When the bottle rockets go up, remember that the Star-Spangled Banner began as notes—“the land of the free and home of the brave”—on the back of a letter in Francis Scott Key’s hands as he stood on the deck of the British ship the Minden and beheld the temerity of an armed nation of free people standing up to a then more powerful aggressor all during an overnight bombardment of Baltimore’s Fort McHenry in 1814.
So, light up the sky on this 250th Fourth of July as bright and fiery as what Key witnessed knowing that the colorful explosions are a tribute to our right to keep and bear arms. After all, the colors from compounds like strontium, barium, copper, and sodium burning on gunpowder are meant to be reminiscent of the cannon bombardment of Fort McHenry and, decades earlier, of the battles of the American Revolution.
Independence Day is a celebration of armed defiance to tyranny—and of the citizen’s right to defend their lives.
Maybe, as you celebrate, also ponder that a smaller explosion came from the musket that fired the “shot heard round the world” in 1775. That morning, there was the flash of white and red and the bang and the lingering smell of sulfur combustion from mostly burned blackpowder as the Revolution began.
The guns that day—many American made—were in the hands of Colonial Americans who were not going to give them to British troops marching from Boston to seize guns and powder from the people.
Indeed, realize that many of the guns owned by the people in Boston in 1775 and early 1776 were confiscated by the British—they even took the guns Paul Revere left in his Boston home—showing that control of the people begins with disarming (disempowering) them.
But, in this case, the free people besieging the city of Boston still had many more guns not yet seized, and surprised the British by digging in at night, under the command General George Washington, on Dorchester Heights on March 4-5, 1776. The Americans placed artillery there (much of it hauled from Fort Ticonderoga in an epic journey).
This made the British position in Boston untenable. British General William Howe realized his troops and ships in the harbor were vulnerable to cannon fire that could smash his ships from the heights and so chose to evacuate.
That was the beginning of a long and tenuous war that, on paper, should have gone to the British.
Freedom, however, is a strong motivator. As they had modern arms and knew how to use them, the American people were formidable.
It is this bright and true history of the American character that showed, and maybe even helped to grow, the conviction in the peoples’ earliest conceptions of who they were as an armed people standing up to tyranny that showcased and perhaps hardened the American spirit.
The feel of this freedom is still in the hearts and minds of every free citizen who knows they can defend themselves from predators with four legs or two until other free citizens, our first responders, arrive to assist.
With the tools for freedom in their hands and advocacy for this right on their voices, this still mostly free people can remain free.
This is what we celebrate by brightening the dark skies after sunset on the Fourth of July.
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