It was quite a road we took to become a free nation, as our Toby Gibbs now shows us.

The story begins.

Well before 1776, tensions had been building between the 13 colonies and the mother country, Great Britain, for more than a decade.

According to Carol Easterly of the Kentucky Historical Society.

Really, the main kind of rallying cry was no taxation without representation.

The colonists did not have any representatives in parliament, and yet the British government continued to kind of pile on more and more taxes.

And they really felt that that was pretty unfair and that had been going on for a while all the way back in the 1760s.

A growing movement pushed for independence from Britain.

War began in 1775, though not all colonists supported the revolution.

There were those loyal to Britain, and they hoped a reconciliation was still possible.

I I've read that historians estimate anywhere between 15, 20, maybe 30% of colonists were loyal to the British crown.

Some of them fled.

Some fled to Canada, where they were received and given asylum in Canada.

Some did take up arms with the British army.

There wasn't sort of a general uprising of loyalists, and others just tried to kind of stay out of the fray.

But they would not join the colonists in their fight against the British government.

In May of 1776, almost two months before the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress passed a resolution urging the colonies to break away from Britain and form their own governments.

Massachusetts delegate John Adams wrote the preamble to that resolution and always believed that preamble was the true Declaration of Independence.

Now, Adams, his ego and his rivalry with Jefferson might have had a little bit to do with his with his ongoing insistence.

In a sense, July 4th is not Independence Day.

The Continental Congress met in Philadelphia on July 1st.

The next day, July 2nd, 12 of the 13 colonies voted for Richard Henry Lee's motion for independence.

Delegates then spent the next two days revising the document, announcing and explaining the decision to break away from Britain, a document already being worked on by Virginia Delegate Thomas Jefferson.

Then, on July 4th, the Continental Congress adopted that document.

The Declaration of Independence.

With late 18th century transportation and communications slow.

It took days, even weeks, for word to spread throughout the colonies and territories beyond, including Kentucky.

It would have taken several weeks, at least for news from the eastern colonies to reach Kentucky.

These frontier settlements were still very remote.

Kentucky at this point was still part of Virginia.

The colony of Virginia in 1776, it became a separate county, and that was for the purpose of defense.

The Declaration of Independence and its famous phrases.

All men are created equal and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have inspired Americans for almost 250 years and people seeking freedom in other parts of the world.

Carol Easterly says the declaration's message can still inspire unity today.

I think we're we're living through a very polarized moment right now, but the ideals that are expressed in the Declaration of Independence is something that all Americans can get behind.

Now, certainly they're very high ideals and ones that we've never perfectly lived up to as a country.

But that doesn't mean we don't continue to try to live more fully into them, to grow into them.

We've had activists at different times in our history who've called this out and have kind of tried, you know, called us to be who we say we want to be in the Declaration of Independence.

And so I think it's it's kind of a beacon for us to, you know, a goal to kind of continue growing toward as a country.

For Katie, I'm Toby Gibbs.