July 4, 2003 - It is Independence Day, our national holiday. Sometimes we say it is out nation’s birthday, but it is not. Nor is it the anniversary of our Independence from the United Kingdom. The Fourth of July does not celebrate the beginning of our American Revolution. It is hard to designate just when that Revolution began but if we have to select a date it would be that upon which the riot and civil disobedience endemic to Massachusetts ripened into organized armed resistance to Royal authority at Lexington and Concord on the 18th and 19th of April in ’75. On July 4th 1776 recognition of the 13 North American Colonies as free sovereign and independent states was seven years away. The date from which we can accurately marked our independence was September 2, 1783, the day on which that status was given recognition by the Treaty of Paris.

But even September 2 is not our nation’s birthday. The Treaty of Paris did not create our nation but rather it recognized the independence of 13 separate sovereign states allied in a loose confederation binding them to act in concert in their relations with the rest of the world. Nationhood would come later. Was it 4 years later, when the delegates to the Convention called to revise the Articles of Confederation concluded their deliberations and signed the Constitution of the United States on September 17, 1787? Or was it on the date that our first National administration commenced its first term on March 4, 1789 with General Washington’s inauguration as President of the United States?

There is a strong argument that we were not yet a nation when the 16th President of the United States was inaugurated on March 4, 1861 foe men still thought of themselves as Vermonters or South Carolinians first and Americans second. For many of us, too many of us, the day on which we become Americans first and Floridians or Texans second lies for in the future – perhaps in the 22nd Century, but not before. The process of American nation-building has not yet been completed.

So what is it that we celebrate on the Fourth of July? Not the birth of a nation but the realization of an idea – the conception of a sovereignty that had no sovereign but the people. The idea that no one man was born greater or more entitled to privilege than another; the idea that each of us is entitled to share in the determination of our common future. We celebrate that time that a minority of the population of the British North American pledged their live, their fortunes and their sacred honor to the proposition that his most common subject was possessed of rights greater than the prerogatives of the British King.

On the Fourth of July we mark not the reaching of a destination but the commencement of a journey. It is a journey that has continued through two centuries and one score and seven years. It is a journey that continues today and beckons to succeeding generations. It is a journey that cannot be abandoned short of our common destination. It is a process to which we are each called to pledge again our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.