It was July 4, 1776, when 56 men finished hammering out America’s birth notice, put their signatures to it and adopted it.
Among them, eight were immigrants from England, Scotland and Ireland. The rest were mostly first- or maybe second-generation American colonists – not citizens, colonists – born to other immigrants who had streamed to one or more of the 13 colonies then at war with the Kingdom of Great Britain.
Altogether, the 56 opted to become Americans – the first Americans – rather than British subjects in a colonial empire. Today, by the hundreds, modern immigrants born outside America also seek to transform their lives.
The first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, drafted by a committee of five and fine-tuned by Thomas Jefferson, puts it well for 1776 and 2018: “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
But it’s really the second sentence that spoke to that moment and continues to bind us all together as freedom-loving Americans.