At noon on July 4, a group of fifteen volunteers organized by the Grove Society gathered at the Tom Kerkenbush memorial in Leonard-Leota Park to read the Declaration of Independence. A nice crowd gathered to hear the reading, including some people who had come all the way from Illinois to attend.
A video recording of the reading may be found here. Each volunteer took turns at one of three microphones to read a section of the Declaration, concluding with a recitation of the names of the 57 members of the Second Continental Congress who signed the document.
The Declaration came into being through a democratic process.
Although Congress appointed a committee of three to draft the document — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin — the drafters borrowed freely from other Patriot writings and lots of people made their own edits along the way. The Declaration was a consensus document, carefully worked out word by word over a long time.
Continental Congress formally approved the edited version on July 4, 1776, and all 57 delegates put their names to it. That was the moment at which the United States of America came into being: as President Lincoln later put it, “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” John Adams called it “the greatest Question which ever was debated in America, and a greater, perhaps, never was or ever will be decided among men.”
Independence Day thus commemorates one of the greatest events in human history. The Declaration is a living document. It remains to this day a rebuke to tyrants and a beacon of resistance the world over. It articulates “the last, best hope of earth,” as Lincoln put it in 1862.
