Is Independence Day Celebrated on the Wrong Date?

A scene that never happened--the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  There was no great signing ceremony on July 4th or any other day.  On August 2, 1776 the Delegates to the Continental Congress who were still in Philadelphia stopped by the Pennsylvania State House to add their signatures before they left town.  Those who were already gone added their signatures when they could--weeks, months, and in one case years later.

As we all know today is Independence Day when Americans celebrate the adoption of a resolution by the Continental Congress formally severing ties between the England and her former colonies in 1776. Although we celebrate on July 4th, the date is just one of several that could have been chosen. 

On May 15 Congress adopted a preamble for a resolution offered by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia calling for colonies without a “government sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs” to adopt new governments.  The preamble, written by John Adams, said that “it is necessary that the exercise of every kind of authority under the said crown should be totally suppressed.”  Although the four Middle Colonies voted against it, Adams wrote home that he considered this a virtual declaration of independence.  The same day the Virginia Convention adopted a resolution calling for a dissolving all allegiance to the Crown.  

Virtually forgotten in popular accounts, Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee offered the underlying resolution for Independence.  The familiar document was an explanation and justification of the act drafted by a special committee.  It was not the legal document accomplishing separation.  Lee's resolution and the votes for and against it were recorded in the official proceedings of Congress.

In keeping with his instructions on June 11 Lee offered a resolution that Congress declare independence, seek foreign alliances, and begin laying the groundwork for a new confederation:

Resolved, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

As Lee’s resolution was being debated Congress authorized a Committee of Five to draw up a document explaining the action, should it be passed.  The committee consisted of Adams; Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, the delegate with the most international renown and prestige; Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, one of the youngest delegates; Robert R. Livingston of New York, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut.  

The famous committee charged with drafting a justification for Independence. Left to right:  Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and John Adams.  Jefferson wrote the first draft.  Franklin and Adams were actively involved in editing and fine tuning the document.  Sherman and Livingston are not known to have contributed tot he wordage but were important politically to secure support from their states--especially Livingston whose New York delegation was deadlocked on Independence.

The committee delegated to Jefferson the job of writing a first draft.  He did so over several days.  The committee conferred and recommended some changes, which mortified Jefferson, and then he produced a draft incorporating the edits.  It remained, however, mostly Jefferson’s work. 

The language was sent to Congress on June 28.  The document was tabled until action on Lee’s resolution was completed. On July 1, sitting as a Committee of the Whole with each Colony having one vote, the resolution was approved with 9 yeas, two nays (Pennsylvania and South Carolina), and a no vote by New York, whose delegation lacked instructions, and Delaware whose two delegates were split.  

Ceasar Rodney rode hell-for-leather from Delaware to cast his deciding vote in that colony's delegation on June 2 passing Lee's resolution.

On July 2 South Carolina reconsidered and switched its vote to yes and the two most ardent opponents of independence in the Pennsylvania delegation, John Dickinson and Robert Morris, bowing to the inevitable, abstained in a caucus of the state’s delegates allowing the delegation to follow Franklin for independence.  Then, dramatically, Caesar Rodney arrived after an epic ride from Delaware to cast a vote breaking the tie in that delegation.  Only New York, then, had not voted for independence.  Adams regarded the July 2 vote as definitively the day of independence.  He wrote home to his wife Abigail:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

Congress then took up the wording declaration from the Committee of Five. On July 3 after spirited debate Congress adopted most of Jefferson’s text except for a lengthy passage critical of the slave trade and some other relatively minor matters of language.  He was bitterly disappointed, but the deed was done.  Congress ordered official copies be made for each state and printed copies to be read publicly. These copies were dated July 4 A calligrapher worked on a very fine original document which most delegates signed on August 2 and to which absent delegates appended their signatures weeks, maybe even months later.  There was no grand signing ceremony as enshrined in myth.  

The iconic document on display at the Library of Congress and reproduced in class rooms across the country is one of about three copies made by a calligrapher.  Like the printed copies it was dated July 4 although there was no action by Congress that day.  The Fourth was meant to be the date that the Declaration was to be read publicly for the first time  but the broadsides were not ready from the printer.  The Philadelphia Evening Post ran it on July 6  and it was not until July 8 that Col. John Nixon of the Philadelphia Committee of Safety read it on the steps of the State House.   General George Washington personally read the document to his troops and local citizens in New York City on July 9.

Here are some dates in the associated with marking Independence Day and the Fourth of July:

1776—Philadelphia celebrated with toasts, 13-gun salutes, speeches, fireworks, and parades after the official reading on July 8.

1777—13 guns were fired once in the morning and once in the evening in Bristol, Rhode Island

1778—George Washington marked the occasion with double rum ration for the troops. Benjamin Franklin and John Adams held a dinner for fellow Americans in Paris.

1779—The Fourth fell on a Sunday. To keep the Sabbath, observances in many places were held July 5.

1781—Massachusetts became the first state legislature to recognize the day as an official occasion.

1791—The first recorded use of the name Independence Day occurred.

1826—former Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died within an hour of each other on the 50th anniversary of the dated copies of the Declaration

1831—Former President James Monroe died on the Fourth.

1870—Congress made the 4th of July an unpaid holiday for Federal employees.

1884—The Statue of Liberty was presented to the American People in Paris.

1941—Congress made Independence Day a paid Federal holiday.

 

 

The Real Beginning of the Automobile Age and a Woman Driver

 

Karl Benz, creator of the first modern internal combustion engine automobile, demonstrates a prototype Motorwagen.

On July 3, 1886 inventor Karl Benz rolled his latest creation, the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, a light weight three wheeled carriage powered by an internal combustion engine of his own design onto the streets of Manheim for its first public demonstration.

There had been self-propelled road vehicles since Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot’s lumbering Fardier à vapeur, a heavy cart built to haul artillery for the French Army in 1769.  Since then dozens of steam powered vehicles had been built and/or proposed.  By the 1880’s Amédée Bollée of Le Mans was producing large, multi-passenger coaches and de Dion & Bouton were turning out light weight tri and quadricycles.  But Benz’s gasoline powered Motorwagan is considered the first modern automobile and the direct ancestor of all that came that came after.  

Benz's heiress wife Bertha financed her husband's inventions and we a shrewd businesswoman in her own right.

Benz, a successful engineer and developer of stationary engines for industrial applications, was financed by his heiress wife Bertha, a woman of strong mind and keen intellect in her own right who would be deeply involved in advising her husband on business matters.  Benz’s German patent dated from his application on January 29 of that year.

Key to the tricycle was the light weight gasoline powered two-stroke piston engine that he had patented back in 1873.  The version he mounted on his Motorwagen was a  954 cc single-cylinder four-stroke engine with trembler coil ignition which produced 2⁄3 horsepower (hp) 250 rpm—about the same power as a modern walk-behind self-propelled lawnmower engine.  But it was powerful enough to propel the very light vehicle built on a tubular steel frame with thin wood panels.  Each of the three wheels, specially designed by Benz, had wire steel spokes and hard rubber tires.  The freely rotating single front wheel was steered by a tiller by a driver seated in front of the engine.

A museum replica of the Patent Moterwagan.

The engine drove the two rear wheels with a chain drive on both sides. A simple belt system served as a single-speed transmission, varying torque between an open disc and drive disc. A large horizontal flywheel stabilized the engine power output.

That first put-putting prototype strikes us as not quite finished.  There was an open crankcase  into which oil dripped from an open pan on critical moving parts.  Similarly there was neither a sealed gas tank as we know it nor a carburetor.  Gasoline (or another suitably combustible fluid) dripped from a small reservoir into a basin of soaked fibers that supplied a vapor to the cylinder by evaporation.  There were also no brakes.

But Benz was not finished tinkering.  Over the next year he built two more improved models.  By the time of his Model 3 Motorwagen, it was powered by a new 2 hp engine capable of getting the vehicle up to a dizzying 10 miles per hour.  It also had a real carburetor, gas tank, and manually operated brakes on the rear wheels.

All of these prototypes were all well and good, but perhaps Mrs. Benz was a trifle anxious for her investment to start paying off with sales.  She recognized that the public interest had been piqued but was far from convinced that the Motorwagen was a practical means of transportation.  The shrewd and intrepid Bertha realized something more dramatic needed to be done.

Bertha Benz and her teenage sons posed for a photo, seen here tinted, recreating the beginning of her historic drive.

In early August 1888 supposedly without her husband’s permission—some historians doubt this claim—she gathered up her two sons, ages 15 and 14 and took the Model 3 out for a spin.  A trip actually, all the way from Mannheim to her mother’s home in Pforzheim a about 60 miles away.  The drive took her through the streets of Heidelberg and Wiesloch.  The sight of a woman and two children zipping through the streets in a noisy, smoky contraption with no horse naturally attracted considerable attention.

Bertha was not only the driver and navigator, but the mechanic as well.  When the carburetor clogged, she had no problem clearing it with her hat pin and she used her garter to insulate an exposed wire.  When fuel ran low and no gasoline was available she purchased ligroin, a petroleum ether related to benzene, at the Wiesloch municipal pharmacy.  Later when the wooden block of her brakes wore down, she found a cobbler to nail strips of leather on them, thus inventing brake pads on the fly.

Bertha made it safely to her mother’s by evening and sent husband a famous telegram explaining her whereabouts and how she got there.  The next morning she drove home.  She had proved the automobile was a reliable transportation option and that it could even be operated by an unsupervised woman.  And as she hoped, the trip generated sales.

Afterwards her husband, at Bertha’s suggestion, made brake pads standard equipment and added a second gear for aid in climbing hills.

An early ad for the Patent-Motorwagen featured an illustration of Benz at the tiller.

Over the next few years until 1893 about 25 Motorwagens were built and sold before Benz moved on to more sophisticated models.

Three years before Karl Benz died in 1929 he merged his Benz & Cie company with Gottlieb Daimler’s Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft to form what would become Mercedes-Benz.

Bertha Benz’ investment paid off.  When she died at age 95 in 1944 she was a very wealthy woman indeed.

The route she took on her memorable 1888 drive has been named the Bertha Benz Memorial Route.