It is as holy a day as a secular event can offer. Our school books tell us that in the years following we won that freedom, defeating the Redcoats-and lest we forget, not only at Bunker Hill in New England but at Cowpens and Kings Mountain and Ninety Six and in the swamps of coastal South Carolina. Indeed, we won it in a skirmish in the Forks area of Stanly County.
Freedom is a hard concept.
There is nothing absolute about it, as it relates to the human condition. Thomas Jefferson said all men were created equal and possessed inalienable rights, but he could not bring himself to include his slaves in his concept of freedom. Nor for the first 150 years, could men include women. And somehow, as long as we thought of them as savages, the Native Americans were not considered up to being free. Nor did we include African Americans until forced to by federal law in the 1960s.