Throughline - The story of July 4th is messier than you remember

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Devastating compromises. Midnight rides. A nailbiter vote. Statue toppling riots… and the very real possibility of death. This July 4th, we're taking you inside the making of the Declaration of Independence and how, against all odds, a single document introduced the world to a new kind of nation. Guests:Walter Isaacson, professor at Tulane University and author of The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.Denise Kiernan, author of Signing Their Lives Away: The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the Declaration and Obstinate Daughters: The Rebels, Writers, and Renegade Women Who Ignited the American Revolution.Support shows like Throughline with NPR+. Sign up today at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

June 1776. All these different things had been brewing to make a bad tea joke. One year into the Revolutionary War, things were not looking good for the newly formed Continental Army. A guy named George Washington had been put in charge of it, and he was kind of on a losing streak. You have all these people fighting and dying. Things are beginning to come to a head. Washington was stationed in New York, where the British were closing in fast. Ships were coming in from England, and it was looking as though New York was going to fall.

In a certain point, I suspect, they're sort of saying, okay, remind me again, what are we fighting for? They needed a rally cry to commit people to see the fight through come what may. So in the face of mounting odds and setbacks, some in the Continental Congress decided they needed a declaration of independence. This is who we are. This is a laundry list of what you've done. And I can't be in this relationship anymore. Over the next month, a declaration was drafted and then announced to the world. As John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress, whose signature has become iconic, said at the signing, We must all hang together.

Benjamin Franklin, who needs no introduction, responded, Yes, indeed, we must all hang together, because otherwise, most assuredly, we'll all hang separately. A dark joke, because the truth was, if the revolution failed, every single person who signed on could be tried and hanged for treason. I think at that point you're saying, hey, we just reached the point of no return.

It means you don't get to turn back. You've got to keep marching ahead. The declaration begins. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another. And to assume among the powers of the earth

the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them. But it's the second sentence that everyone knows. The second sentence is a big, mission statement for our nation, a nation in which the governance comes not from the divine right of kings or the sword of conquerors, but by a social contract that's signaled in the very first word of the sentence. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created

equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's a sentence that, it's a sentence that that actually sets a new type of nation on this planet. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. This is not the way the world worked 250 years ago, but more than half the nations on Earth now are pretty much guided by the principles of that sentence. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends,

it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. I'm Randab del Fattah, and this July 4th on ThruLine from NPR, we're doing a kind of document exploder,

looking at the story of the Declaration of Independence, the messy drama that surrounded it, and what it all can tell us about how to find our way forward as a country in 2026. Devastating compromises, midnight rides, a nail-biter vote, statue-topling riots. That's all coming up. Hello, this is Lawrence calling from Zurich, Switzerland, and you're listening to Thrulyne from MPR. Part 1. The Committee of 5.

The Continental Congress in June of 1776 finally decided they had to declare independence. And so they created a committee to explain and declare why they were doing it. This is Walter Isaacson, Professor at Tulane University, an author of The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. They were nominated by their fellow members. And this is Denise Kiernan. She's written several books about the revolutionary period. Her latest is called Obstinate Daughters, The Rebels, Writers, and Renegade Women

who ignited the American Revolution. Okay, so this committee that Congress put together consisted of five people. John Adams of Massachusetts. Robert Livingston of New York. You have one slave owner, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, a working class runaway, Ben Franklin, who had started a print shop, And the president of the society in Pennsylvania for the abolition of slavery. And the last guy.

Roger Sherman, who started life as a cobbler in Connecticut. And so you had a committee of diverse views and talents, even though they were all white men, but they shared a love of science. And they were readers of history. They'd all read John Locke's second treatise on government. People like John Locke come up with a notion of a social contract. as the source of our rights, as the source of our governance. And Thomas Hobbs.

They knew about the state of nature, nasty, brutish, and short. Jefferson kicks things off and starts writing a first draft. Jefferson basically locks himself away in a place he rented. He's rented a room on Market Street in Philadelphia. And Ben Franklin's house is closer to the river on Market Street. So he sends it by hand. Not his hand. He's not going to walk it over himself, but someone's hand.

We can even imagine maybe Robert Hemings, the enslaved valet, has to bring it down two blocks to Franklin's home. Robert Hemings, by the way, is the older brother of Sally Hemmings, an enslaved woman who was widely believed to have given birth to several of Jefferson's children, children who would also be enslaved by him. So the draft is delivered to Benjamin Franklin, and there's a note attached to it. Something along the lines, I'm paraphrasing, would the good Dr. Franklin, with his great wisdom, please do what he can to improve this draft because he is much more familiar, et cetera. This first draft begins...

We hold these truths to be sacred. You go, sacred? But then you see the black printer's pen, Ben Franklin's printers pens with backslashes, crossing out sacred. And written in next to it. The word self-evident. He's saying we're trying to create a new type of nation

where our rights come from the rationality and from reason, not from the dictates or dogma of a particular religion. Sacred does automatically take you to a religious connotation. Yeah, it takes a religious connotation, but they were deists. They did not believe in a particular dogma or a particular religion. They left it so that everybody could worship even the notion of creation. If you didn't want to believe in a creator. Over the next couple of weeks, they made a bunch of these kinds of edits.

There were lots of different versions that went back and forth. And while the first part of the Declaration reads like a mission statement, we hold these truths to be self-evident. The rest of it is basically a list of everything the king has done wrong. He has refused his assent to laws. He has dissolved and represented. He has refused. He has forbidden.

He is obstructed the administration of justice. obstructed, cutting off our trade with all parts of the world. He has endeavored to prevent. For imposing taxes on us without our consent. Taking away charters. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us. One of the ones that we hear often, plundered our seas, ravaged our coast, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. I'm curious who their audience was.

Were they writing this so that King George III would read it? Were they writing it for all the, you know, people they were representing in the colonies to sort of feel like they were unifying as a country? Yeah, there were three or four audiences. The people in the American colonies. You have to remember, at the beginning of 1776, most Americans did not want to break from England. They wanted representation,

but they were not trying to overthrow the control of the king. England's enemies. Our revolution against England was actually a part of a much larger war, which was the war basically between France and England, then we're going to make it part of this larger war, and France will support us. And their colleagues in Congress. This would have to go on to be approved by Congress itself, right?

They need votes from representatives from the 13 colonies, north to south. By early July, their draft was ready, and they took it to Congress. But before the language could be finalized, a vote was safe. for July 2nd, 1776. The vote on July 2nd is, are we going to declare independence from England?

If the answer was no, the Declaration of Independence would be stopped in its tracks. There was an incredible amount of debate. The evening before the vote, they took an informal poll and... It did not appear it was going to pass. Coming up, the midnight ride that saves the Declaration of Independence. Hi there. This is Francesca Villaged Kennedy. I'm calling in from Brooklyn, New York. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part two, the midnight ride.

On the night of July 1st, 1776, Caesar Rodney received an urgent message. You have to get up here. He was in Delaware, his home state, overseeing some military plans. The message said a vote was set to happen in Congress the following day in Philadelphia to decide, whether they would declare independence from England. And at that moment, the two other Delaware delegates were divided on that question, one for, one against. Without Caesar Rodney's vote, Delaware would be counted as a stalemate, and the vote might fail. And Rodney was not a physically, particularly well man.

He was described as, quote, the oddest-looking man in the world, tall, thin, and slender as a reed, pale. His face is not bigger than a large apple. Severe asthma and a long battle with facial cancer had left him disfigured and frail. But he rides through the night, 80 miles on horseback. Thunder echoing above him, rain pouring down on him.

Mud everywhere. And he makes it just in the nick of time to vote on July 2nd. Still in his riding, clothes, Rodney arrives, a scarf wrapped around his scarred face, and he cast the deciding vote for independence. Legend has it, he said, quote, as I believe the voice of my constituents and of all sensible and honest men is in favor of independence, and my own judgment concurs with them. I vote for independence. So then if the vote happened on July 2nd, why do we commemorate July 4th? What's the big deal about July 4th?

So basically between the 2nd and the 4th, now you have Congress has to approve this language that the Committee of 5 came up with. The vote on the 2nd established, yes, they are declaring independence. But they needed to have the language in that declaration approved by Congress, which wouldn't happen until the 4th, after more tweaking. And in some cases, a lot more than tweaking. A lot of the language around slavery was taken out.

The Committee of Fives' version had a whole section condemning the king for his role in the slave trade. He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This peradical warfare, the opprobrium of infirm of infestrian, Fidel Powers is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce, referencing a promise of freedom that was made to enslaved individuals if they were willing to leave their slavers and join up with

the British, which did have a very significant impact on how the war played out in certain parts. of the colonies. That whole thing was struck. They were not mincing words, but many Americans in the colonies were profiting from the slave trade and the industry it propped up. So before the declaration could be approved

by enough members of Congress, that passage was cut. Now, everybody can debate whether or not you should have made those compromises. You can have historians say, that was evil. In some ways it was. You could also have a story and say, if you didn't do it, you would never have the colonies creating a union.

Jefferson himself was a slave owner. They knew that the gap between the words that they were writing and the reality that they were living and that the country was going to be living for the foreseeable future, we're going to be at odds. Jefferson himself wrote that sentence while he's enslaving people. Around this time, Jefferson was enslaving close to 200 people. So, yeah, you got a lot of contradictions in there. It's an incredibly important moral issue. But it wasn't the main issue that they had to contend with.

Probably the main issue was, were we a federation of states or were we one nation? Should Congress have equal votes for state? Should it be proportional representation? A lot of the thornyest questions remained unambiguous. answered, a problem for another day. But on that day, July 4th, 1776, a revised version of the Committee of Five's Declaration of Independence was approved. Now they needed to let the world know about it. So July 4th, it goes to printer John Dunlap, who prints up 200 copies. And this is not, one of the things about the Declaration of Independence is we think there's that one really pretty

copy with the great handwriting that everybody signed. That's not the case. Not all the pretty, nothing fancy. Straight up typeset. The day they write the declaration, parchment copies go out and they ride from Philadelphia to the southern tip of Manhattan in New York. Continental Army headquarters is in New York City at this time. That's where George Washington and his troops are. George Washington says, I want the Declaration of Independence to be read aloud to the troops. They're still trying to convince people in the colonies. Estimates range, but it's believed that at no time did more than 45% of colonists support the war.

And around a third of colonists fought for the British. So you got to unify the country. You got to get Europe on our side. And maybe you have to explain to yourselves, this isn't just about taxes on tea or a Boston Tea Party or a problem we're having with pollument over stamp acts or something, we now are on a larger mission. We're creating a new type of nation. And this document is telling the troops and the world

what that new nation is going to be. Everybody has to show up. As Washington's colonels begin reading the declaration out loud, the soldiers are taking it in calmly. And then it starts getting into, hey, we're really mad about X, Y, and Z. which really riles them up. A massive riot erupts in Lower Manhattan, what is now Lower Manhattan.

That becomes very focused on this huge statue of King George III in Bowling Green. This little tiny park in Lower Manhattan. They've got ropes. People managed to topple it and tear it down. It was big. guilt over lead, so it wasn't solid gold. And in those days, people were interested in the lead

because that was used to make ammunition. One of the eventual signers of the Declaration of Independence, Oliver Walcott of Connecticut, who was also serving in the military as an officer, he's like, we need to get this to Connecticut. So they get as many chunks of the statue as they can. they get it out of Manhattan, they get it across the sound, they get it overlanding Connecticut to his backyard in Litchfield. And behind Walcott's house, Walcott's wife, Laura, and his daughter Marianne, and people they gathered from the community begin melting down King George's statue into bullets. And Oliver Walcott keeps meticulous records of who did what.

And in the end, there were more than 40,000 bullets made from this statue that was toppled in Bowling Green because George Washington said, we need to read this document aloud to the troops and to the people. A chunk of those bullets ended up being used. And they later referred to those bullets as melted majesty because they had melted. I mean, talk about heavy-handed symbolism, right? The Declaration of Independence leads to this statue being melted down into bullets that would return back. That would go right. The King's Army. Yeah.

And it's interesting because it gets at something, right, that the declaration, even then, even, you know, within a couple weeks of it being drafted and approved by Congress, begins to take on a life of its own. And have an impact. I mean, we were already fighting, right? We already had a standing army. There had already been battles. There had already been death. We'd already had naval ships from Britain. Gravaging our sea coast, as they say.

It is something else to put in writing, hey, this is who we are, this is what we stand for, and this is what we're not going to stand for anymore. By the end of 1776, the tide was slowly beginning to turn. Washington and his troops were having more luck on the battlefield. But most people in the colonies still had no real sense. of who had signed on to this declaration. The copies that had been passed around were unsigned.

And in some ways, the anonymity was an obstacle to unity. Because how could a farmer in South Carolina or a cobbler in Massachusetts know for sure if their colony was a part of this vision of a new nation? Coming up, Congress decides to let their constituents and the British Crown know exactly who is behind those words. Hi, this is Rob from Arlington, Virginia. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

Part 3, The Commons. In January 1777, a printer in Baltimore named Mary Catherine Goddard was tasked with printing a new version of the Declaration. That features individual colonies and the names of the people who signed on. 55 names in total. 56, if you include Mary's name at the bottom. The first female postmaster of the United Colonies and the only woman to have her name on the Declaration of Independence, Mary Catherine Goddard.

It's heightened risk for everyone, including her, right? Anyone whose name is public at that point suddenly as potentially a target on their backs if the war goes wrong for the colonies. Yeah, if it goes terribly wrong, that's not a name you would want out in the public. When you're talking about unity as a kind of, Like if I'm someone sitting in South Carolina or in Virginia and I'm just like a regular person, seeing my representative there is different than a kind of vague, like, we're all unified now.

Absolutely. So that does seem really significant in terms of selling the idea to the people that we are actually one united country. That's right. Absolutely. 100%. It's not just a handful of guys in Philadelphia who were making this decision. It is representatives from throughout all 13 colonies, including Georgia, including South Carolina. They can look and say, oh, Edward Rutledge is on board with this, you know. Or, you know, Richard Henry Lee or George Walton from Georgia, you know, who's off fighting and gets, you know, injured in the Battle of Savannah. These were guys out there leading troops and representing their colonies, melting bullets in their backyard.

I mean, they had a real snake in what was going. on, they had a personal stake. They were not detached from the ills and the struggles of what was happening. The Revolutionary War would continue for another six years. There were countless battles and moments before and after the Declaration was announced that helped shape the course of the country. And yet, it was July 4th that stood out as the pivotal moment when the nation became a nation. We celebrate July 4th.

And we started celebrating it pretty soon after the founding. Within 10, 15 years, the fourth becomes a holiday. It's a touchstone for what the signers aspired for America to be, in a sense. I really not particular fans of people who say we were totally conceived in evil and demonizing all the founders or people who are sugar-coating and canonizing. and canonizing the founders. We were humans when we started this country, and we are humans now.

We can decry the founders from making a compromise that allows South Carolina to sign the declaration. But we can also say, as Franklin did, when we were young tradesmen in Philadelphia, we had a joint that didn't hold together. You'd take from one side and take from the other, and you had a joint that would hold together in centuries.

And so, too, we here, must each part with some of our demands. And his point was that compromises may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies. It feels like we live in a time where compromise is a lost art. It's a lost art, and it's partly due to people like you and me in the media. I'm not throwing NPR under the bus here. But once you get cable news networks where people have to demonize or canonize somebody

in a quick sound bite or a, 140-character post, you're not encouraging people to say, oh, I kind of see their point and I'm going to change my opinion a little bit. And you just get tagged as a waffler or somebody who changes their minds. And we're not good at compromise. We're not good at humility. But Walter says throughout American history, people have returned to the Declaration of Independence and the second sentence in particular to find a way through the problems of their time. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,

that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. People die on battlefield to Gettysburg fighting to get closer to a country in which all men, all people, are equal. Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation. And as Lincoln will say, when he's consecrating their graves, they died trying to make that sentence a little bit more true. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.

Whether it's a Seneca Falls Declaration of Women, in which they invoke the sentence, to say it really should be all men and women are created equal. This nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. Whether it's Dr. Martin Luther King invoking that sentence in his speeches. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created each other. At times, history and faith meet at a single time, in a single place, to shape a turning point in man's unending search.

for freedom. Whether it's Lyndon Johnson, invoking the sentence when he signs a civil rights bill. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama. In the late 1960s, you had the assassinations of Kennedys and Kings. And then you had the Vietnam War. You had Watergate.

You had the urban riots. You had the resignation of a president. For our 200th anniversary, we rang the Liberty Bell. The tall ships came into our ports. We put aside some of our differences. And we kind of healed during the bicentennial. We all watched the same fireworks. We all ate soggy hot dogs.

This is not happening this time around, which is a shame. because I started writing this book a year ago, and John Meacham started writing American struggle, and Ken Burns was doing his documentary. Rick Atkins, we're all doing books that maybe, if they come out, the year of our 250th, will cause people to rally together. I appreciate the spirit of what you're saying, right? But when you think about the wars that the U.S. is waging directly in the case of the of Iran in the case of Gaza indirectly with weapons. When you think about the state of the economy

and the fact that so many people are struggling, when you think about all these layers of very real issues, what some might say is a kind of imperial identity that the U.S. has taken on, is it enough to heal through something like the Declaration? But do you think our challenges now are that much worse than the late 60s? I think things are very bad. I think things are very bad. now. I'm just saying we've been to this before. We went through it in the McCarthy era. We certainly went through it in the Civil War. We went through it in the late 60s. Can America come together and heal is a good question. But as a historian, you say, well, we've certainly done it before. I'm somewhat optimistic that at some point a group of political leaders is going to emerge

who are going to run on the idea that we're not a red nation or a blue nation, that we share more values than we disagree on, and that we should all heal and come together. Heal and come together feels like a far cry from where we are right now as a nation. And it's hard not to ask a different question. What would the founders think of the system in place today, where corporations are king, and where many feel a sense of injustice

about how they fit into that equation? We've hollowed out a middle class in America. So it's not just the extremes of the politics, it's also people got left behind by an era of globalization. And so we have to be sensitive of why are they picking up their pitchforks? Why are they voting for, everybody from Donald Trump to Mom Donnie, well, because they're feeling the system didn't work very well,

and they have some truth to that. When should you choose to create a new system versus try to reform the old one? How do you compromise on matters of life and death? There's no easy answers. But Walter says, for starters, we have to find more ways to connect with each other. So one of the things that has held our country together

is a notion of common ground, and that's physical at times. You build Boston Common so people who don't have land, there's a place where they can graze their herds and bury their dead and plant their gardens. And John Locke in the second treatise teaches us, and he's a big supporter of private property. He says you only can do that if enough is left in common for others. You have to rebuild a common ground, where everybody feels they become part of the process

and that their kids will do better than they did. We all go to different entrances in the stadiums now. We have VIP entrances. We have divided ourselves far too much. And as John Hancock would tell us, let's see if we could try to hang together instead. And that's it for this week's show. Randa del Fattah. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Ara Blue.

This episode was produced by me and... Casey Minor. Devin Katayama. Sarah Wyman. Amy Padula. Kiana Mogadem. Julia Redpath. Skyler Swenson. Leanna Semstrom. Irene Noguchi. Jasmine Romero.

Thank you to Johannes Durgey, Matthew Pollock, Cheyenne Butler, Yolanda Sangueni, and Tommy Evans. Thanks also to Dan O'Neill for his voiceover work. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed by Maggie Luthor. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Navid Marvi. Show Fujiwara.

Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number two. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. Also, make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode.

And while you're there, feel free to leave us a review. Thanks for listening.