Opinion
OPINION: Happy 250th to a longshot nation
Rob Shelton | Lehi Free Press
Let’s get one thing straight about the Fourth of July: The guys we’re toasting this week were not supposed to win.
Not a chance. Not on paper. Not in London, not anywhere a sane person was laying money.
Two hundred fifty years ago, 56 men signed a piece of paper that was basically a confession. Treason, in the king’s eyes. And the penalty for treason wasn’t a fine; it was a rope.
They signed anyway.
Picture the worst team you ever rooted for. Now make them play the best army on earth, the best navy on earth and roughly all the money in the world, which is to say, the British. Our side had farmers, a printer, a couple of lawyers and a redheaded Virginian who’d rather have been home gardening. That’s the squad. That’s who declared independence.
The best place I have found to relearn all this is not from a dusty textbook. I got it from the podcast “History That Doesn’t Suck,” hosted by Greg Jackson, who happens to teach right up the road at Utah Valley University, where his actual title is America 250 Professor. For the country’s big 250th, Jackson pulled his eighth episode off the shelf and let it rip. Millions of people have hit play on this guy. Give him 70 minutes and you’ll know why.
Here’s what they don’t print on the fireworks stand: This whole thing almost didn’t happen.
The room was split. Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson stood up and basically called timeout. Tearing away from Britain right now, he warned, was like knocking your house down in the dead of winter before you’d built a new one. Reasonable. Cautious. The kind of guy who reads the whole contract.
Then John Adams got up.
Adams was the loud one, the guy who’d been hollering for independence for a year while everybody told him to sit down. He didn’t sugarcoat it. “Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish,” he said. “I give my hand and my heart to this vote.” You want a pregame speech? That’s a pregame speech.
The first vote came up short. Nine colonies — not enough. So they argued all night, the way you argue at 2 a.m. when everything’s on the line. And then Delaware’s Caesar Rodney climbed on a horse and rode 80 miles through a thunderstorm to break a tie. Eighty miles. In a storm. To cast one vote.
On July 2, they voted again. Twelve colonies for, none against. New York, doing its best New York thing, abstained. Adams was so sure July 2 was the day that he wrote his wife, Abigail, that folks would remember it forever, bonfires, parades, bells, the works. He was off by two days. They spent the third and fourth fixing Thomas Jefferson’s wording, and the Fourth is the date that stuck. Close enough, John.
And then the fun part stopped.
Because 1776, the actual year of the Declaration, was a get-blown-out-every-week kind of season. George Washington’s army lost Long Island. Lost New York. Lost fort after fort. Got chased across New Jersey into Pennsylvania. Men were deserting by the thousands, and Washington himself wrote that he’d never been so miserable in his life. This is the part nobody mentions between hot dogs.
And yet they kept slipping the noose. Pinned against the water on Long Island, the whole army should have been finished. Then a fog rolled in, and through the dark Washington ferried 9,000 men across the East River while the British slept, leaving them an empty camp at dawn. People back then didn’t call that luck. They called it deliverance.
Let’s put faces on it. Nathan Hale, 21 years old, slipped behind enemy lines to spy, got caught, got hanged. The last thing the kid said, or close to it: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Twenty-one. Read that age again.
And Margaret Corbin, 25, standing beside her husband John at his cannon when a British shot cut him down. She didn’t run. She took his place at the gun and kept firing until an enemy grapeshot tore into her and wrecked her arm for the rest of her life. There’s a patriot. Nobody put money on her.
But here’s the thing about that beat-up little army. They had the words. When Washington had the Declaration read out loud to his troops in New York on July 9, something caught fire. A crowd marched down, yanked a lead statue of King George III off its base, and melted the whole thing into musket balls. They took the king’s own statue and shot it back at him. Try not to love that.
That’s the story. A pack of longshots who had no business winning bet their lives, their money and their good names on an idea, then got pounded for a year before a single thing went right.
And 250 years later, the country they gambled on is still standing. Still loud. Still arguing about everything. Still reaching for the line Jefferson wrote down, the one about all of us being created equal, all of us owed “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
Here’s what their bet bought you: The fireworks over the valley this week; the ballot you’ll fill out come November; the right to stand up at a City Council meeting and tell your elected officials, to their faces, that you think they’ve got it wrong. Somebody rode 80 miles through a storm so you could do that on an ordinary Tuesday.
We don’t always hit the mark. They didn’t either, but they pointed us at it and signed their names with the rope in plain sight.
So this week, somewhere between the parade and the brats, raise something cold to the longshots. To the 56 signatures. To a fog that rolled in at the right hour. To a 21-year-old with one life to give, and a 25-year-old who would not leave her husband’s gun.
Then do yourself a favor and go hear the whole thing. Jackson’s episode is called “Declaring Independence, the Rise of Alexander Hamilton, and the Fall of New York,” and all of it, the quotes, the ride, the fog, Margaret Corbin, came straight from him. There’s far more in there too, including a broke Caribbean orphan named Alexander Hamilton you may have heard a thing or two about. Find it wherever you get your podcasts, or at htdspodcast.com.
Happy 250th, America. You beautiful longshot.
