Happy birthday, America!

We Americans will again comply with John Adams’ instructions of how the founding of the greatest nation in history should be celebrated:

“It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

Along with area cities across North Texas, Arlington’s celebration will be marked with fireworks downtown on Tuesday night then followed by one of Texas’ biggest parades on Independence Day.

Beyond the fireworks and parades, however, are historic events that mark July 4 in some remarkable ways.

The principal author of the Declaration of Independence had to decline the invitation to attend the 50th anniversary of American freedom.

Thomas Jefferson, at the age of 83, was too ill to make the journey to Washington where the celebration was taking place.

In his last written thoughts in the letter he sent explaining his absence he expressed deep sadness that he was to be deprived of personal participation, along with other surviving signors, in the rejoicings of the day.

It would have been of particular satisfaction to him “to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made.”

On the very day of the celebration he could not attend, both he and the 90-year-old John Adams, a fellow member of the committee of five patriots who drafted the Declaration, died.

Only 37 years later on another July 4th, there were two major turning points in the war to preserve the union and finally resolve the fault of having to delete the clause to end slavery that both Jefferson and Adams had written into that document.

Uneasiness had characterized the atmosphere surrounding the decision to strike provisions that opposed slavery. The change was necessary if the new nation was to be born because, with the anti-slavery language, there would be no “united states.”

On July 4, 1863, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee led his army in retreat from Gettysburg. The greatest battle of the war had lasted for three days and left almost 50,000 dead or wounded American soldiers about evenly divided between the North and the South.

More than a thousand miles away on the very same day, Gen. John Pemberton surrendered to Union Gen. Ulysses Grant ending the long siege at Vicksburg.

That day would mark the turning point in the Civil War leading ultimately to the preservation of the union.

President Lincoln’s invitation to participate in the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg came almost as an afterthought to mark the occasion as his reelection was nearly impossible to imagine at the time.

But it would be his two-minute address that would forever memorialize the importance of the events of that Fourth of July.

He reminded those assembled that their fathers had brought forth a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal. He said the government they had conceived of, by and for the people, would not perish.

He sat down before the photographers could get their cameras ready but his few words made an indelible portrait for all time. And he made them stick.

Just as Lincoln gave new life to Jefferson’s dream, he made it possible for us to carry out the founder’s last instructions, “For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”

And, so we will. Happy Birthday, America!

Richard Greene is a former Arlington mayor, served as an appointee of President George W. Bush as regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency and lectures at UT Arlington.

This story was originally published June 29, 2018 at 2:38 PM with the headline "Happy birthday, America!."