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To all the Katie Courics, Rush Limbaughs and other right-wing talking-point nay-sayers who keep saying that John and Elizabeth Edwards should stay home instead of run for the Presidency in 2008 I want to ask this one question:
"What if Caesar Rodney had stayed home?"
Had it not been for just one man, Caesar Rodney, there would have been no Declaration of Independence in 1776 and today we would all be singing "God Save the Queen" at our cricket matches rather than "The Star Spangled Banner" at baseball games.
The fourth of July would be the holiday where we reconciled with King George III.
In deciding to seek independence from England, the Continental Congress adopted a rule that would have required that any such independence be approved unanimously by all thirteen colonial delegations in July of 1776. If just ONE colony would have voted against secession from England, then there would be no independence and some sort of reconcilliation with the crown would have to have been attempted instead.
In turn each colony only got to cast one vote between all their delegates because the delegates were there as representatives of the legislatures of the thirteen colonies, not the people of the colonies directly. If the majority of any one colony's delegates voted against independence then they would in turn cast their single vote against independence.
Overall some 56 delegates from the 13 colonies had assembled that hot summer in Philadelphia to decide the all important question of "independence". Caesar Rodney was one of three delegates sent from the very small colony of Delaware - Thomas McKean and George Read being the other two delegates and they had deadlocked over Delaware's vote 1 to 1. McKean had decided for independence while Read decided against.
Caesar Rodney's vote then was needed to break their tie and determine Delaware's vote.
No big deal you might say.
Well, no big deal - except that Caesar Rodney was at home in his sick-bed some eighty miles away at the time suffering from a painful cancer tumor on his face and also from asthma. Heeding his country's call to service though, got up out of his sick bed and rode all night on horseback through a pouring thunderstorm, down mud-choked dirt roads, and across swollen streams, and over some not so sturdy bridges to arrive in Philadelphia just in time for the independence vote.
Rodney cast his vote in the Delaware delegation in favor of independence breaking the tie and thus in turn casting Delaware's single vote in the Congress for independence and thereby assuring that we live today as Americans, not Englishmen, and that we know these words as our birthright:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Caesar Rodney got up out of his sick-bed when his country needed him and not only did he cast this important deciding vote for our Independence, he then went on during the next eight years to serve as a Judge in Delaware, in the Continental Army under George Washington and then as a Major General in the Delaware Militia. Thereafter he served as Governor of Delaware, and again in the Continental Congress, and finally as the Lieutenant Governor of Delaware before finally succumbing in 1784 to the cancer that had troubled him for the last 10 years of his life.
A hero is, most often, the ordinary person who at a critical moment and a critical place in history steps up to the crisis that presents itself and does something extraordinary for an important cause higher than self.
In 1999, the United States finally honored Caesar Rodney's heroism and memorialized his eighty mile midnight ride to Philadelphia on the back of the new Delaware state quarter-dollar they issued, the first of fifty such state quarter-dollar designs to be issued by the Treasury Department.
What if Caesar Rodney had stayed home indeed?
God bless John and Elizabeth Edwards - May we have more courageous people like them in this country who live every day of their lives to the fullest in serving others and serving their nation in a time of need.
Respectfully,
Douglas J. De Clue
Orlando, FL
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