[Editor’s note:  The following remarks were delivered by Lincoln C. Oliphant at an Independence Day flag-raising ceremony at the LDS Chapel in Arlington, Virginia.  His remarks have been edited lightly.]

We meet today to celebrate our liberties, and our independence.  On July 4, 1776 a small band of Americans announced to the world that they were going to break the “political bands” that had connected them to Great Britain.  At the time, Great Britain was the greatest military power on earth.  The odds did not favor these colonials, these upstarts with muskets.

They surprised the world, however, by winning the war.
 
In this Church, we believe that they prevailed because God had a hand in establishing the United States.  We believe that God raised up and inspired our Founders.

Wilford Woodruff said in 1898, “those men who laid the foundation of this American government and signed the Declaration of Independence were the best spirits the God of Heaven could find on the face of the earth.  They were choice spirits . . . [and] were inspired of the Lord.”  [Conf. Rpts., April 1898, p. 89]
 
This morning I want to make just five points.  Three of the points are about the Declaration itself, and two are extrinsic to the document.
 
The first of the three facts about the Declaration of Independence is this – God is in it.  And, the God of the Declaration is not an abstraction.
 
The God of the Declaration is a God of law, and He is the Creator of human kind.  The Declaration of Independence speaks of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”  And, it speaks of “all men [being] equal . . . and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
 
Further, the God of the Declaration is a personal God.  His creations may appeal to Him for judgment, and His children may rely on Him for justice.  The Declaration speaks of an “appeal[] to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions.”  And, it speaks of “a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.”

The second point is that the Declaration required sacrifice.  The Signers were fully aware of the solemn covenant they were making by affixing their signatures to a document that the king regarded as treasonous.  When a man bent over the parchment of the Declaration of Independence to sign it, he wrote his name just below this final sentence:

“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

These were not idle words:

By the end of the War, (one source says) nine signers had been held as prisoners of war.  Two Signers had sons killed, and another two had sons held as prisoners.  One Signer (Lynch) died while on a recruiting mission, and another (Lewis) lost his wife to death during a forced separation.  Twelve Signers had their homes destroyed or damaged, and 10 had their homes occupied or confiscated.  Four had their businesses or ships burned.  [M. Novak, On Two Wings, Appendix, pp. 157-58]
The third point about the Declaration of Independence is that it contains what I suppose are the most recognizable and oft-repeated words ever put on paper in the cause of liberty.  Those words are:

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed. . . .”

When those words were penned, they applied to a small segment of the population.  Still, the words themselves drew no distinctions and set no limits, and in 1859 Abraham Lincoln wrote that the Declaration had “introduce[d] into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times” which would be a “rebuke and a stumbling-block” to “tyranny and oppression.”  [A. Lincoln to Henry Pierce, April 6, 1859, reprinted in T. West, Vindicating the Founders at 175.]

Now I turn from the document itself to make two extrinsic points:

It is not entirely true to say that America was born on July 4, 1776.  The Declaration of Independence was, it is true, a powerful and thorough statement of complaints and objectives – and even hopes – but the United States of America would not have come into existence if the war had been lost.  Had we lost, the Declaration of Independence would be an obscure footnote in the history of the British Empire. 

It took the sacrifice of soldiers to transform the words of the Declaration into reality.  Some 4,400 Americans died in the War for American Independence, and some 6,200 were wounded.  They defeated the greatest military power on earth, but they were only the first of hundreds of thousands of casualties in America’s wars.  Nearly 200,000 Americans died in the Civil War, and nearly 300,000 Americans died in World War II.  It is the force of arms that has made concrete reality out of principles and aspirations written down with a quill pen in July of 1776.

Finally, the fight for life, liberty, and equality continues.  The questions are as fresh as this week’s headlines.  The debate will continue as long as we are a Nation.
 
We ought to thank God, though, for the progress we have made.  When the Declaration of Independence was written, chattel slavery was common.  Within what-is-now-called Arlington County, human beings would have been bought and sold, and families would have been forcibly separated, never to see one another again. 

In the Census of 1860, this county that we call home had 251 slave holders and 982 slaves out of a total population of fewer than 2,500 persons.  Within two years of the date of that Census, 20 forts were constructed here to protect the Potomac River bridges from the armies of the Confederacy.
 
Today, in stark (almost inconceivable) contrast, the son of an African-American father is President of all the United States.
 
We have come a long way, but it took many generations to come this far.  Arlington did not desegregate its public-school classrooms until 1959 – and Arlington was the first county in Virginia to do so.  Just a year earlier, in 1958, the first African-American graduated from one of Virginia’s historically white public universities.  Charlie Yates graduated with honors in mechanical engineering from Virginia Tech, but in his four years he was never permitted to live on campus or to eat in the cafeteria!

On this very spot, our late Brother John Phoenix went to church.  However, some 60 years ago, John Phoenix was denied admission to graduate studies in the State of Virginia solely because of his race.  In order to maintain its segregated institutions, Virginia paid for him to attend an out-of-State school.

Yes, let us praise our noble founders, including those who wrote and defended the Declaration of Independence, but let us not forget that other heroes have followed in their footsteps – and that heroes still are needed today.

May God raise up men and women of wisdom and virtue and courage in our own day, as He has done in the past.  We face problems that were unimaginable to our forebears, and we desperately need our own visionaries and champions.  Let us pray that their work will be as successful as the Declaration of Independence, which formed a part of the foundation of our own successes, and will forever inspire men and women who long for liberty and self-government.