The crucible of war and the making of Independence Day

On July 4, 2026, we Americans will celebrate the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, a document whose proclamation of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” remains as profound a statement on the human condition now as it was then.

In the 250 years since its unanimous passage by the Second Continental Congress, the ideas that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” and that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed” have served as the guiding lights of the United States through wars, turmoil, setbacks, and change.

It’s easy to forget that these noble words were born of battle and bloodshed, that countless thousands of patriots, from the dead on Lexington Green to the mothers and wives on the home front, gave them life. Those 15 months from April 1775 to July 1776 also proved to be the baptism of fire that would bring to the fore the leaders of this new independent nation.

Diverse as they were in personality and background, George Washington, Abigail Adams, and Thomas Jefferson offer examples of leadership in three distinct arenas in this forge of wartime during which the principles of the Declaration were hammered out.

The soldier

On June 15, 1775, one day after the Second Continental Congress created the Continental Army, Massachusetts delegate John Adams nominated George Washington as its new commander in chief. Washington accepted the post a day later, and by July 2 he had arrived in Cambridge, outside of Boston, where he found the newly minted army to be a determined but ragtag collection of militias. These volunteers had successfully prevented the British from moving inland from Boston, but they sorely lacked military discipline and were short of both cannon and powder.

For the next eight months, while keeping the British troops under Gen. William Howe locked in place, Washington reorganized the militias into regular units and saw to the training of his troops. During this time, he also displayed a gift in judging the character and qualities of men. A case in point: He recognized talent and drive in the young Henry Knox, a bookseller who had studied ordnance and artillery but who lacked real experience. That winter, under orders from Washington, it was Knox who led troops to Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York to retrieve captured British cannon and other supplies, and who then performed one of the most incredible feats of the war by dragging 60 tons of this ordnance through ice and snow 300 miles back to Boston.

Throughout this long siege of Boston, Washington sharpened other talents, skills that would serve him both as general and later as the country’s first president under the Constitution. He was humble enough to take advice, for instance, setting aside his plans for an attack on the British in Boston when his council of war ruled against it. As he had with Knox, he looked for and rewarded competency rather than wealth or societal rank when choosing subordinates. Moreover, right from the beginning, his time as commander in chief commenced his education in dealing with a legislature, the Continental Congress, often at odds with his own views on the care and keeping of his army.

The formidable wife and mother

Like Washington, Abigail Adams took lessons from this crucial year of conflict before the signing of the Declaration.

She fought her war on two fronts, one public and one private. The Boston siege with its battles and skirmishes was close to home. She and John lost one of their good friends, the physician Joseph Warren, at the Battle of Bunker Hill, which Adams observed from a distance. Shortly after Washington’s arrival, she met him and described the general in a letter to John as a man of “dignity with ease, and complacency, the gentleman and soldier look agreeably blended in him.” Always attempting accuracy, threading her way through rumors and secondhand reports, she also tried to keep her absent husband updated on the political and military situation in Boston.

The spring and summer of ’76 saw the British gone, having escaped by ship, but brought on a new challenge—an epidemic of smallpox. At that time, the new and controversial procedure of inoculation was coming into play, during which a physician would make a small cut on a patient and insert fluid taken from another patient with the pox into the wound, in hopes of inducing a mild case of the disease that would then produce lifelong immunity.

In what Adams called the “Spirit of Inoculation,” Boston made this new preventative against the pox legal, and Adams arranged for her own inoculation, that of her four children, and a good number of friends. With varying reactions, they eventually emerged from this procedure with their health restored and their immunity assured.

During their long separation during this period—they were apart for more than a year—Adams not only managed farm, family, and business affairs, but also proved to be her husband’s chief booster. She wrote him letter after letter reassuring him about the children’s welfare, praising his work, and reminding him of causes close to her own heart, such as the abolition of slavery and greater rights for women. In turn, John Adams acknowledged the crucial importance of her support for him and for the cause of liberty. The day after he signed the Declaration, he wrote to a friend regarding Abigail: “There is a lady at the foot of Penn’s Hill, who obliges me, from time to time with clearer and fuller intelligence, than I can get from a whole committee of gentlemen.”

The writer

If to Washington the soldier and to Adams the patriotic defender of hearth and home, we add Thomas Jefferson, the lawmaker and longtime student of political philosophy, we arrive at a third key arena in this first year of revolution. And like Washington and Adams, Jefferson learned a great deal during this period before becoming the primary author of the Declaration.

On March 27, 1775, even before the battles of Lexington Green and Concord, Jefferson was elected as a Virginia delegate to the Second Continental Congress. Following his arrival in Philadelphia, he worked closely with delegates from the other colonies, absorbing their variant views on separation from Britain, which, like his own, changed in the course of time and events. Some of the papers and articles he published during this time set him apart, winning the respect and admiration of his fellow delegates. In a letter to Timothy Pickering, who would later become secretary of state, John Adams noted: “Writings of his were handed about, remarkable for their peculiar felicity of expression.”

When a subcommittee of five delegates was appointed to compose a declaration of independence, Jefferson was assigned the task of drawing up the draft document. He felt that this honor belonged to Adams, who had become a friend as well as a colleague, but Adams gave him three reasons why Jefferson was the right man for the job. In the same letter to Pickering, he reproduced this conversation with Jefferson: “Reason first—You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second—I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular.—You are much otherwise. Reason third—You can write ten times better than I can.”

Though Jefferson’s original version underwent several revisions, he is regarded as the Father of the Declaration of Independence, an honor bestowed not only by his own genius and his talent with quill and paper but also by Adams’s honest assessment of his own talents and shortcomings.

Talents and a Treasure

In looking at this threesome of Founders, we detect another who makes the limelight as well. John Adams had the heart and the wisdom to marry and cherish Abigail, who considered him “my dearest friend.” He pushed for Washington to become commander in chief of the army, and so launched him into the series of events that made him the Father of His Country. He put aside his ambition and persuaded Jefferson to author the Declaration.

Consequently, during those months of war, fear, and hope leading up to the Fourth of July, 1776, we see borne out a promise implicit in the Declaration, that of a meritocracy rather than an aristocracy of social class or wealth. Just as Washington picked Knox for his talents, so too did Adams favor Washington and Jefferson. The liberties bestowed by a Creator gave individuals the freedom to make what they would of themselves, just as the country itself was attempting to do from 1775 to 1776.

This Independence Day of 2025, as we enjoy our holiday activities—barbecues, picnics, fireworks—let’s take a moment, look to the Founders for inspiration, and renew that vow made in the last sentence of the Declaration of Independence: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

 

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