June 11, 1776 – It's On My Mind

June 11, 2018 (Monday)
On this day, June 11,1776, Continental Congress created a committee (Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston) to draft a Declaration of Independence. On July 4 each year we celebrate its adoption as the birth of our nation.

Here is the opening sentence of the declaration: “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
The next sentence stands as one of the most meaningful and important in the history of our world: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Throughout its history, this nation, The United States of America, has demonstrated to the world that the principle of human rights expressed in our Declaration of Independence guides our nation as we fulfill our role as a leader among the family of nations.
After the Revolutionary War, the nation thus established faced its first test of self-defense in The War of 1812 with Great Britain. Thankfully, we won that war. A poem by Francis Scott Key, “Defence of Fort M’Henry”, composed in the heat of battle, later (1931) became our national anthem, known throughout the world as “The Star Spangled Banner.” The fourth verse of the anthem leaves no doubt that our ideal is to be a nation “under God.”

O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation.
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Click here to read all verses of our national anthem.
Note: There is also an unofficial fifth verse written during the Civil War by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Click here to see a copy of the original handwritten lyrics

Click here to read the history of “The Star Spangled Banner.”