When our founding fathers rose and declared that liberty was their birthright, and the right of all their posterity forever after, they did not do so in a vacuum. They were born into a culture of free men, dedicated to individual thought, individual effort, and individual success. They were raised and educated in the Word of God, as taught in the Bible; that all men were sons of God, created in His likeness, and endowed with a Holy spark of His spiritual essence.
To truly understand what they wrote, we must put on the mantle of their perspective – with study and contemplation we must recreate, in our own minds, the social, spiritual, and cultural environment in which they lived and worked. This is not as difficult as it seems – but it requires that we study our history, and not with an attention for dates and places, but with our attention focused upon what people believed important and/or pressing in that day.
The social, moral, political, and financial issues of the American colonial era are actually not so different than ours in this modern day – financial hardships, corruption, the imposition of arbitrary and stifling regulation, and the blind acceptance of these issues as “unfixable” by many among the population. The defining essence of the 30 years preceding the revolutionary war was that a small number of brave men dared to speak out, to educate and inspire their family, friends, and neighbors, that a better way to live was, in fact, at hand; and that what they needed to do to obtain this better way was, simply, to risk all which was “good enough” in order to gain that which was “best” for them and for their descendants.
“If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.” – Benjamin Franklin
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