Thoughts on Liberty

"Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood." -- John Adams (A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765)

"A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate." -- Thomas Jefferson (Rights of British America, 1774) (For those who don't get it, he is refering to Natural Law)

"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." -- Benjamin Franklin (letter to Benjamin Vaughn, 14 March 1783)

John Adams thought that today would be the day we celebrate not the 4th. The reason is that today is the day they declared Independence, the 4th is the day they approved the final draft of the Declaration. Here is what he wrote his wife Abigail on the 3rd of July 1776 about how we are to celebrate. I have noticed in that in many recent books like a 2003 bio about John Adams by Scholastic books that a key part of the letter is left out, "Devotion to God Almighty". I suspect there is a PC reason, it destroys any pretense of the myth of seperation of Church & State:

“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 Day’s Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.”