If we could go back in time to choose which day to celebrate our independence as a country, which do you think we should choose?
• April 19, 1775 — first military engagement of the Revolutionary War at Lexington and Concord
• July 2, 1776 — the Second Continental Congress voted to approve a resolution of independence marking the legal separation of the new United States and Great Britain. John Adams wrote his wife that the date would be "celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival."
• July 4, 1776 — Congress ratified the Declaration of Independence, a document conceived to announce independence and explain the decision to become independent.
• July 8, 1776 — the Declaration was first read to the public, simultaneously in Easton (PA), Philadelphia (PA), and Trenton (NJ).
• Sept 3, 1783 — the Revolutionary War came to an end with the Treaty of Paris, wherein Great Britain recognized the sovereignty of the United States.
April 19, 1775
July 2, 1776
July 4, 1776
July 8, 1776
Sept 3, 1783
Other
None, no Independence Day
Don't know
Don't care
Jefferson wrote the first draft, which the Committee left largely intact, though a passage denouncing King George III for perpetuating the slave trade was removed because other Committee members believed some southern colonies would not ratify the document if a passage criticizing slavery remained.
Would you prefer a passage criticizing slavery had been left in, realizing the Declaration may not have been ratified by all thirteen colonies?
Yes
No
Don't know enough to say
Don't care
Scholars also say Common Sense, which today remains the book with the highest circulation of any published in American history relative to the size of population, is what first made independence an issue to be taken seriously in the colonies.
Would the US have had the success it has had as an independent country without those two "publications," Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence, advocating for the cause of independence?
Yes
No
Moot: The US has not had been successful
Don't know
Don't care
In our preference poll on publications, the Declaration of Independence is tops,followed by the Constitution. Last is the Communist Manifesto.
The referenced segment that was cut from Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence:
"he (King George III) has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."
John Adams was convinced July 2 would become the national holiday.
