Niagara’s 4th

Happy Independence Day.

Twenty years before the American Revolution, Britain and France fought for control of North America in a conflict known as the French and Indian War.

In July 1759 a British army, accompanied by almost 1,000 Iroquois allies, laid siege to French-held Fort Niagara. After 19 days, the fort’s walls had been breached by artillery fire, and a French and Indian relief column was defeated just a mile from the fort in a bloody morning battle. On July 25, the French surrendered the fort, ushering in an era of British control of the Great Lakes.

Today Old Fort Niagara is a National Historic Landmark and New York State Historic Site that welcomes more than 100,000 visitors every year. It offers a unique collection of original military architecture and fortifications from the 18th Century and the 19th Century, as well as living history events and programs, historical exhibits and collections, archaeology, and education.

Six years after Fort Niagara fell some citizens of Boston created the first Liberty Tree. Farmers going to market discovered that an effigy had been hung a big elm tree in Deacon Elliott’s grove. The hanged figure represented Boston merchant Andrew Oliver who’d agreed to collect a new “Stamp Tax” levied on the colonists by Parliament to pay for that war.

American colonists really, really resented having to pay the Mother Country for warring on their behalf (this kind of thing probably sounds familiar to you). That Liberty Tree was the first sign there was going to be trouble between America and Britain. It was one of the earliest conceptual expressions of liberty itself.

Thinking liberty led to independence and the document with the word in its title. As soon as it appeared in 1776, the talking heads of the day started arguing about what liberty, freedom and equality really meant. But the writer of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was typically ambiguous – he wrote that the text was intended “to be an expression of the American mind, and to give that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”

Now it’s two-and-a-half centuries since the siege in upstate New York. Jo-Anne and Frank White the Photographer are in Youngstown celebrating the 4th of July and the 250th anniversary of the Fort Niagara battle. Frank has promised to send holiday snaps. Meantime I’ll sponge the ones you see here. And Barbara and I will be celebrating with Sam and Georgia Akers in the Heights.

Whether you’re in Houston or Youngstown or Paris or Baghdad, let’s join in observing the 4th. Listen to the Declaration of Independence, that “expression of the American mind,” right here. Let it stir you up.

We have the liberty to enjoy the widest range of freedoms in the world. Today, we commemorate the independence that gave us that liberty.

Happy 4th of July.

Vacation photography by “Klare and John” Shober posted on Panoramio, from whence I borrowed them.