OK, so we all stand pat on our insistence that 1789 is the year that the United States of America first came into existence. So why the hell were we celebrating our Bicentennial in 1976? What is the significance of July the 4th? Was July 4th, 1789 an important day?
The United States of America was Confederated, and then formed a Union. Hansen was the First President, but he served very different functions than did George Washington, who was the first to hold the office we now call President of the United States.
The truth is that history is fairly inconsistent in remembering such facts, particularly who was the first to do something, or invent something. Take the Automobile, which was “invented” ten or twelve times, according to who is remembering it. The early federalists were quite passionate in their insistence that the new Government was not the successor of the old, but a new creation, unencumbered by the previous government. So, they enshrined their new president as the first, and their congress as the first, and tried as hard as they could to make that the beginning.
Trisk, I see your point, and I’m not going to argue there wasn’t a United States of America before the U.S. Constitution was enacted.
However, I will argue that there was no office of “the President of the United States”. That office, an executive forming a branch of government, is a creation of the Constitution. There was no equivalent under the Articles of Confederation.
Under the AofC, there was a position titled “the President of the United States in Congress Assembled”. That last part of the phrase is a crucial part. That title means "the presiding officer (aka chairman) of the assembly of state representatives (United States in Congress assembled). He is the president of Congress, not the president of the country. The distinction is important.
This is a truly bizarre misunderstanding. Some people claim the John Hanson, the president under the Articles of Confederation, was a “Moor” i.e. black. As evidence, they point to a photograph of John Hanson which clearly shows he has a dark complexion.
I know. Many of you are already ahead of me on this. The John Hanson in the photograph was a Reconstruction era Senator and definitely not the same person as the first president. President Hanson died several decades before photography was invented and painted portraits of him show he was white.
Well, if people were telling you that July 4, 1976 was the bicentennial of the United States, they were wrong. July 4, 1976 is the bicentennial of the Revolution. July 4, 1789 was not any more important than any other Independence Day (except the first. )
In addition, the AofC were first ratified on November 15, 1777, already well into the war. So if we’re going to celebrate the anniversary of a political union of some sort, it should be in 77, not 76.
Whether or not the states were ever sovereign is debateable. I was planning a thread in GD on just that topic when something else came up.
On the topic of historic dates, I’d like to point out that the colonies voted to revolt on July 2nd, 1776. The paperwork just took a couple days to catch up. Check out this John Adams site. Richard Henry Lee actually wrote resolution to secede from Britain.
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