A Heady Three Days
250 years ago, Congress adopted the Lee Resolution and finalized the Declaration of Independence
Welcome to the July 1, 2026, edition of Properly Subversive. Exactly 250 years ago, our forefathers debated and worked out the details of the Declaration of Independence.
On July 1, 1776, the Second Continental Congress debated whether to seek full independence or reconciliation with the British Empire. By the end of the day, it was all but decided to go for full-on independence.
On July 2, Congress adopted the Lee Resolution formally declaring the Thirteen Colonies were “free and independent States” and allegiance to the Crown was dissolved.
On July 3, Congress hammered out the draft Declaration of Independence, line by line. It was here that Congress cut Thomas Jefferson’s original language on the condemnation of slavery.
Jefferson included “the cruel war against human nature itself (slavery)” as a grievance against the Crown:
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
It was edited out of the original document before it was adopted and signed on July 4.
The rest, as they say, is history. From then on, the Revolutionary War took on a new meaning. We were not just fighting unfair oppression; we were fighting for full independence.
The world was never the same.
Every American is now the keeper of the spirit of this great experiment.
Keep it going. Make it more perfect. Pass it on.
Also in today’s report, we chronicle the last rulings of the Supreme Court this session. SCOTUS upheld state bans on transgender athletes and upheld the traditional understanding of birthright citizenship. We provide links below to those events. We also highlight a pair of new crazy KBJ-isms. Enjoy!
KBJ-isms
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson may, indeed, be insane.
