That the anniversary of the nation’s founding ought to be celebrated with especial extravagance every fifty or a hundred years, a tradition that the unlikely President Ford inherited, is an idea that started in 1826, the jubilee of independence. Late that June, Thomas Jefferson, eighty-three, gave thanks for the spread of the self-evident truths of the Declaration—“that the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them”—and expressed his hope that “the annual return of this day” would “for ever refresh our recollections of these rights and an undiminished devotion to them.” Days later, on July 3rd, on his deathbed at Monticello, Jefferson is said to have gasped, “Is it the Fourth?” He died the next afternoon. That evening, in Massachusetts, Adams, ninety, followed him. “They are dead,” Daniel Webster said, in a eulogy at a joint memorial service in Boston, but “to their country they yet live, and live for ever,” their memory all the more sacred for having died, together, more than five hundred miles apart, fifty years to the day that they first ushered in an era “distinguished by free representative governments, by entire religious liberty, by improved systems of national intercourse, by a newly awakened and unconquerable spirit of free inquiry, and by a diffusion of knowledge through the community, such as has been before altogether unknown and unheard of.” And that, more or less, if usually not so eloquently delivered, was the canonical Fourth of July speech for a very long time, even if it was utterly eviscerated by Frederick Douglass in 1852. “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” Douglass said. “You may rejoice, I must mourn.”