On the Fourth of July we celebrate the birth of our nation, the day 56 brave men signed their own death warrants by declaring Independence from the most powerful nation on Earth. Think about that. We don’t celebrate the victory at Yorktown, or the signing of the Treaty of Paris, which concluded the war.
Instead, we celebrate the Declaration. We celebrate the moment in which brave men – acknowledging their dependence on God – announced to a “candid world” that they were casting off the shackles of a predictable tyranny and embracing liberty. Even at the likely cost of their lives.
That is liberty. As our countrymen in New Hampshire like to say, “live free or die.”
It is an attitude that is the undercurrent of the Francis Scott Key’s poem The Star Spangled Banner. We can all sing the first verse in our sleep, but the following three verses speak just as boldly – and defiantly – as to who we are as a nation.
O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country, should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation.
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
May it ever be so.
