All across our great nation, we just celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the United States. July 4 has been celebrated as a special day of patriotism since 17,77 when the first organized celebrations took place in Philadelphia and Boston. According to the Pennsylvania Evening Post on July 5, 1777, celebrations of the first anniversary of independence were “demonstrations of joy and festivity,” including “a discharge of thirteen cannon” from each of the ships in the river “in honor of the Thirteen United States,” the “ringing of bells,” and “a grand exhibition of fireworks on the Commons.”
Annual celebrations are one thing, but half-century commemorations are another. This year, 2026, will be the fifth half-century celebration of the Declaration. What happened on the previous four?
On July 4, 1826, President John Quincy Adams commemorated the Declaration in a ceremony on Capitol Hill. Two days later, he would learn the Declaration’s author, Thomas Jefferson, had died just after noon on the fourth at his home in Virginia. Among his last words were “Is it the fourth of July?” Four days later, Adams learned that his own father, former President John Adams, died in Massachusetts on the same day. Not knowing his old friend and sometimes political enemy had died five hours earlier, Adams uttered his last words, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” John Quincy Adams interpreted this “strange and striking” event as a “visible and palpable” manifestation of “Divine favor.” In his diary he recorded, “on that day while every heart was bounding with joy…amid the blessings of freedom and independence…the hand that penned the ever-memorable Declaration and the voice that sustained it in debate, were called before the Judge of All.”
Fifty years later, in 1876, the Centennial of the United States was marked by the first official world’s fair in the United States. Held in Philadelphia to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Declaration, the fair showcased American industrial power with massive displays, drawing ten million visitors from 37 nations. The exhibit officially opened on May 10, presided over by President Ulysses S. Grant before a crowd of more than 100,000.
On July 4, the Declaration was read by Richard Henery Lee, namesake of the patriot who had introduced the motion for independence a hundred years earlier. Then the unexpected occurred. Susan B. Anthony, accompanied by four other women, approached the platform carrying their own document, the “Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States.” Denied the opportunity to read it to the assembled throng, the women presented the declaration to the presiding officer, scattered copies among the dignitaries, and marched to the far side of Independence Square where Anthony read it to an enthusiastic crowd.
The principles and promises of the Declaration of Independence had justified separation from Great Britain in 1776. But they had become more than that – they had become the foundations upon which slavery had been abolished and equal protection for all guaranteed. Now, they were the underpinnings of the bold public challenge for equality for women.
July 4, 1926, was President Calvin Coolidge’s 54th birthday. Because the 4th was a Sunday, official celebrations were deferred to the next day. President Coolidge arrived by train in Philadelphia for the second World’s Fair and addressed a crowd of 35,000 people at Sesquicentennial Stadium. There he reaffirmed the enduring, universal, and unchanging principles of the Declaration. Dismissing calls for discarding the ideas of the Founders as outmoded and demands for something more modern, he stated clearly:
“If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.”
“If anyone wishes to deny their truth…the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. If there is any failure in respect to any of these principles, it is because of the failure on the part of individuals [us] to observe them.”
Finally, on our nation’s Bicentennial in 1976, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, mother of current King Charles III and direct descendant of King George III, presented a gift to the people of the United States from the people of the United Kingdom – an exact replica of the Liberty Bell, made at the same foundry in London as the original two hundred years earlier. Standing in front of Independence Hall where the Declaration had been approved (citing 27 grievances against her royal ancestor), the Queen stated she believed that “Independence Day, the Fourth of July, should be celebrated as much in Britain as in America.”
“We lost the American colonies,” she continued, “because we lacked that statesmanship to know the right time, and the manner of yielding, what is impossible to keep. We learnt to respect the right of others to govern themselves in their own ways…Without that great act in the cause of liberty performed in Independence Hall two hundred years ago, we could never have transformed an Empire into a Commonwealth.”