Historian David McCullough on Trumbull's Painting
Above right. [ Full view ]

In the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington hangs John Trumbull's great painting, "The Declaration of Independence, Fourth of July, 1776." [See detail from the painting, above.] . . . It's our best known scene from our past. And almost nothing about it is accurate. The Declaration of Independence wasn't signed on July 4th. They didn't start to sign the Declaration until August 2nd, and only a part of the Congress was then present. They kept coming back in the months that followed from their distant states to take their turn signing the document. . . . But what is accurate about it are the faces. Every single one of the 47 men in that painting is an identifiable, and thus accountable, individual. We know what they look like. We know who they were. And that's what Trumbull wanted. He wanted us to know them and, by God, not to forget them.

David McCullough, "Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are," remarks to the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar, February 15, 2005, in Phoenix, Arizona.

John Adams Celebrates the Declaration of Independence

I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary festival. . . .

You will think me transported with enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these states. . . . I can see that the end is more than worth all the means. And that posterity will triumph in that day's transaction . . .

John Adams letter to Abigail Adams, July 3, 1776 from The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family 1762-1784 (Harvard Univ Press, 1975).

Abraham Lincoln on the Significance of Declaration of Independence to All People

If [immigrants] look back through this history [of the U.S.] to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

...

They [the fathers] did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all men were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet that they were about to confer it, immediately, upon them. In fact, they had not power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.

Abraham Lincoln, July 4, 1858, as quoted in Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, p. 86-87.