The following articles are included as the Fourth of July 1998 package. The President's message will run when released by the White House Director of Presidential Messages. Posts have full distribution, abridgment, reprint and translation rights to all texts that follow.

1. MAKING SENSE OF THE FOURTH OF JULY By Pauline Maier

2. PLAYING WITH FIRE By Jack Kelly

3. PATRIOT ALLEY By Edward E. Ericson, Jr.

4. TORPEDO PATRIOTISM By Jack Kelly

5. THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER

6. SELECTED INTERNET SITES

------------------ 1. Fourth of July '98

MAKING SENSE OF THE FOURTH OF JULY By Pauline Maier

(Pauline Maier is William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of American History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This article is adapted from her book AMERICAN SCRIPTURE: MAKING THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, published by Knopf on July 4, 1997.

This article has been cleared for republication in English and in translation by USIS and the press outside the United States; it may also be carried over the Internet. Credit to the author and the following note must appear on the title page of any reprint.

Copyright: 1997 American Heritage, Inc. All rights reserved. "Reprinted from AMERICAN HERITAGE, August 7, 1997.)

John Adams thought Americans would commemorate their Independence Day on the second of July. Future generations, he confidently predicted, would remember July 2, 1776, as "the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America" and celebrate it as their "Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shows, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

His proposal, however odd it seems today, was perfectly reasonable when he made it in a letter to his wife, Abigail. On the previous day, July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress had finally resolved "That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved." The thought that Americans might instead commemorate July 4, the day Congress adopted a "declaration on Independency" that he had helped prepare, did not apparently occur to Adams in 1776. The Declaration of Independence was one of those congressional statements that he later described as "dress and ornament rather than Body, Soul, or Substance," a way of announcing to the world the fact of American independence, which was for Adams the thing worth celebrating.

In fact, holding our great national festival on the Fourth makes no sense at all-unless we are actually celebrating not just independence but the Declaration of Independence. And the declaration we celebrate, what Abraham Lincoln called "the charter of our liberties," is a document whose meaning and function today are different from what they were in 1776. In short, during the nineteenth century the Declaration of Independence became not just a way of announcing and justifying the end of Britain's power over the Thirteen Colonies and the emergence of the United States as an independent nation but a statement of principles to guide stable, established governments. Indeed, it came to usurp in fact if not in law a role that Americans normally delegated to bills of rights. How did that happen? And why?

According to notes kept by Thomas Jefferson, the Second Continental Congress did not discuss the resolution on independence when it was first proposed by Virginia's Richard Henry Lee, on Friday, June 7, 1776, because it was "obliged to attend at that time to some other business." However, on the eighth, Congress resolved itself into a Committee of the Whole and "passed that day, Monday the 10th, in debating on the subject." By then all contenders admitted that it had become impossible for the colonies ever again to be united with Britain. The issue was one of timing.

John and Samuel Adams, along with others such as Virginia's George Wythe, wanted Congress to declare independence right away and start negotiating foreign alliances and forming a more lasting confederation (which Lee also proposed). Others, including Pennsylvania's James Wilson, Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, and Robert R. Livingston of New York, argued for delay. They noted that the delegates of several colonies, including Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York, had not been "impowered" by their home governments to vote for independence. If a vote was taken immediately, those delegates would have to "retire" from Congress, and their states might secede from the union, which would seriously weaken the Americans' chance of realizing their independence. In the past, they said, members of Congress had followed the "wise & proper" policy of putting off major decisions "till the voice of the people drove us into it," since "they were our power, & without them our declarations could not be carried into effect." Moreover, opinion on independence in the critical middle colonies was "fast ripening & in a short time," they predicted, the people there would "join in the general voice of America."

Congress decided to give the laggard colonies time and so delayed its decision for three weeks. But it also appointed a Committee of Five to draft a declaration of independence so that such a document could be issued quickly once Lee's motion passed. The committee's members included Jefferson, Livingston, John Adams, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Pennsylvania's Benjamin Franklin. The drafting committee met, decided what the declaration should say and how it would be organized, then asked Jefferson to prepare a draft.

Meanwhile, Adams -- who did more to win Congress's consent to independence than any other delegate -- worked feverishly to bring popular pressure on the governments of recalcitrant colonies so they would change the instructions issued to their congressional delegates. By June 28, when the Committee of Five submitted to Congress a draft declaration, only Maryland and New York had failed to allow their delegates to vote for independence. That night Maryland fell into line.

Even so, when the Committee of the Whole again took up Lee's resolution, on July 1, only nine colonies voted in favor (the four New England states, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia). South Carolina and Pennsylvania opposed the proposition, Delaware's two delegates split, and New York's abstained because their twelvemonth-old instructions precluded them from approving anything that impeded reconciliation with the mother country. Edward Rutledge now asked that Congress put off its decision until the next day, since he thought that the South Carolina delegation would then vote in favor "for the sake of unanimity." When Congress took its final tally on July 2, the nine affirmative votes of the day before had grown to twelve: Not only South Carolina voted in favor, but so did Delaware -- the arrival of Caesar Rodney broke the tie in that delegation's vote -- and Pennsylvania. Only New York held out. Then on July 9 it, too, allowed its delegates to add their approval to that of delegates from the other twelve colonies, lamenting still the "cruel necessity" that made independence "unavoidable."

Once independence had been adopted, Congress again formed itself into a Committee of the Whole. It then spent the better part of two days editing the draft declaration submitted by its Committee of Five, rewriting or chopping off large sections of text. Finally, on July 4, Congress approved the revised Declaration and ordered it to be printed and sent to the several states and to the commanding officers of the Continental Army. By formally announcing and justifying the end of British rule, that document, as letters from Congress's president, John Hancock, explained, laid "the Ground & Foundation" of American self-government. As a result, it had to be proclaimed not only before American troops in the hope that it would inspire them to fight more ardently for what was now the cause of both liberty and national independence but throughout the country, and "in such a Manner, that the People may be universally informed of it."

Not until four days later did a committee of Congress -- not Congress itself -- get around to sending a copy of the Declaration to its emissary in Paris, Silas Deane, with orders to present it to the court of France and send copies to "the other Courts of Europe." Unfortunately the original letter was lost, and the next failed to reach Deane until November, when news of American independence had circulated for months. To make matters worse, it arrived with only a brief note from the committee and in an envelope that lacked a seal, an unfortunately slipshod way, complained Deane, to announce the arrival of the United States among the powers of the earth to "old and powerfull states." Despite the Declaration's reference to the "opinions of mankind," it was obviously meant first and foremost for a home audience.

As copies of the Declaration spread through the states and were publicly read at town meetings, religious services, court days, or wherever else people assembled, Americans marked the occasion with appropriate rituals. They lit great bonfires, "illuminated" their windows with candles, fired guns, rang bells, tore down and destroyed the symbols of monarchy on public buildings, churches, or tavern signs, and "fixed up" on the walls of their homes broadside or newspaper copies of the Declaration of Independence.

But what exactly were they celebrating? The news, not the vehicle that brought it; independence and the assumption of self-government, not the document that announced Congress's decision to break with Britain. Considering how revered a position the Declaration of Independence later won in the minds and hearts of the people, Americans' disregard for it in the first years of the new nation verges on the unbelievable. One colonial newspaper dismissed the Declaration's extensive charges against the king as just another "recapitulation of injuries," one, it seems, in a series, and not particularly remarkable compared with earlier "catalogues of grievances." Citations of the Declaration were usually drawn from its final paragraph, which said that the united colonies "are and of Right ought to be Free and Independent states" and were "Absolved of all Allegiance to the British Crown" -- words from the Lee resolution that Congress had inserted into the committee draft. Independence was new; the rest of the Declaration seemed all too familiar to Americans, a restatement of what they and their representatives had already said time and again.

The adoption of independence was, however, from the beginning confused with its declaration. Differences in the meaning of the word declare contributed to the confusion. Before the Declaration of Independence was issued -- while, in fact, Congress was still editing Jefferson's draft -- Pennsylvania newspapers announced that on July 2 the Continental Congress had "declared the United Colonies Free and Independent States," by which it meant simply that it had officially accepted that status. Newspapers in other colonies repeated the story. In later years the "Anniversary of the United States of America" came to be celebrated on the date Congress had approved the Declaration of Independence. That began, it seems, by accident. In 1777 no member of Congress thought of marking the anniversary of independence at all until July 3, when it was too late to honor July 2. As a result, the celebration took place on the Fourth, and that became the tradition. At least one delegate spoke of "celebrating the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence," but over the next few years references to the anniversary of independence and of the Declaration seem to have been virtually interchangeable.

Accounts of the events at Philadelphia on July 4, 1777, say quite a bit about the music played by a band of Hessian soldiers who had been captured at the Battle of Trenton the previous December, and the "splended illumination" of houses, but little about the Declaration. Thereafter, in the late 1770s and 1780s, the Fourth of July was not regularly celebrated; indeed, the holiday seems to have declined in popularity once the Revolutionary War ended. When it was remembered, however, festivities seldom, if ever -- to judge by newspaper accounts -- involved a public reading of the Declaration of Independence. It was as if that document had done its work in carrying news of independence to the people, and it neither needed nor deserved further commemoration. No mention was made of Thomas Jefferson's role in composing the document, since that was not yet public knowledge, and no suggestion appeared that the Declaration itself was, as posterity would have it, unusually eloquent or powerful.

In fact, one of the very few public comments on the document's literary qualities came in a Virginia newspaper's account of a 1777 speech by John Wilkes, an English radical and a long-time supporter of the Americans, in the House of Commons. Wilkes set out to answer a fellow member of Parliament who had attacked the Declaration of Independence as "a wretched composition, very ill written, drawn up with a view to captivate the people." Curiously, Wilkes seemed to agree with that description. The purpose of the document, he said, was indeed to captivate the American people, who were not much impressed by "the polished periods, the harmonious, happy expressions, with all the grace, ease, and elegance of a beautiful diction" that Englishmen valued. What they liked was "manly, nervous sense ... even in the most awkward and uncouth dress of language."

All that began to change in the 1790s, when, in the midst of bitter partisan conflict, the modern understanding and reputation of the Declaration of Independence first emerged. Until that time celebrations of the Fourth were controlled by nationalists who found a home in the Federalist party, and their earlier inattention to the Declaration hardened into a rigid hostility after 1790. The document's anti-British character was an embarrassment to Federalists who sought economic and diplomatic rapprochement with Britain. The language of equality and rights in the Declaration was different from that of the Declaration of the Rights of Man issued by the French National Assembly in 1789, but it still seemed too "French" for the comfort of Federalists, who, after the execution of Louis XVI and the onset of the Terror, lost whatever sympathy for the French Revolution they had once felt. Moreover, they understandably found it best to say as little as possible about a fundamental American text that had been drafted by a leader of the opposing Republican party.

It was, then, the Republicans who began to celebrate the Declaration of Independence as a "deathless instrument" written by "the immortal Jefferson." The Republicans saw themselves as the defenders of the American Republic of 1776 against subversion by pro-British "monarchists," and they hoped that by recalling the causes of independence, they would make their countrymen wary of further dealings with Great Britain. They were also delighted to identify the founding principles of the American Revolution with those of America's sister republic in France. At their Fourth of July celebrations, Republicans read the Declaration of Independence, and their newspapers reprinted it. Moreover, in their hands the attention that had at first focused on the last part of the Declaration shifted toward its opening paragraphs and the "self-evident truths" they stated. The Declaration, as a Republican newspaper said on July 7, 1792, was not to be celebrated merely "as affecting the separation of one country from the jurisdiction of another"; it had an enduring significance for established governments because it provided a "definition of the rights of man, and the end of civil government."

The Federalists responded that Jefferson had not written the Declaration alone. The drafting committee -- including John Adams, a Federalist -- had also contributed to its creation. And Jefferson's role as "the scribe who penned the declaration" had not been so distinguished as his followers suggested. Federalists rediscovered similarities between the Declaration and Locke's Second Treatise of Government that Richard Henry Lee had noticed long before and used them to argue that even the "small part of that memorable instrument" that could be attributed to Jefferson "he stole from Locke's Essays." But after the War of 1812, the Federalist party slipped from sight, and with it, efforts to disparage the Declaration of Independence.

When a new party system formed in the late 1820s and 1830s, both Whigs and Jacksonians claimed descent from Jefferson and his party and so accepted the old Republican position on the Declaration and Jefferson's glorious role in its creation. By then, too, a new generation of Americans had come of age and made preservation of the nation's revolutionary history its particular mission. Its efforts, and its reverential attitude toward the revolutionaries and their works, also helped establish the Declaration of Independence as an important icon of American identity.

The change came suddenly. As late as January 1817 John Adams said that his country had no interest in its past. "I see no disposition to celebrate or remember, or even Curiosity to enquire into the Characters, Actions, or Events of the Revolution," he wrote the artist John Trumbull. But a little more than a month later Congress commissioned Trumbull to produce four large paintings commemorating the Revolution, which were to hang in the rotunda of the new American Capitol. For Trumbull, the most important of the series, and the one to which he first turned, was the Declaration of Independence. He based that work on a smaller painting he had done between 1786 and 1793 that showed the drafting committee presenting its work to Congress. When the new twelve-by-eighteen-foot canvas was completed in 1818, Trumbull exhibited it to large crowds in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore before delivering it to Washington; indeed, The Declaration of Independence was the most popular of all the paintings Trumbull did for the Capitol.

Soon copies of the document were being published and sold briskly, which perhaps was what inspired Secretary of State John Quincy Adams to have an exact facsimile of the Declaration, the only one ever produced, made in 1823. Congress had it distributed throughout the country. Books also started to appear: the collected biographies of those who signed the Declaration in nine volumes by Joseph M. Sanderson (1823-27) or one volume by Charles A. Goodrich (1831), full biographies of individual revolutionaries that were often written by descendants who used family papers, and collections of revolutionary documents edited by such notable figures as Hezekiah Niles, Jared Sparks, and Peter Force.

Postwar efforts to preserve the memories and records of the Revolution were undertaken in a mood of near panic. Many documents remained in private hands, where they were gradually separated from one another and lost. Even worse, many revolutionaries had died, taking with them precious memories that were gone forever. The presence of living remnants of the revolutionary generation seemed so important in preserving its tradition that Americans watched anxiously as their numbers declined. These attitudes first appeared in the decade before 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of independence, but they persisted on into the Civil War. In 1864 the Reverend Elias Brewster Hillard noted that only seven of those who had fought in the Revolutionary War still survived, and he hurried to interview and photograph those "venerable and now sacred men" for the benefit of posterity. "The present is the last generation that will be connected by living link with the great period in which our national independence was achieved," he wrote in the introduction to his book The Last Men of the Revolution. "Our own are the last eyes that will look on men who looked on Washington; our ears the last that will hear the living voices of those who heard his words. Henceforth the American Revolution will be known among men by the silent record of history alone."

Most of the men Hillard interviewed had played modest roles in the Revolution. In the early 1820s, however, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were still alive, and as the only surviving members of the committee that had drafted the Declaration of Independence, they attracted an extraordinary outpouring of attention. Pilgrims, invited and uninvited, flocked particularly to Monticello, hoping to catch a glimpse of the author of the Declaration and making nuisances of themselves. One woman, it is said, even smashed a window to get a better view of the old man. As a eulogist noted after the deaths of both Adams and Jefferson on, miraculously, July 4, 1826, the world had not waited for death to "sanctify" their names. Even while they remained alive, their homes became "shrines" to which lovers of liberty and admirers of genius flocked "from every land."

Adams, in truth, was miffed by Jefferson's celebrity as the penman of Independence. The drafting of the Declaration of Independence, he thought, had assumed an exaggerated importance. Jefferson perhaps agreed; he, too, cautioned a correspondent against giving too much emphasis to "mere composition." The Declaration, he said, had not and had not been meant to be an original or novel creation; his assignment had been to produce "an expression of the American mind, and to give that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion."

Jefferson, however, played an important role in rescuing the Declaration from obscurity and making it a defining event of the revolutionary "heroic age." It was he who first suggested that the young John Trumbull paint The Declaration of Independence. And Trumbull's first sketch of his famous painting shares a piece of drawing paper with a sketch by Jefferson, executed in Paris sometime in 1786, of the assembly room in the Old Pennsylvania State House, now known as Independence Hall. Trumbull's painting of the scene carefully followed Jefferson's sketch, which unfortunately included architectural inaccuracies, as Trumbull later learned to his dismay.

Jefferson also spent hour after hour answering, in longhand, letters that he said numbered 1,267 in 1820, many of which asked questions about the Declaration and its creation. Unfortunately, his responses, like the sketch he made for Trumbull, were inaccurate in many details. Even his account of the drafting process, retold in an important letter to James Madison of 1823 that has been accepted by one authority after another, conflicts with a note he sent Benjamin Franklin in June 1776. Jefferson forgot, in short, how substantial a role other members of the drafting committee had played in framing the Declaration and adjusting its text before it was submitted to Congress.

Indeed, in old age Jefferson found enormous consolation in the fact that he was, as he ordered inscribed on his tomb, "Author of the Declaration of American Independence." More than anything else he had done, that role came to justify his life. It saved him from a despair that he suffered at the time of the Missouri crisis, when everything the Revolution had accomplished seemed to him in jeopardy, and that was later fed by problems at the University of Virginia, his own deteriorating health, and personal financial troubles so severe that he feared the loss of his beloved home, Monticello (those troubles, incidentally, virtually precluded him from freeing more than a handful of slaves at his death). The Declaration, as he told Madison, was "the fundamental act of union of these States," a document that should be recalled "to cherish the principles of the instrument in the bosoms of our own citizens." Again in 1824 he interpreted the government's re-publication of the Declaration as "a pledge of adhesion to its principles and of a sacred determination to maintain and perpetuate them," which he described as a "holy purpose."

But just which principles did he mean? Those in the Declaration's second paragraph, which he understood exactly as they had been understood in 1776 --as an assertion primarily of the right of revolution. Jefferson composed the long sentence beginning "We hold these truths to be self-evident" in a well-known eighteenth-century rhetorical style by which one phrase was piled on another and the meaning of the whole became clear only at the end. The sequence ended with an assertion of the "Right of the People to alter or to abolish" any government that failed to secure their inalienable rights and to institute a new form of government more likely "to effect their Safety and Happiness." That was the right Americans were exercising in July 1776, and it seemed no less relevant in the 1820s, when revolutionary movements were sweeping through Europe and Latin America. The American example would be, as Jefferson said in the last letter of his life, a "signal arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government."

Others, however, emphasized the opening phrases of the sentence that began the Declaration's second paragraph, particularly "the memorable assertion, that `all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.'" That passage, the eulogist John Sergeant said at Philadelphia in July 1826, was the "text of the revolution," the "ruling vital principle" that had inspired the men of the 1770s, who "looked forward through succeeding generations, and saw stamped upon all their institutions, the great principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence." In Hallowell, Maine, another eulogist, Peleg Sprague, similarly described the Declaration of Independence as an assertion "by a whole people, of ... the native equality of the human race, as the true foundation of all political, of all human institutions."

And so an interpretation of the declaration that had emerged in the 1790s became ever more widely repeated. The equality that Sergeant and Sprague emphasized was not, however, asserted for the first time in the Declaration of Independence. Even before Congress published its Declaration, one revolutionary document after another had associated equality with a new American republic and suggested enough different meanings of that term-equal rights, equal access to office, equal voting power -- to keep Americans busy sorting them out and fighting over in -- egalitarian practices far into the future. Jefferson, in fact, adapted those most remembered opening lines of the Declaration's second paragraph from a draft Declaration of Rights for Virginia, written by George Mason and revised by a committee of the Virginia convention, which appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette on June 12, 1776, the day after the Committee of Five was appointed and perhaps the day it first met. Whether on his own inspiration or under instructions from the committee, Jefferson began with the Mason draft, which he gradually tightened into a more compressed and eloquent statement. He took, for example, Mason's statement that "all men are born equally free and independant," rewrote it to say they were "created equal & independent," and then cut out the "& independent."

Jefferson was not alone in adapting the Mason text for his purposes. The Virginia convention revised the Mason draft before enacting Virginia's Declaration of Rights, which said that all men were "by nature" equally free and independent. Several other states -- including Pennsylvania (1776), Vermont (1777), Massachusetts (1780), and New Hampshire (1784) -- remained closer to Mason's wording, including in their state bill of rights the assertions that men were "born free and equal" or "born equally free and independent." Unlike the Declaration of Independence, moreover, the state bills or "declarations" of rights became (after an initial period of confusion) legally binding. Americans' first efforts to work out the meaning of the equality written into their founding documents therefore occurred on the state level.

In Massachusetts, for example, several slaves won their freedom in the 1780s by arguing before the state's Supreme Judicial Court that the provision in the state's bill of rights that all men were born free and equal made slavery unlawful. Later, in the famous case of Commonwealth v. Aves (1836), Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled that those words were sufficient to end slavery in Massachusetts, indeed that it would be difficult to find others "more precisely adapted to the abolition of negro slavery." White Americans also found the equality provisions in their state bills of rights useful. In the Virginia constitutional convention of 1829-30, for example, a delegate from the trans-Appalachian West, John R. Cooke, cited that "sacred instrument" the Virginia Declaration of Rights against the state's system of representing all counties equally in the legislature regardless of their populations and its imposition of a property qualification for the vote, both of which gave disproportional power to men in the eastern part of the state. The framers of Virginia's 1776 constitution allowed those practices to persist despite their violation of the equality affirmed in the Declaration of Rights, Cooke said, because there were limits on how much they dared change "in the midst of war." They therefore left it for posterity to resolve the inconsistency "as soon as leisure should be afforded them." In the hands of men like Cooke, the Virginia Declaration of Rights became a practical program of reform to be realized over time, as the Declaration of Independence would later be for Abraham Lincoln.

But why, if the states had legally binding statements of men's equality, should anyone turn to the Declaration of Independence? Because not all states had bills of rights, and not all the bills of rights that did exist included statements on equality. Moreover, neither the federal Constitution nor the federal Bill of Rights asserted men's natural equality or their possession of inalienable rights or the right of the people to reject or change their government. As a result, contenders in national politics who found those old revolutionary principles useful had to cite the Declaration of Independence. It was all they had.

The sacred stature given the declaration after 1815 made it extremely useful for causes attempting to seize the moral high ground in public debate. Beginning about 1820, workers, farmers, women's rights advocates, and other groups persistently used the Declaration of Independence to justify their quest for equality and their opposition to the "tyranny" of factory owners or railroads or great corporations or the male power structure. It remained, however, especially easy for the opponents of slavery to cite the Declaration on behalf of their cause. Eighteenth-century statements of equality referred to men in a state of nature, before governments were created, and asserted that no persons acquired legitimate authority over others without their consent. If so, a system of slavery in which men were born the subjects and indeed the property of others was profoundly wrong. In short, the same principle that denied kings a right to rule by inheritance alone undercut the right of masters to own slaves whose status was determined by birth, not consent. The kinship of the Declaration of Independence with the cause of anti-slavery was understood from the beginning -- which explains why gradual emancipation acts, such as those in New York and New Jersey, took effect on July 4 in 1799 and 1804 and why Nat Turner's rebellion was originally planned for July 4, 1831.

Even in the eighteenth century, however, assertions of men's equal birth provoked dissent. As slavery became an increasingly divisive issue, denials that men were naturally equal multiplied. Men were not created equal in Virginia, John Tyler insisted during the Missouri debates of 1820: "No, sir, the principle, although lovely and beautiful, cannot obliterate those distinctions in society which society itself engenders and gives birth to." Six years later the acerbic, self-styled Virginia aristocrat John Randolph called the notion of man's equal creation "a falsehood, and a most pernicious falsehood, even though I find it in the Declaration of Independence." Man was born in a state of "perfect helplessness and ignorance" and so was from the start dependent on others. There was "not a word of truth" in the notion that men were created equal, repeated South Carolina's John C. Calhoun in 1848. Men could not survive, much less develop their talents, alone; the political state, in which some exercised authority and others obeyed, was in fact man's "natural state," that in which he "is born, lives and dies." For a long time the "false and dangerous" doctrine that men were created equal had lain "dormant," but by the late 1840s Americans had begun "to experience the danger of admitting so great an error ... in the declaration of independence," where it had been inserted needlessly, Calhoun said, since separation from Britain could have been justified without it.

Five years later, in senate debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Indiana's John Pettit pronounced his widely quoted statement that the supposed "self-evident truth" of man's equal creation was in fact "a self-evident lie." Ohio's senator Benjamin Franklin Wade, an outspoken opponent of slavery known for his vituperative style and intense patriotism, rose to reply. Perhaps Wade's first and middle names gave him a special bond with the Declaration and its creators. The "great declaration cost our forefathers too dear," he said, to be so "lightly thrown away by their children." Without its inspiring principles the Americans could not have won their independence; for the revolutionary generation the "great truths" in that "immortal instrument," the Declaration of Independence, were "worth the sacrifice of all else on earth, even life itself." How, then, were men equal? Not, surely, in physical power or intellect. The "good old Declaration" said "that all men are equal, and have inalienable rights; that is, (they are) equal in point of right; that no man has a right to trample on another." Where those rights were wrested from men through force or fraud, justice demanded that they be "restored without delay."

Abraham Lincoln, a little known forty-four-year-old lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, who had served one term in Congress before being turned out of office, read these debates, was aroused as by nothing before, and began to pick up the dropped threads of his political career. Like Wade, Lincoln idealized the men of the American Revolution, who were for him "a forest of giant oaks," "a fortress of strength," "iron men." He also shared the deep concern of his contemporaries as the "silent artillery of time" removed them and the "living history" they embodied from this world. Before the 1850s, however, Lincoln seems to have had relatively little interest in the Declaration of Independence. Then, suddenly, that document and its assertion that all men were created equal became his "ancient faith," the "father of all moral principles," an "axiom" of free society. He was provoked by the attacks of men such as Pettit and Calhoun. And he made the arguments of those who defended the Declaration his own, much as Jefferson had done with Mason's text, reworking the ideas from speech to speech, pushing their logic, and eventually, at Gettysburg in 1863, arriving at a simple statement of profound eloquence. In time his understanding of the Declaration of Independence would become that of the nation.

Lincoln's position emerged fully and powerfully during his debates with Illinois's senator Stephen Douglas, a Democrat who had proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and whose seat Lincoln sought in 1858. They were an odd couple, Douglas and Lincoln, as different physically -- at full height Douglas came only to Lincoln's shoulders -- as they were in style. Douglas wore well-tailored clothes; Lincoln's barely covered his limbs. Douglas was in general the more polished speaker; Lincoln sometimes rambled on, losing his point and his audience, although he could also, especially with a prepared text, be a powerful orator. The greatest difference between them was, however, in the positions they took on the future of slavery and the meaning of the Declaration of Independence.

Douglas defended the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed the people of those states to permit slavery within their borders, as consistent with the revolutionary heritage. After all, in instructing their delegates to vote for independence, one state after another had explicitly retained the exclusive right of defining its domestic institutions. Moreover, the Declaration of Independence carried no implications for slavery, since its statement on equality referred to white men only. In fact, Douglas said, it simply meant that American colonists of European descent had equal rights with the King's subjects in Great Britain. The signers were not thinking of "the negro or ... savage Indians, or the Feejee, or the Malay, or any other inferior or degraded race." Otherwise they would have been honor bound to free their own slaves, which not even Thomas Jefferson did. The Declaration had only one purpose: to explain and justify American independence.

To Lincoln, Douglas's argument left only a "mangled ruin" of the Declaration of Independence, whose "plain, unmistakable language" said "all men" were created equal. In affirming that government derived its "just powers from the consent of the governed," the Declaration also said that no man could rightly govern others without their consent. If, then, "the negro is a man," was it not a "total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself?" To govern a man without his consent was "despotism." Moreover, to confine the Declaration's significance to the British peoples of 1776 denied its meaning, Lincoln charged, not only for Douglas's "inferior races" but for the French, Irish, German, Scandinavian, and other immigrants who had come to America after the Revolution. For them the promise of equality linked new Americans with the founding generation; it was an "electric cord" that bound them into the nation "as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration," and so made one people out of many. Lincoln believed that the Declaration "contemplated the progressive improvement in the condition of all men everywhere." If instead it was only a justification of independence "without the germ, or even the suggestion of the individual rights of man in it," the document was "of no practical use now -- mere rubbish -- old wadding left to rot on the battlefield after the victory is won," an "interesting memorial of the dead past . . . shorn of its vitality, and practical value."

Like Wade, Lincoln denied that the signers meant that men were equal in "all respects," including "color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity." He, too, made sense of the Declaration's assertion of man's equal creation by eliding it with the next, separate statement on rights. The signers, he insisted, said men were equal in having "`certain inalienable rights....' This they said, and this they meant." Like John Cooke in Virginia three decades before, Lincoln thought the Founders allowed the persistence of practices at odds with their principles for reasons of necessity: to establish the Constitution demanded that slavery continue in those original states that chose to keep it. "We could not secure the good we did if we grasped for more," but that did not "destroy the principle that is the charter of our liberties." Nor did it mean that slavery had to be allowed in states not yet organized in 1776, such as Kansas and Nebraska.

Again like Cooke, Lincoln claimed that the authors of the Declaration understood its second paragraph as setting a standard for free men whose principles should be realized "as fast as circumstances ... permit." They wanted that standard to be "familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, and constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere." And if, as Calhoun said, American independence could have been declared without any assertion of human equality and inalienable rights, that made its inclusion all the more wonderful. "All honor to Jefferson," Lincoln said in a letter of 1859, "to the man who ... had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and to embalm it there," where it would remain "a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression."

Jefferson and the members of the Second Continental Congress did not understand what they were doing in quite that way on July 4, 1776. For them, it was enough for the Declaration to be "merely revolutionary." But if Douglas's history was more accurate, Lincoln's reading of the Declaration was better suited to the needs of the Republic in the mid-nineteenth century, when the standard of revolution had passed to Southern secessionists and to radical abolitionists who also called for disunion. In his hands the Declaration became first and foremost a living document for an established society, a set of goals to be realized over time, the dream of "something better, than a mere change of masters" that explained why "our fathers" fought and endured until they won the Revolutionary War. In the Civil War, too, Lincoln told Congress on July 4, 1861, the North fought not only to save the Union but to preserve a form of government "whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men --to lift artificial weights from all shoulders -- to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all." The rebellion it opposed was at base an effort "to overthrow the principle that all men were created equal." And so the Union victory at Gettysburg in 1863 became for him a vindication of that proposition, to which the nation's fathers had committed it in 1776, and a challenge to complete the "unfinished work" of the Union dead and bring to "this nation, under God, a new birth of freedom."

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address stated briefly and eloquently convictions he had developed over the previous decade, convictions that on point after point echoed earlier Americans: Republicans of the 1790s, the eulogists Peleg Sprague and John Sergeant in 1826, John Cooke in the Virginia convention a few years later, Benjamin Wade in 1853. Some of those men he knew; others were unfamiliar to him, but they had also struggled to understand the practical implications of their revolutionary heritage and followed the same logic to the same conclusions. The Declaration of Independence Lincoln left was not Jefferson's Declaration, although Jefferson and other revolutionaries shared the values Lincoln and others stressed: equality, human rights, government by consent. Nor was Lincoln's Declaration of Independence solely his creation. It remained an "expression of the American mind," not, of course, what all Americans thought but what many had come to accept. And its implications continued to evolve after Lincoln's death. In 1858 he had written a correspondent that the language of the Declaration of Independence was at odds with slavery but did not require political and social equality for free black Americans. Few disagreed then. How many would agree today?

The Declaration of Independence is in fact a curious document. After the Civil War members of Lincoln's party tried to write its principles into the Constitution by enacting the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which is why issues of racial or age or gender equality are now so often fought out in the courts. But the Declaration of Independence itself is not and has never been legally binding. Its power comes from its capacity to inspire and move the hearts of living Americans, and its meaning lies in what they choose to make of it. It has been at once a cause of controversy, pushing as it does against established habits and conventions, and a unifying national icon, a legacy and a new creation that binds the revolutionaries to descendants who confronted and continue to confront issues the Founders did not know or failed to resolve. On Independence Day, then, Americans celebrate not simply the birth of their nation or the legacy of a few great men. They also commemorate a Declaration of Independence that is their own collective work now and through time. And that, finally, makes sense of the Fourth of July.

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2. Fourth of July '98

PLAYING WITH FIRE By Jack Kelly

(This article has been cleared for republication in English and in translation by USIS and the press outside the United States; it may also be carried over the Internet. Credit to the author and the following note must appear on the title page of any reprint.

Copyright 1997 American Heritage, Inc. All rights reserved.

"Reprinted from AMERICAN HERITAGE, August 7, 1997.)

A tugboat pushes us slowly past the waterfront of Fall River, Massachusetts. Lined up on the steel decks of two barges are twelve hundred mortars packed with explosive charges. Overhead, evening sunlight drapes white mountains of summer clouds.

"I get a few knots in my stomach about now," says Frank M. Coluccio, an easygoing mustached man of fifty who is president of Legion Fireworks. He is sorting out the wires that will connect his guns to an electric control panel. The last-minute jitters are understandable. In an hour Coluccio and his partner, Jennie Bradford, will take the stage in front of tens of thousands of eager spectators for one of the company's biggest shows of the season. While they mount their fireworks extravaganza to cap an annual city celebration, the two will be stationed in the midst of a storm of exploding gunpowder potent enough to heave shells the size of a basketball a thousand feet into the air. It gives, Coluccio says, "an adrenaline rush."

Legion carries on a venerable craft tradition that has permeated pyrotechnics since it arrived in Italy from China five hundred years ago. Using methods that have changed little over centuries and formulas passed down by word of mouth, Coluccio and his people hand-fashion many of their shells in small workshops. The well-known pyrotechnic clans -- the Gruccis of Long Island or the Zambellis of New Castle, Pennsylvania -- grab the glamour shows. But it's the smaller firms that decorate the Fourth of July in towns across the country and provide the fiery, satisfying climax to firefighters' carnivals, ethnic fairs, and municipal celebrations.

Man is the only animal that is afraid of the dark and the only one that has mastered fire. Pyrotechnics is the art of artificial fire, fire that is independent of the diluted oxygen in the air. Fireworks mixtures include an oxidizer, a material that gives up oxygen when heated. This chemical, typically potassium nitrate, or saltpeter, must be purified, ground to a powder, and mixed with equally pulverized fuel. The resulting composition burns with astonishing rapidity and vigor.

We can trace the roots of pyrotechnics to medieval China, where alchemists experimented with purified chemicals in search of an elixir of life. Perhaps having observed how saltpeter lent energy to fire, around A.D. 850 they tried combining the mineral with charcoal and sulfur. The result proved magical. The mixture, which in the West came to be known as gunpowder, was one of the discoveries, according to the philosopher Francis Bacon, that revolutionized the world.

Yet the invention did not revolutionize Chinese society. The idea that the Chinese used gunpowder only for celebration goes too far; in fact they invented flame-throwing fire lances and incendiary war rockets early on. But without a true gun the Chinese did not fundamentally alter their method of making war. By the twelfth century they were using huo yao, "fire drug," for pleasurable diversions.

When gunpowder reached Europe in the thirteenth century, it inspired the cannon, which spelled the end of aristocratic feudalism and shaped the modern nation-state. At the same time, the awakening of knowledge that followed the Dark Ages nurtured the birth of pyrotechnics, which by the 1400s had begun to be incorporated into pageants and celebrations across Europe, a flickering of controlled fire to welcome the Renaissance.

At fall river, as we chug out to take our position before the city's riverside park, we pass the USS MASSACHUSETTS, now part of a naval museum. The sight of the battleship's massive sixteen-inch guns invokes the connection between pyrotechnics and warfare. Up until the eighteenth century, armies commonly employed civilian fire masters to handle their artillery. Their profession was closely associated with alchemy, danger, and dark secrets. They supervised cannon in combat and fired salutes to celebrate victories. They also began to mount elaborate fireworks displays for public festivities.

Early pyrotechnicians developed three basic gunpowder tools that still provide most of the effects we see today. First they contained the powder in a closed case. Light the case with a fuse, and the sudden burning creates gas that explodes the container. Thus the firecracker, the larger "salute," or the bursting shells of an aerial display.

When they packed powder into a tube closed at one end, fire masters observed, hot gases, flame, and sparks rushed out the other. The result was a fountain of fire. Some of the earliest pyrotechnics, in fifteenth-century Florence and Siena, involved large plaster figures that spewed fire from their eyes and mouths. When the tube was reversed, the expanding gas gave it forward momentum, turning it into a rocket.

Finally, fire masters learned to ram a projectile down on top of the powder in those same closed-end pipes. Tonight that tool, the gun, in the form of hundreds of cardboard, plastic, and steel mortars, will hurl aloft the thousands of aerial fireworks we'll be seeing.

A pyrotechnician's work begins months before the summer season. During the winter Frank Coluccio applies himself to the exacting and repetitive work of constructing shells, the innocuous-looking "bombs" that yield the color, sound, and glitter of a display. Purchased shells can be more economical, but Coluccio prefers to use traditional custom-built ones in his shows.

"Five years ago we made 80 percent of our shells," explains Legion's vice president, Jennie Bradford, a compact and energetic woman of thirty-six. "Now, because fireworks from Asia have gotten so cheap, probably 60 percent of our shows consist of high quality shells that we purchase, mostly from China."

The Legion plant is tucked unobtrusively into a seventeen-acre site near the Hudson River, seventy miles north of New York City. The work goes on in thirty-three small and widely spaced buildings, which include storage magazines, drying rooms, and workshops. Air-powered or hydraulic presses are used for a few operations, but much of the construction of fireworks is still carried out by hand. No better method has been found.

Bradford and Coluccio are Legion's only full-time employees; they hire a cadre of experienced "shooters" to help fire shows during the summer. They also buy shells from master shell builders like David Datres, a fifty-two year-old railroad-communications cable splicer who has long pursued pyrotechnics as a sideline.

One of Datres's specialties is the charcoal "crossette," or splitting comet shell. He shows me how he packs comets, small cylinders of charcoal-rich composition, into the cardboard cylinder that will carry them aloft. Each comet contains a tiny firecracker that will blow it apart, multiplying the effect of golden trails of sparks. "This is really a labor of love," he says. "I make them the way the old Italians used to." The technology for shells of this type can be traced back into the sixteenth century.

Timing is everything in fireworks. With each shell he makes, Datres carefully measures and arranges the ingredients to produce a calculated pattern in the sky. He wraps the whole shell in glued paper and string, securing it against the force of the explosion that will send it flying. "I once put together a shell for a competition," he says, "that took me sixty hours to construct. It went off in twelve seconds."

Mixing the volatile flash powder that gives salutes their bang is the most dangerous task in any fireworks firm. At Legion it's carried out on humid days in the spring and fall to minimize the threat from static electricity. "We realize the danger," Coluccio says. "That's why we're conscious of safety every minute we're working."

In their beginnings fireworks were not the center of a spectacle. They served as theatrical effects during pageants involving dragons, giants, and enchanted islands. The Italians, who first developed fireworks in Europe and have maintained an affinity for the art ever since, built elaborate facades --called temples or machines whose porticoes and columns served as backdrops for the pyrotechnic fountains, rockets, and Roman candles that illuminated saints' days or other religious festivals.

The eighteenth century ushered in the golden age of classical fireworks. In the early 1700s the Ruggieri brothers, whose name would become synonymous with the craft, moved from their native Bologna to France and became fire masters to the court of Louis XV, mounting increasingly opulent spectacles at Versailles. During his sojourn in Paris, Thomas Jefferson saw displays mounted by the Ruggieris.

Fireworks arrived in America as early as 1608, when Capt. John Smith "fired a few rockets" to impress the natives during the difficult days of the Jamestown colony. At the time of the Revolution John Adams, in a letter to his wife, predicted that the signing of the Declaration of Independence would be celebrated with "bonfires and illuminations from this time forward forevermore." While "illuminations" is sometimes taken to mean fireworks, it's more likely that he was referring to the custom, before streetlights were common, of illuminating buildings and public squares with candles in windows and on walls. But pyrotechnics soon did become a Fourth of July institution. Skyrockets filled the air over Newport in 1781, and Boston put on its first full-scale Independence Day fireworks display in 1805.

By the end of the 1700s most of the effects we see today were in common use. In the air, shells, known in those days as balloons, burst into patterns of fire, sparks, and darting "fisgigs." Many types of rockets soared skyward, including the caduceus, which left behind a spiral trail. On the ground, fire masters set off fountains, suns, and trees of flame. Spectators also witnessed rockets that leaped in and out of the water like dolphins and wheels that metamorphosed through fifteen patterns. An early treatise gives directions for producing "silver and gold raine" by filling thousands of goose quills with powder and packing them into the head of a rocket.

What classical fireworks lacked was color. Granulated charcoal left a trail of lingering orange sparks. Iron filings glowed white. Chemical additions like amber could tint flames with pastels, but the deep and varied colors that we enjoy today were unknown.

During much of the early history of fireworks, pyrotechnicians relied on skyrockets as a mainstay of their shows. Rockets carry their fuel with them, leaving a brilliant trail of sparks as they soar into the sky. When the fuel is spent, the rocket's "garniture" explodes, setting off reports and a spray of stars or serpents. But skyrockets are not often used in commercial shows today. They carry a smaller payload than shells shot from a gun, and their trajectory is less predictable. Moreover, they require the weight of long wooden shafts to keep on course, and these sticks present a danger as they fall.

Legion still fires smaller shows by hand, in the manner of traditional fuochisti. I watched Frank Coluccio set off a display in the little town of Coxsackie, on the edge of the Hudson River. Some of the shells were loaded into mortars in advance, including those for the finale, which filled a long row of guns, the fuses chaining one shell to the next. The rest were laid out under a fireproof tarp, ready to be dropped singly into mortars.

Coluccio extracts one of the shells and lowers it by its fuse down a steel tube about three and a half feet long. As he lets it go, he touches the fuse to a flare. The fire races down to a measured sack of gunpowder at the bottom of the shell. This lift charge explodes with a hollow "thwomp!" During the four seconds the shell takes to reach a height of six hundred feet, a time fuse burns down, finally reaching the burst charge inside. The shell explodes, flinging stars outward in a spherical pattern. The stars are nuggets of chemicals that burn with a colored flame, sometimes changing hues before they die out.

The variety of rich colors that we know today began to appear in the 1830s. Descendants of the Ruggieri brothers were among the first to make stars using potassium chlorate, which causes metal salts to glow with distinctive hues. Salts of copper yield blue, those of strontium red, barium green, and so on. Fire workers also used newly refined metals to brighten their effects, beginning with magnesium in the 1860s. By the end of the century powdered aluminum was offering an inexpensive brilliance. "Its advent opened a new era of the art," wrote the English pyrotechnician Alan St. Hill Brock.

Hand-firing a show has built-in dangers. Fuses burn quickly, leaving the shooter little time to get away from the mortar before the formidable explosion that lifts the shell. Sometimes shells blow up before reaching their intended height, a "low break" that sprays the ground with burning stars. Shooters have been killed when a spark touched off a shell they were preparing to drop into a mortar.

At Coxsackie, before half the shells have been fired, drops of rain begin to splatter on the parking lot that separates the spectators from the shooting area. In minutes it's pouring. The wet-dust smell of a summer shower mixes with the tang of gunpowder. The show goes on. By the end a crowd of soaked spectators cheers an ear-shattering finale that challenges the storm itself.

Rain has always been a worry for fireworks artists. On the Fourth of July in 1876 a massive display was slated for Fairmont Park in Philadelphia to celebrate the nation's centennial. A huge crowd gathered in the sultry evening. As darkness fell, a thunderstorm boiled over. The pyrotechnicians knew they had no choice. According to a contemporary account, "The whole range of fireworks, including temples, gigantic portraits of Washington, mounds, volcanoes, stars, patriotic mottoes, pyramids, and other structures, all on a scale never before seen in America, must be discharged at once or never discharged at all." The audience was "stilled and entranced" by the short but stupendous spectacle.

Throughout the nineteenth century the re-enactment of battles on both land and sea remained a pyrotechnic staple, but pyrotechnicians also began to mount the first of what might be called modern shows: fireworks with no scenery whatever. There also arose a new fashion for set pieces. These were wooden and bamboo frames covered with pyrotechnic lances that created pictures in fire. The Brock family of England were specialists in set pieces, and during the 1880s visiting potentates such as the king of the Maoris or the Shah of Persia marveled to see their own portraits unfurled eighty feet high in colored fire. An unfortunate malfunction on a Brock set piece once caused the eye of Queen Victoria to wink lewdly at the astonished crowd.

In America the English pyrotechnician Henry J. Pain catered to a taste for historical vignettes using fireworks. He operated an amphitheater at Brooklyn's Manhattan Beach, near Coney Island, for many years. Patrons watched actors scurry around in togas as Mount Vesuvius erupted, sending fire streaming onto Pompeii. In 1882 the British fleet shelled the Egyptian port of Alexandria; a year later Pain's customers could view this "magnificent naval and military spectacle" in a fiery re-enactment involving 350 players.

When he was five years old, Legion's president, Frank Coluccio, set a fire under a porch. Later he blew up a toilet in a Catholic school and fired cherry bombs from a slingshot. An early fascination with fire and explosions is typical of many pyrotechnicians I've met.

Fireworks have also helped inspire many budding scientists. "Fired cannon, pop, and firecrackers all day. In the evening had five skyrockets," reads a Fourth of July entry in the diary of the fifteen-year-old Robert Goddard, whose early work in rocketry put America on its path to the moon.

Coluccio followed his father into the masonry trade and for years satisfied his taste for gunpowder through membership in a cannon club. While on a bricklaying job in 1975 he heard Legion workers testing salutes, tracked down the company, and soon became a part-time shooter.

Legion had been founded in 1920 by Joseph Chiarella, who followed a tradition of immigrants bringing pyrotechnics to this country from Italy. He was noted for his elaborate set pieces, such as "The Battle of Bunker Hill," "Flight of a Zeppelin," and a topical "Spirits of 1933" -- a huge bottle outlined in fire to honor the repeal of Prohibition.

"Grandpa" Chiarella died in an explosion at the Legion plant in 1970. Coluccio began running the business eleven years later. He continues to use formulas and methods handed down from the company's founder. He also has followed fireworks tradition by involving his own family in the business: His father, brothers, sister, and in-laws all help out firing shows, especially during the busy Fourth of July season.

Both Coluccio and his partner have the great fortune to have merged vocation and avocation. "I was always involved in the arts," Jennie Bradford explains. "I drew pictures, I worked in the graphic arts. But when I found fireworks, I was home." As the designer of Legion's shows, Bradford selects effects that will enhance one another and surprise the audience. She works in multiple dimensions of space and time and, as a show approaches, she completes a detailed second-by-second script. For electrically fired shows, she sometimes makes an audiotape to cue the shooter and to help coordinate the timing of the firing with any accompanying music.

When I first visited the Legion plant, Bradford, whose enthusiasm about everything connected with fireworks is irresistible, told me, "You have to go to the PGI. That's where you'll meet the real pyros."

The Pyrotechnic Guild International is an organization of fireworks enthusiasts, many of them amateurs. They maintain a deep sense of fireworks tradition; their symbol is the sixteenth century "Green Man," who wore a foliage outfit, carried a sparking torch, and assisted the fire master in mounting displays.

The pyro clan gets together once a year to share information, show off their latest fire-art creations, and enjoy great fireworks. Freely exchanging formulas, methods, and safety tips, PGI members have helped break down the long tradition of secrecy surrounding pyrotechnics. Last year their black powder orgy drew more than 2200 members and their families to Muskegon, Michigan, a quiet Rust Belt town optimistically dubbed the Riviera of the Midwest. One of this band of amiable eccentrics was Jack Fielder, a machinist from the Detroit area.

"To some people," he says, "amateur pyrotechnician sounds a little like amateur neurosurgeon." Fielder laughs through a thick beard and goes on to muse that if he couldn't continue making fireworks, he would take up serious cooking, another pursuit that involves recipes and mysterious transformations. In fact, the composition for stars is rolled out in sheets like cookies, cut, and dusted with gunpowder before being dried. Fielder even makes his own charcoal, an ingredient that yields lush golden sparks.

Amateur pyros have a long tradition. With the coming of the Enlightenment, hobbyists began to experiment with science. Pyrotechnics, Alan St. Hill Brock writes in his History of Fireworks, "seemed to offer to the chemist a means whereby he could demonstrate, publicly and visually, his scientific proficiency." Amateurs still play an important role. "They're a kind of informal research and development arm of the industry," Jennie Bradford says. "They have the time to experiment with new effects and to invent new varieties of shells."

During the day, the convention spins around a range of technical seminars and meetings about such topics as "beginner fountain making," "multi-break shell construction," and "the use of binary flash powders in proximate pyrotechnics." Late in the afternoon a fireworks bazaar opens in a defunct cold-storage warehouse. Outside, a rocket soars over the water with the sound of a skidding tractor trailer; a blast of flash powder sets off a car alarm a quarter of a mile away. The air soon fills with the aroma of brimstone. "Once you smell the smoke," a pyro adage holds, "you'll never again be free."

When darkness arrives, the PGI conventioneers, joined by thousands of lawn-chair-toting Muskegonites, move to a waterfront park for a no-holds barred show. Members compete in thirty-one categories of homemade pyrotechnics, ranging from small rockets to elaborate girandoles, which spin like infernal merry-go-rounds and then go careering up into the zodiac. Michelangelo is said to have constructed one of these devices more than four hundred years ago.

I begin to learn some of the nuances of fireworks. Spherical Chinese and Japanese shells burst into round patterns of color resembling, and named for, flowers-chrysanthemums and peonies. Italian or "salami" shells, so called because of their cylindrical shape, usually achieve their effects by means of multiple timed explosions, each one spilling out colored stars, serpents, whistles, or other effects. A spider-web sprays charcoal streamers. Willows leave trails of sparks weeping in the sky. "A twelve-inch double petal peony, outer petal blue to red mag, inner petal pearl to silver flash, and a red mag pistil," the announcer says, introducing a sky-filling explosion.

What's the point of it all? The essence of the convention is that there is no point. Fireworks are about celebration and beauty and childish delight, pure and simple. "People tell me to act my age," a graying pyro explains. "I just tell them I'm no actor."

Now, with the barges lashed to a mooring buoy and a velvety darkness stretching above the river, the Fall River show, which has taken two days to set up, is ready to go. Two car batteries will provide the power to ignite the electric matches. A warning beep announces that the control panel is armed.

Coluccio and Bradford stay on the barge, sheltered from sparks by a plywood framework, while the five crew members scramble onto the tugboat to watch the show from a couple of hundred yards away. "If anything happens," Bradford says, "we want to be the ones who are on board."

The flashing blue lights of Coast Guard cutters keep back hundreds of pleasure boats. Spectators crowd the shoreline. A few stars glimmer overhead. We've arrived at one of the most delicious phases of any fireworks show, the moment of intense anticipation that precedes the first shell.

When they go home from their convention, PGI members return to a quasi-legal world. While self-preservation pushes most to take reasonable precautions, few are in complete compliance with the law. Defiance may be part of the attraction of the hobby; pyros rate high on insubordination.

The running battle between the promoters and detractors of fireworks is an old one. As early as 1731 a law in Rhode Island banned "the unnecessary firing of Guns, Pistols, squibs, and other Fire-Works." A phalanx of agencies oversees the industry today: the Consumer Product Safety Commission; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the U.S. Department of Transportation; and a crazy quilt of state and local regulators. The result can be maddening, especially for the smaller firms.

"We had a DOT inspector show up once," Bradford tells me. "Because of a printing error by our box company, this guy was going to fine us two thousand dollars per box if we had used any." Professionals also complain about the five-million-dollar insurance coverage required for all vehicles carrying fireworks and the voluminous paperwork burden.

At the PGI I talked to a fireworks manufacturer named Cameron Starr, a tall man from the Dakotas who's a kind of industry Billy Graham. In 1993 Starr founded the National Fireworks Association, to give fireworks people a unified voice -- a formidable challenge in a fiercely competitive industry that includes hundreds of retailers and display companies that operate only a few weeks each year. "We are not against regulations to make things safe," says Starr, who in 1947, as an eleven-year-old entrepreneur, started a roadside fireworks stand. "We're against the ridiculous rules and the nitpicking."

The display industry has an excellent safety record. Professionals hardly need government reminders to operate safely; insurance costs already eat up at least 20 percent of most companies' gross revenues. "People in the fireworks industry regulate themselves," Starr points out, "because they know they will die if they don't."

Punctuating the regulatory debate have been the occasional horrific fireworks accidents. In 1902 William Randolph Hearst, who had just been elected to Congress from New York City in a walkaway, arranged for a massive fireworks display in Madison Square to celebrate the victory and to build momentum for a presidential bid. The show was poorly planned. A mortar tipped over; the stack of ten thousand shells waiting to go up caught fire, and the ensuing explosion killed seventeen people, injured one hundred, and blew out doors and windows on the square.

The use of fireworks by private citizens has also been a frequent target of legislation. During the nineteenth century serious carnage began to accompany the Fourth of July rite. At a time when infections, especially tetanus, could be lethal, injuries from even small fireworks constituted a serious threat. As early as the 1880s the press was lambasting "firecracker and torpedo patriotism."

Public guardians soon began to impose restrictions. Cleveland passed the first citywide ban on consumer fireworks in 1908. During the Depression, Michigan took the lead in enacting statewide restrictions. By the early 1950s, twenty-eight states had adopted legislation banning all consumer fireworks, with fourteen others enforcing serious restrictions. A loophole that allowed mischievous children to order fireworks by mail was closed in 1954.

The federal government outlawed cherry bombs and ashcans, or M-80s, in 1966. In the mid-1970s the Consumer Product Safety Commission proposed a ban on all firecrackers. Partly moved by protests from Chinese-Americans, who use firecrackers in religious and cultural celebrations, the commission relented. In a compromise, it limited firecrackers to a finger-stinging fifty milligrams of flash powder; a typical cherry bomb contains about thirty times as much.

Pyro proponents try to shift the blame to negligent parents who let their children set off fireworks unsupervised. They also note that many injuries are caused not by legal fireworks but by bootleg M-80s and other illicit devices. The pro-fireworks faction has always resisted an Independence Day marked only by parades and church bells. Substitute "kindergarten mother-play" for the martial spirit of rockets and salutes, a popular magazine warned in 1904, and "see how the tea will go overboard."

The fact is, of course, that danger is an integral part of the fascination with fireworks. Fire awakens a primordial fear and enchantment. When the low break of a shell at a display sends flaming stars sailing toward the crowd, the cry is not of consternation but of delight; the show takes on extra brio. And in spite of bureaucratic hand wringing, the popularity of fireworks has burgeoned since the 1976 Bicentennial. The reopening of trade with China a few years earlier had given the industry a boost with a surge of innovative and inexpensive fireworks.

Aerial shells form the mainstay of modern fireworks shows. And the pace of shows has accelerated. What once might have been a forty-five-minute display is now packed into twenty relentless minutes. As late as the 1960s spectators watched leisurely shows that combined shells with imaginative set pieces: Niagara Falls, a tank battle, a chariot race. Partly because of safety rules that push viewers farther back, set pieces are less common now. Even the fiery American flag at the end is becoming a rarity.

Fireworks continue to evolve. Shaped shells have gained popularity as they blast hearts, peace symbols, and even "happy faces" into the sky. A new effect I saw at the PGI convention was the "lampare," or gas bomb, a kind of anti-firework that explodes with a sinister boom into a roiling black and red fireball. Crowds love it. Electric-firing and the possibilities it opened for fireworks choreography have made music a standard part of shows today. And fireworks artists are beginning to use computers to control the firing of displays, allowing for a more complex synchronization of effects.

The Disney organization, probably the world's largest user of fireworks, is a leading pyrotechnic innovator. The company developed a system to hurl shells skyward with compressed air and to ignite them with electronic chips, further increasing the precision and predictability of the display. A Disney executive says that the company considers fireworks "cost-effective," an odd view of an activity whose essence has always been joyful waste.

In spite of all the innovation, thousands of old-fashioned small-scale fireworks shows continue to light up the Fourth. A typical half-hour display costs from five to ten thousand dollars. Some are still shot by volunteer firefighters who buy "shipped shows" from manufacturers and take their chances. Audiences can still smell the smoke, sense the slight danger, become caught up in the genuine magic of the event.

True fire masters share their passion with customers rather than just sell a product. "We take such pride in our shows," Jennie Bradford says. "I know we spoil our customers, but we just love fireworks. We can't shoot a show we're not happy with." And the craft continues. Amateurs still toil in garages, professionals in small workshops, struggling to perform the ancient alchemy, to make base matter yield up happiness.

"Who doesn't like fireworks?" a spectator remarks after a Legion show. Pyrotechnics offer children and adults delight in equal measure. Perhaps their enduring appeal is their luminous perishability, their very evanescence, which makes them at once so wondrous and so rare. Like memory itself, one might say. Fireworks consistently evoke nostalgia. Hardly a person I have talked to about them did not begin by saying, "When I was a kid ..." and go on to recite an account of mystery or mischief: shells blossoming over some long-ago town park or firecrackers pune tuating a summer's day in a summer without end.

In fall river, Frank Coluccio flicks a switch. Both barges erupt. Twenty-three-inch shells fly skyward simultaneously; a row of mines sprays purple stars 150 feet into the air; huge purple chrysanthemums burst overhead. The show has begun.

For the next half-hour shells blossom overhead, reports boom, serpents streak across the sky like fiery sperm. Dave Datres's charcoal crossette shells fill the night with the spark trails of comets that then burst, flinging out yet more trails. The choppy water fragments the colors into jewels; the buildings onshore echo back the wrenching blasts of the salutes. The spectators scream with delight.

The finale builds and builds, piling a heaving mass of fiery flowers into a kaleidoscopic bouquet. Golden palm trees materialize. Legion's famous spider-web shells paint the darkness with sparks. Three enormous diadem chrysanthemums explode and hurl out long sparkling trails. It all culminates in a cannonade that threatens to bring down the vault of heaven, a mounting series of concussions that we hear not with our ears but with our bodies and even our souls.

And we drive home through the mild summer night, satisfied.

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3. Fourth of July '98

PATRIOT ALLEY By Edward E. Ericson, Jr.

(Edward E. Ericson, Jr., is a professor of English at Calvin College, and a Solzhenitsyn scholar who abridged THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO in cooperation with the author.

This article has been cleared for republication in English and in translation by USIS and the press outside the United States; it may also be carried over the Internet. Credit to the author and the following note must appear on the title page of any reprint.

"Reprinted from THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, a Washington-based magazine of politics, business, and culture.")

Every Fourth of July, we neighbors gather early in an alley. It's an alley with pretensions; it's called Hollyhock Lane.

The hollyhocks are gone now, and the concrete is purpled by mulberries instead. We rise to see the Hollyhock Lane Parade; then half of us repair to the alley for a patriotic service. This has happened 63 times before. Attendance has been rising in recent years, and in 1997 there were more than a thousand people on hand, approaching some of the big turnouts of yesteryear.

The Calvin-Giddings Patriotic Association runs this show. Always multi-ethnic, the area is now also multi-racial. If you move onto the 800-900 blocks of Calvin or Giddings, the streets between which the alley runs, you had better clean up and paint up and help with the planning, or the neighbors will talk about you. Imagine the shock of the family that was closing on a house purchase, only to learn that their unfenced, terraced back yard provides the annual program stage.

Even those of us who go year after year are a little surprised that a traditional celebration of this sort continues to attract strong interest in the 1990s. After all, it's a throwback. It's often hokey. But in this alley we do pretty much the same thing our immigrant forebears did. They probably did it better, but a least we still do it. As the smiles all around say, we love it for the sheer happening of it. This is how to make time stand still.

At night over public TV we can see the downtown glitz and faux and striving. Here we see a plain parade and an unchanging ceremony with no outside talent. It's pure ritual, with the meaning mostly remembered, and we revel in the effortless charm of the ordinary. Highways are packed with Americans leaving town for the holiday. Here we plan our summers so we can stay home and mill around in an alley that for 364 days a year is nondescript. The parade began in 1934, when four fathers, looking for something to drain the energy out of their sons, decided to march through the neighborhood playing their horns. A woman now about 80 who was there at the creation says that the only song they all knew was "Onward, Christian Soldiers." A grumpy old neighbor, awakened by the unexpected clatter, called the cops. Trouble. It was 5:30 A.M.! For lack of a parade permit, the police closed down the show. On July 5, the four fathers went down to City Hall and got a permit for the next July 4. The cops happily changed sides and have ridden escort ever since, sirens sounding. This is how a tradition starts.

In 1935 the Screech Owls, Inc., of Grand Rapids, Michigan, civilly delayed reveille until 5:45 A.M. The march ran only the length of the alley. After flag-raising and the national anthem, a full hour, 6:00-7:00, was given over to firecrackers! Then came the parade: "Each kid, and this includes the grown-up kids as well, will please bring a drum, horn, flag or all three." 7:30 was time for a "Peaceful snooze (Try and get it)."

By the next year, reveille had been moved further back to 7:00. The city newspaper took interest in the celebration in 1938: "So far as is know here, the Grand Rapids community is the only one in the country staging such an event." By 1939 the order of activities had pretty much settled down to what we have today, parade preceding program and fireworks no longer mentioned. The 1940 poster reads in part, "We will always remain a liberty-loving nation, tolerating no dictatorships." In 1941 the patriotic association filed articles of incorporation.

Now, at 8:00 A.M., the calliope hauled out of the local museum each year awakens the open-windowed slothful for blocks around. We reach curbside around 8:30, parade starting-time. It loops through several blocks, and most of us move to see it twice, there being not all that much to see. Those on the curb are as interesting to watch as those in the street. I look for those I know. I watch a mixed-race feminist student clapping -- for the strolling politicians? I espy a former student, now a Presbyterian minister known to join gays in marriage. I greet a smiling Italian-American man from the local conservative think tank. I hook up with a genial left-wing black colleague; no arguments today. Unum overrides pluribus.

Here comes the parade, random order. A man on a unicycle -- old Hollyhock tradition -- with a kid on his shoulders. Someone in a full-body Goofy costume -- good thing it's cool today. A modern fire engine; an antique fire engine; a Steelcase semi, shiny as always. A 20-strong band tootles, its one practice over, and I see my next-door husband and wife and daughter whose instruments I never hear at home. It's called the Hollyhock Band, and the music is okay.

Now for the floats. They are on kids' red wagons; the Rose Parade this ain't. They are being judged, with prizes to be awarded. Kid-ridden bikes with crepe-paper-festooned spokes are too many to count. They must stay behind a rope being walked along the route; and parents, on foot or on bike, are interspersed to accompany the littler ones. Where is the dog that pulls the wagon that carries the tyke? Here are 15 motorcycles, riders black-jacketed. They must not be Hell's Angels; I see a 60 year-old man known to have done time as an elder in his conservative church. Then come the convertibles, antique to kids but nostalgic for oldsters. They carry signs for political office-holders and challengers, but the pols know to walk, not ride. Their juvenile underlings pass out stickers, little flags, Tootsie Rolls. The pols have cheek-aching grins, point to folks they know, sometimes veer over to the curb for a handshake with an old friend.

Vern Ehlers, our congressman and a Berkeley-trained physicist, sticks out for wearing a sport jacket over white shirt and tie. He says he'll shed the coat for his other three parades later in the day. Shy and formal, he seems more awkward here than when in hearings shown on C-SPAN. He shows up even in off-years, though he's in a safe district that seems not to mind substance over splash. Stickers with his name on them soon adorn many shirts. His predecessor and another former predecessor at Calvin College, Paul Henry, who died much too young, used to toss out O' Henry bars, and in the alley I once asked him where he developed the habit of giving things away.

Then we walk through the shaded alley lined with bunting on fences and garages, and under "Welcome" signs hanging from horizontal ropes we hold our annual rendezvous amidst red, white, and blue. There's coffee for adults, punch for kids. Good music bracketing the program, before and after, comes over a good amplifier from a group that allows itself to be known for this one day as the Hollyhock Jazz Quintet. We Hollyhock veterans recognize more faces than we know names. We chat with those we know, smile with tentative familiarity at those we don't. An Asian couple, rare here, walks by jabbering in foreign tongue. Pols recognizable from paper and TV give controlled but warm greetings. Do they recognize me? Today I'm an equal-opportunity grinner, wrinkling up toward those I vote against as much as those I vote for. I see a former student who eagerly tells me how she used to ride her bike in the parade. Looking around, I'm impressed by how many college kids are here, pseudo-sophisticated cynicism shed for a day. There's my current favorite five-year-old, adopted from India and living two doors away. "Hi, Ericson." Lifting her, "Hi, Angela. Are you having fun?" Yeah.

A woman from Giddings Street emcees, smooth at the mike. As the flag goes up the little pole, teens costumed as Uncle Sam and Miss Liberty lead us in the pledge of allegiance. Kids, like the adolescent girl next to me, seeing hands go over adult hearts, follow suit; some know all the words. A strong-voiced woman leads us in singing the Star-Spangled Banner; we are loud, hearty, astonished by ourselves. The prayer is offered by a Catholic priest from the local parish. I'm startled when he ends "in Jesus' name," more startled by the loud "Amen" from the crowd. Protestants, probably.

It's time for introductions of public office-holders, first "our man in Washington," then state senator, state representative, county commissioner, mayor, city commissioner. Each gets to wave to the crowd, and each gets good applause, but none gets to say a word. We are patriotic today, not political. So the challengers, though allowed to march, are not introduced by name, just given a general hand for their presence.

The speaker gets five minutes. We've had some big names, one of whom was the local boy who went on to be President, Jerry Ford. We've even had a couple of imports, such as a congressman from California. We're now back to the original spirit with a local speaker -- lo! a young neighbor just a couple of years out of my classroom and now into organizing inner-city kids for urban gardening and for making and marketing their own brand of barbecue sauce. He speaks about regeneration, about welcoming the young into our cherishing of the American heritage. He has a good joke and gives a good talk in the genre remembered from his childhood.

Prizes for the floats are now announced, first-, second-, and third-place in each of the two categories: patriotic (four contestants) and environmental (six). In "patriotic," there just happens to be a tie for third-place, so no group has finished last. And now we close, as we have for six decades, with "God Bless America." Strangely, I miss a few notes. Glancing furtively around, I see I am not alone in experiencing a very brief affliction of the throat.

We're off now to the rest of the day, living in the 90's again, off to sailing and sunbathing at the Big Lake or finishing at one of the many small lakes or shooting a round of golf (which will have to be truly horrible to cast a pall over this day). To do what we ought to do and to enjoy doing it -- that makes us feel good. There's some strength in this old country yet.

The alley empties. The kids leave with popsicles, successors to the paddle pops of yore. The silly things are colored red, white, and blue.

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4. Fourth of July '98

TORPEDO PATRIOTISM By Jack Kelly

(This article has been cleared for republication in English and in translation by USIS and the press outside the United States; it may also be carried over the Internet. Credit to the author and the following note must appear on the title page of any reprint.

Copyright 1997 American Heritage, Inc. All rights reserved. "Reprinted from AMERICAN HERITAGE, August 7, 1997.)

The organized displays that professionals fire are just one side of the fireworks business. Equally replete with tradition and nostalgia are the firecrackers, fountains, and bottle rockets that ordinary citizens shoot off in their back yards. These "toy" fireworks, as they are known in the industry, became popular after the Civil War.

"Before then it was popular to shoot guns and cannons to celebrate the Fourth," says Warren Klofkorn, an author who has written about fireworks history. "The blackpowder-based fireworks that were introduced were a less lethal form of revelry than indiscriminate shooting."

In the early years of this century, children everywhere religiously saved their pennies to invest them in firecrackers at a nickel a pack. Torpedoes, small balls that exploded on impact with a sidewalk, were another popular diversion, along with snakes, doubleheaders, chasers, skyrockets, and pinwheels. Toy cannon and cap pistols were also closely associated with fireworks. Early models used primer caps designed for black-powder guns. They were responsible for decades of blasts and blisters.

On a typical July Fourth youngsters woke before dawn and sneaked outside with Christmas-morning anticipation. Every boy wanted to set off the first Independence Day salute. By the time the sun was up, most towns were alive with the dry crackle of miniature explosions, every one a "death to a redcoat." The air would be tinged with sulfur until after the town fireworks display at night.

The Chinese have been the traditional suppliers of firecrackers, which continue to be manufactured and braided into strings by hand. The early black-powder "mandarin" firecrackers emitted a rather feeble snap when lit. In 1916 Thomas G. ("Ray") Hitt, a pyrotechnic innovator from Washington State, experimented with photographic flash powder, a mixture of powdered magnesium or aluminum and an oxidizer. The formula was soon introduced into the Chinese fireworks industry. The resulting "flashlight crackers" exploded with a much sharper report than their black-powder predecessors.

Flash powder also turned domestically made salutes and "cannon crackers" lethal, fueling the anti-fireworks crusade. "You had cannon crackers up to twelve inches long," says John Nieminski, a Park Forest, Illinois, letter carrier who moonlights as a dealer in antique fireworks. "They were like bombs. They killed people." Salutes were eventually limited to five inches.

The attraction of consumer fireworks has not diminished. Recognizing their improved quality and reliability, a number of states have liberalized their laws in recent years. Thirty-two states now allow citizens to purchase fireworks. At stands near state lines, fireworks retailers have long carried on an interstate trade, which is immune from state strictures. This year consumers will set matches to an estimated $250 million worth of pyrotechnics, ranging from simple sparklers to a device evocatively labeled "Wild Imagination."

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5. Fourth of July '98

THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER

(This article has been cleared for republication in English and in translation by USIS and the press outside the United States; it may also be carried over the Internet.)

Throughout the year, visitors to Washington, DC, pause to view the flag which inspired the U.S. national anthem. The 185-year-old flag, the Star Spangled Banner, is massive (9.75 x 10.4 meters). Its 15 white cotton 5-pointed stars are on a blue field of English wool bunting, with 15 stripes, eight red and seven white, of wool bunting. The linen backing is more than half its weight of about 68 kilos.

Unlike today's flag, the flag of the early 19th century had one stripe as well as one star for each state currently in the Union. This handsewn flag was made in the summer of 1813, 36 years after the Stars and Stripes pattern was adopted as the U.S. national flag.

With the War of 1812 still raging against the British and after they had burned the U.S. Capitol and White House in Washington, this flag flew over Fort McHenry in Baltimore on the night of September 13, 1814, as British ships began bombarding the fort. On a British truce ship out in the harbor, Francis Scott Key, a young American lawyer who was negotiating the release of a prisoner, watched anxiously as the bombardment continued into the night. He was so relieved to see the flag still flying in the morning that he wrote a poem of the occasion, "The Star-Spangled Banner." He ironically set it to the tune of a popular English song to commemorate the American victory. Key's poem was adopted as the national anthem in 1931.

The flag itself was given to the commander of Ft. McHenry, and his family donated the flag to the Smithsonian Institution in 1907, where it was subsequently placed on public display. Since 1964, the Smithsonian's new National Museum of American History has prominently displayed the flag in its specially designed site at the main entrance on the National Mall.

As a national treasure, the Star-Spangled Banner flag has been included in the White House millenium plans for the preservation of America's treasures. Faded by weather and age, the flag has been further damaged during its 80-year display by the influences of light, pollution and humidity.

The flag will be removed from display in October 1998 and laid flat for analysis to determine the best conservation treatment, which is currently estimated at $5.5 million. The public will be able to observe the work through windows in the conservation lab. After approximately three years, the museum intends to re-exhibit the banner in an environmentally controlled glass case.

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6. Fourth of July'98

SELECTED INTERNET SITES

Boston's Fourth of July -- We're Celebrating 25 Years on the Esplanade. The official headquarters for "America's biggest Independence Day party."

http://www.july4th.org/4thtitle.htm

Declaring Independence -- Drafting the Documents. This Library of Congress collection includes a Chronology of Events from June 7, 1776, to January 18, 1777, a detailed discussion of the drafting of the documents, and a list of objects shown in a special exhibition.

http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/declara1.html

Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention -- 1774-1789. Part of the American Memory project of the Library of Congress, these collections include extracts of the journals of Congress, resolutions, proclamations, committee reports, treaties, and early printed versions of the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/bdsds/bdsdhome.html

The George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress -- 1741-1799. The complete George Washington Papers from the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress is being published successively through 1999. Included among the first release are letterbooks and travel journals during his election as delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses, and his command of the American army during the Revolutionary War.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html

Independence Day on the Net. A multimedia celebration of the Fourth of July with music, history, and other information about celebrating this national holiday.

http://www.holidays.net/independence/index.htm

John Philip Sousa -- American Composer, Conductor & Patriot (1854-1932). Sponsored by the Dallas Wind Symphony, this page contains a listing of all of Sousa's compositions, with nearly 100 sound clips; FAQs; books about Sousa; photographs; the history of the Sousa Band, and a sound clip from "The Stars and Stripes Forever."

http://www.dws.org/sousa/

National Archives and Records Administration -- The Charters of Freedom. Reproductions and background information on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

http://www.nara.gov/exhall/charters/charters.html

Thomas Jefferson Online Resources at the University of Virginia. Over 1700 electronic texts by or to Jefferson, quotations, bibliographies, guides to his papers at the University of Virginia, online exhibits, and organizations can be accessed through this site.

http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/

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