeed Fourth of July I would like to say a few words about it. We all like to wave our flags and shoot our fireworks when we’re drinking our beer but just to make it clear when we say “Birth of the nation” we’re not talking about Washington and Rochambeau kicking Cornwallis’s ass in Yorktown. We’re talking about the men sitting in an oven of a meeting hall and somehow through debate and painful compromise squeezing out the document that made it politically official.

So with that in mind I would like to give a very special thanks to Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton, Samuel Adams, John Adams, John Hancock, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry, Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery, Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott, William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris, Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark, Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross, George Read, Caesar Rodney, Thomas McKean, Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton, William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn, Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton, Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall and George Walton