At the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the indomitable senior diplomat and renowned wit, Benjamin Franklin, reminded the men of the Continental Congress that “we must all hang together or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” They expressed their response to the possible consequences of signing their names to the document when they set down for all to see in the last paragraph, And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

 “divine Providence” had brought together in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania a unique combination of liberty-loving , brilliant men from thirteen American colonies. Their mother country of England, through a succession of Parliamentary Acts, approved by the monarch George III, violated the historic charters which guaranteed their rights as Englishmen to tax themselves, protect their frontiers, and abide by the principles of English Common law and the Magna Carta.

The peace-loving and principled representatives sent olive branch petitions to the King in Parliament for redress of grievances, pleas that were mostly rejected. Some American colonists finally took direct action through embargos, tax evasion, and inter-colonial networking through Committees of Correspondents and Sons of Liberty organizations. In ten of the colonies the rebels threw tea into the ocean rather than pay the illegal tax. The Crown sent English regular troops to garrison Boston, the hotbed of resistance to Royal authority.

At Lexington and Concord on April 19^th, 1775, the Redcoats conducted a raid into the countryside around Boston which resulted in the first hostile gunfire, triggering the War for Independence. By July the Continental Congress had appointed the Virginia Militia officer George Washington, commander in chief of the New England army assembled on the heights around Boston. After another year or so of debate and attempts to restore relations with Great Britain, petitions which the crown rejected, the Congress appointed a committee to draw up a Declaration of Independence. The Committee was led by the articulate but irascible John Adams of Massachusetts and brilliant but quiet Virginian, Thomas Jefferson. They produced a document declaring the secession of thirteen colonies from the British Empire, enumerating the reasons, and sealing their covenant with their signatures.

Lawyers, merchants, farmers, planters, a publisher, a doctor and a preacher, all men of substance, probity, education, and most of all, wisdom, stepped into their unique moment in world history to become the Founding Fathers of a Confederation, and later a Republic, known as the United States of America. Their daring July, 1776  Act would cost them all dearly in the war that resulted, which lasted eight years. Their foresight and sacrifices bequeathed to their posterity a Constitutional liberty unknown in the world before and has been admired and adopted by many other nations for two and a half centuries.