But that would soon change.Īfter the War of 1812, the Federalist party began to come apart and the new parties of the 1820s and 1830s all considered themselves inheritors of Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans. But the other party, the Federalists, thought the Declaration was too French and too anti-British, which went against their current policies.īy 1817, John Adams complained in a letter that America seemed uninterested in its past.
One party, the Democratic-Republicans, admired Jefferson and the Declaration. By the 1790s, a time of bitter partisan conflicts, the Declaration had become controversial. It was too new and too much else was happening in the young nation. How did the Fourth of July become a national holiday?įor the first 15 or 20 years after the Declaration was written, people didn’t celebrate it much on any date. If we’d followed this same approach for the Declaration of Independence we’d being celebrating Independence Day on August 2nd of each year, the day the Declaration of Independence was signed! In contrast, we celebrate Constitution Day on September 17th of each year, the anniversary of the date the Constitution was signed, not the anniversary of the date it was approved. So when people thought of the Declaration of Independence, Jwas the date they remembered. July 4, 1776, became the date that was included on the Declaration of Independence, and the fancy handwritten copy that was signed in August (the copy now displayed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.) It’s also the date that was printed on the Dunlap Broadsides, the original printed copies of the Declaration that were circulated throughout the new nation. They’d been working on it for a couple of days after the draft was submitted on July 2nd and finally agreed on all of the edits and changes. The Continental Congress approved the final wording of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Or the date it was signed (that was August 2, 1776). Or the date on which the Declaration was delivered to Great Britain (that didn’t happen until November 1776). It wasn’t the day we started the American Revolution either (that had happened back in April 1775).Īnd it wasn’t the day Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence (that was in June 1776). We think of July 4, 1776, as a day that represents the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the United States of America as an independent nation.īut Jwasn’t the day that the Continental Congress decided to declare independence (they did that on July 2, 1776). We celebrate American Independence Day on the Fourth of July every year.
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