The Fourth of July was not celebrated in Vicksburg for many years after that.

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

Guess who on the SCOTUS agrees with that? Scalia and Thomas...so far.

OK, I am well and truly scared of our Dem presumptive nominee.

In a recent interview, Obama appears to back away from his long-stated positions on abortion (and a proposed federal abortion rights law he had co-sponsored), repudiate 35 years of accepted Supreme Court rulings on the issue and embrace a view on abortion restrictions that has been expressed on the Court only by Justices Thomas and Scalia.

Obama's remarks are printed verbatim in the interview, published yesterday in Relevant Magazine. Read them  -- there's no mistaking that Obama says he no longer will support what's long been a cornerstone of the abortion rights debate: The Court's insistence that laws banning abortions after the fetus is viable (now about 22 weeks) contain an exception to allow doctors to perform them if necessary to protect a pregnant woman's mental health.

John Adams predicted in a letter to his wife Abigail that Americans
would celebrate their Independence Day on July 2. Off by two days -
not too bad for government work.

On July 2, 1776, Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence,
signed only by Charles Thompson (the secretary of Congress) and John
Hancock (the presiding officer). Two days later Congress approved the
revised version and ordered it to be printed and distributed to the
states and military officers. The other signatures would have to
wait.

Many actually viewed the Declaration of Independence as a yawner - a
rehashing of arguments already made against the British government.
John Adams would later describe the Declaration as "dress and
ornament rather than Body, Soul, or Substance." The exception was the
last paragraph that said the united colonies "are and of Right ought
to be Free and Independent states" and were "Absolved of all
Allegiance to the British Crown."

For Adams, it was the momentum towards achieving American
independence initiated on July 2 that future generations would
consider worth celebrating, not the approval of this document on July
4.

Interestingly, the pomp and circumstance that many Americans presume
took place on July 4, 1776, actually occurred days to weeks
afterwards.

The Philadelphia Evening Post published the Declaration' s full text
in its July 6 newspaper. And the Declaration of Independence was
publicly read from the State House in Philadelphia on July 8. Later
that day, it was read in Easton, PA, Trenton, NJ, and to the local
embryonic militia to provide much-needed inspiration against the
formidable British.

The shouting and firing of muskets that followed these first public
readings represent America's first celebrations of independence.

As copies spread, the Declaration of Independence would be read at
town meetings and religious services. In response, Americans lit
bonfires, fired guns, rang bells, and removed symbols of the British
monarchy.

The following year, no member of Congress thought about commemorating
the adoption of the Declaration of Independence until July 3 - one
day too late. So the first organized elaborate celebration of
independence occurred the following day: July 4, 1777, in
Philadelphia. Ships in the harbor were decked in the nation's colors.
Cannons rained 13-gun salutes in honor of each state. And parades and
fireworks spiced up the festivities.

Fireworks did not become staples of July 4 celebrations until after
1816, when Americans began producing their own pyrotechnics and no
longer relied on expensive fireworks from across the pond.

In July 1854, John W. Quinney (1797-1855) returned home from Wisconsin. A leader of the Stockbridge (Mahican) Indians who helped organize the tribe's emigration to Wisconsin in the 1820s, Quinney had been invited to speak at July 4th celebrations in Reidsville, N.Y.

In his speech there to 2,000 listeners, he described how to him the festivities marked "the triumphal days of a people who occupy by conquest, or have usurped the possession of, the territories of my fathers, and have laid, and carefully preserved, a train of terrible misseries."

His speech was printed in an Albany newspaper and later reprinted in Madison. It traces the history of the Mohican nation and tells exactly how they had been dispossessed of the Hudson River Valley, reduced to starvation, and ultimately moved to the frontier wilderness of Wisconsin.

"I have been taught in the schools and been able to read your histories and accounts of Europeans, yourselves, and the red man: which instruct me, that while your rejoicings to-day are commemorative of the free birth of this Giant Nation, they simply convey to my mind, the recollection of a transfer of the miserable weakness and dependence of my people from one great power to another."

You can learn more about Indian views of white historyat the Web site of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community.

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IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

I can't get my linking button to work (go figure), so I'll just tell you to go to the Buffalo News site (www dot buffalonews dot com) to read about it.