This weekend, we celebrate a remarkable human achievement: the 250th birthday of, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” 

This year’s Independence Day commemorates the Declaration of Independence, which did far more than announce a break with Britain. It conveyed an idea of human liberty that still defines the American story. 

We are, as our nation’s founding document makes clear, endowed by our Creator with “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” 

In today’s America, we take this for granted. But all too often, we lose the two central principles that make the Declaration revolutionary in itself. 

First, it affirms that our “unalienable rights” don’t come from government but are natural, unalienable and God-given — the birthright of all human beings. 

Second, the government’s sole purpose is “to secure these rights,” deriving powers from “the consent of the governed.” And when government ignores its purpose and becomes “destructive of these ends,” the people have both a right and a duty to abolish it. 

The Declaration states those principles definitively, recounting how the British Crown had inflicted “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations” to establish “absolute tyranny over these states.” 

It then lists 27 specific grievances against King George III, sharply establishing the Founders’ case for revolution. 

“The grievances are a bill of rights,” University of Texas at Austin Professor Jonathan W. White said on KOA radio. “The grievances were the Founders pointing to the things that were causing them to want to separate from Great Britain — the things that the King and Parliament were doing wrong.” 

“It was the way of the Founders putting in writing things, principles and ideas that they hold dear, so that future generations would have something to point to and say, if someone tries to take our rights, no, you can’t do that. We have it written down why,” White told me. 

He noted the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the state constitutions addressed each of the 27 grievances. 

We call it the “Revolutionary War” because America’s revolution was much more than a military one. It was, above all, a revolution of fundamental human ideas. 

Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and freed slave, underscored as much in his 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” He begins by praising the Founders as “statesmen, patriots and heroes” whose Declaration of Independence is “the RINGBOLT to the chain of your nation’s destiny.” 

“The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles,” he urges. “Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes and at whatever cost.” 

Douglass’s words — spoken by a self-educated Black man whose freedom was purchased from slavery — directly challenge the 1619 Project’s claim that America’s founding ideals were “false when they were written.” 

When I ran the Liberty Day Institute, a nonprofit that taught kids the U.S. Constitution and American government in schools, we had a simple saying: “The Declaration of Independence was the promise. The Constitution was the fulfillment.” 

Douglass himself recognized that our nation’s governing charter cannot be separated from its founding document. 

As White, co-editor of “Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln,” put it: “For Douglass, the problem was that Americans of his generation were not reading the Constitution in the way Douglass thought they should… Douglass wants them to get back to those founding principles of 1776 and 1787, to bring freedom and liberty to all Americans.”  

Although he rightly blasts America’s darkest sin of slavery — an institution that wouldn’t be undone until 13 years after his address — Douglass praises and defends the nation’s ideals with patriotic fervor. 

Rather than disowning the founding principles, he embraces and appeals to them, emphasizing how they reveal the hypocrisy of a nation of liberty. 

“There is neither warrant, license nor sanction of the hateful thing (slavery); but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT,” Douglass declared, containing principles and purposes “entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.” 

It all comes back to the Declaration of Independence, whose words aren’t merely a Dear John letter to Britain but a reaffirmation of our own self-worth as a free people. 

Two hundred fifty years later, those words still call upon us to celebrate — and to rededicate ourselves to the ideals they enshrine. 

Indeed, as White argues, “those founding principles, those grievances and the great ideals of the introductory paragraph of the Declaration” remain America’s inheritance.  

“It’s our job as Americans today to remember them and point back to them and to hold them dear so that we don’t lose those rights,” he said. 

Or, as Lincoln closed his Gettysburg Address: “(W)e here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” 

Jimmy Sengenberger is an investigative journalist, public speaker and longtime local talk-radio host. Reach Jimmy online at Jimmysengenberger.com or on X (formerly Twitter) @SengCenter.