This Fourth of July, Americans rightly celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—the document drafted in Philadelphia, then debated, amended, and approved in the Pennsylvania State House, the building posterity would know as Independence Hall.
We remember Jefferson’s timeless words, which still echo today. We remember the delegates pledging to one another their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. We remember the parchment that proclaimed a new nation and announced to the world the principles upon which it would stand.
But while one declaration was taking shape in Philadelphia, another was issued less than a hundred miles away in New York.
It came not from Congress, but from the commander in chief of the Continental Army. It was not written to justify independence before the nations of the world, but to prepare ordinary men to fight—and perhaps die—for a country that had scarcely begun to exist and for the principle upon which the American experiment would rest: liberty.
On July 2, 1776, Congress adopted Richard Henry Lee’s resolution declaring that the united colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” Over the next two days, the delegates turned their attention to the document explaining that momentous decision, revising Jefferson’s carefully wrought prose—much to the chagrin of the young Virginian—before formally adopting the Declaration of Independence on July 4.
And yet, that same July 2, British forces were arriving in New York and coming ashore on Staten Island. A vast armada was gathering in the harbor. British regulars—soon to be joined by thousands of German auxiliaries—were assembling for a campaign intended to crush the rebellion and seize the city whose waterways offered command of the Hudson River and access to the interior of the continent.
General George Washington stood between the combined military might of the British Empire and the American cause.
He could not yet have known that Congress had voted for independence that day. Official word and a copy of the Declaration would reach him later, and on July 9 he would order the document read aloud before his assembled troops. Yet his general orders of July 2 seemed almost to answer the vote in Philadelphia before news of it arrived.
Congress had declared what America was to be.
Washington declared what its survival would require.
His orders began in the ordinary language of military administration. General Mifflin was directed to hasten the construction of the defensive works near Kingsbridge. Militia detachments were shifted among commands. Sentries were instructed not to interfere with country people bringing goods to market, but to remain vigilant against soldiers deserting the army.
Then the voice of command rose to meet the magnitude of the hour:
The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them.
The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army—Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; this is all we can expect—We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die: Our own Country’s Honor, all call upon us for a vigorous and manly exertion, and if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world.
Let us therefore rely upon the goodness of the Cause, and the aid of the supreme Being, in whose hands Victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble Actions—The Eyes of all our Countrymen are now upon us, and we shall have their blessings, and praises, if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the Tyranny meditated against them.
Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and shew the whole world, that a Freeman contending for LIBERTY on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.
These were hardly ceremonial words delivered after victory. They were issued on the eve of a campaign in which victory would prove painfully elusive and Washington’s army would endure its darkest hour yet.
Nor did Washington allow this exalted language to become a substitute for the rigor of military discipline. Immediately after invoking unborn millions, the aid of the Supreme Being, and the eyes of his fellow citizens, he returned to the practical requirements of battle.
He urged his officers to remain cool when action came and expected the men beneath them to obey orders and hold firm. Courage would not go unnoticed, he promised, but neither would misconduct or neglect of duty. No one was to wander beyond the sound of the drums without written leave. Before dawn, the whole army was to be at its alarm posts with weapons and equipment ready.
Later that evening, Washington issued one final order. The soldiers were to sleep beside their weapons and be ready to turn out without warning.
The contrast within the orders is telling. Washington had appealed to liberty, posterity, and Providence, but he knew that lofty words would be of little use if the army failed at the ordinary duties of soldiering. The men would need to follow orders, remain near their posts, protect their ammunition, and answer the drums when they sounded. Congress could declare independence in Philadelphia. In New York, Washington’s soldiers would have to keep the army alive long enough to make that declaration real.
The alarm soon came.
In August, the Continental Army suffered a crushing defeat on Long Island. Only a daring nighttime evacuation across the East River saved much of the army from capture or destruction. The British then forced Washington from Manhattan, defeated him at White Plains, captured Fort Washington, and drove his dwindling army across New Jersey. By December, the cause that had seemed so radiant in Philadelphia appeared close to extinction.
In December, Thomas Paine published the first installment of The American Crisis, shortly before Washington crossed the Delaware and attacked Trenton. It began: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
But Washington had recognized the crisis months before Paine gave it words.
On July 2, while Congress declared independence, Washington warned his soldiers that independence might yet perish. He knew the army before him was inexperienced, imperfectly supplied, and about to confront one of the most formidable military powers in the world. He knew that the months ahead would bring test after test—not merely of the army’s ability to win, but of its ability to endure, remain intact, and fight another day.
Washington was not a literary craftsman in the manner of Jefferson, who could turn political philosophy into imperishable prose, or Adams, whose arguments surged with intellect and ardor. His characteristic language was more restrained—practical, deliberate, governed by duty, and informed by a sure instinct for what the moment required.
That makes the sudden grandeur of this order all the more striking.
Here was the judgment of a commander looking across New York Harbor at the assembled power of the British Empire. Washington understood that the army’s conduct would reach beyond the coming battle, beyond the men then living, and beyond the generation that had chosen independence.
All Americans born since that day—and all yet to come—are counted among those unborn millions.
The freedoms Americans celebrate 250 years later were once entrusted to this untested army awaiting an overwhelming enemy. Those freedoms depended upon men who did not know that Washington would someday become the father of his country, that the retreat through New Jersey would lead to Trenton, or that defeat and privation would ultimately give way to victory at Yorktown. They knew only that the alarm might sound at any hour and that they had been ordered to stand ready.
We rightly return each Independence Day to the parchment created in Philadelphia. It tells us why Americans were entitled to be free—because their Creator endowed them with the rights of a free people.
But Washington’s general order deserves a place beside it in our national memory, for it tells us what preserving that freedom would demand—and may always demand—from those entrusted with its care.
One document proclaimed a nation.
The other summoned Americans to preserve it.
Two hundred and fifty years later, the republic—and the freedom of untold millions of its citizens—still depend upon both.
Charlton Allen is an attorney and former public servant who writes on policy and history. He is President Donald J. Trump’s nominee to serve as General Counsel of the Federal Labor Relations Authority, pending Senate confirmation.
