Signing of the Declaration of Independence

Poll any audience today to all what they’d risk life for and easy answers roll off tongues—family, God, country.  But then widen the sacrifice:  what would you also risk your family, your bank account, your home for—not just yourself.  That answer is harder and few, very few, ever answer they would risk all for an idea, a theory.

Yet this is the question members of the Continental Congress answered on July 4, 1776, when they voted to make Jefferson’s final draft—after their revisions and input—the official Declaration of Independence.  They wouldn’t sign until August 2 after all 13 colonies had approved it, but on July 4, they sent the text to printer John Dunlap.  He typeset and ran 200 copies or “broadsides”—about the size of a sheet of newspaper and those broadsides were then carried by messengers on horseback to Continue reading “Then & Now: Founding Fathers Risk Life, Build a Nation” »