Two-hundred-fifty years ago, the Second Continental Congress lit the fuse for human freedom by declaring the United States of America independent from Great Britain. Although we Americans celebrate the Fourth of July as our nation’s birthday, our country did not have an easy birth.
In July 1776, the men who became known as our “Founding Fathers” had many problems. First among them was the reality that not everyone believed the United Colonies of North America (as they were then called) should sever ties with the Crown. During the First Continental Congress, convened in Philadelphia for fewer than two months in the early autumn of 1774, delegates from twelve of the thirteen colonies (Loyalist Georgia did not attend.) could not agree how best to respond to Britain’s naval blockade of Boston Harbor and Parliament’s imposition of the Intolerable Acts as collective punishment for the Boston Tea Party.
Staunch Loyalist and Pennsylvania delegate Joseph Galloway even proposed a Plan of Union to formally unite Great Britain and the North American colonies. That did not sit well with Massachusetts firebrand Samuel Adams, and the proposal was eventually struck from the official record of the proceedings.
Following the April 19, 1775, Battles of Lexington and Concord — the first armed conflicts in America’s War for Independence — colonial delegates reconvened in Philadelphia on May 10. For the next fourteen months, the Second Continental Congress debated what to do next. Formal separation from Great Britain remained a contentious issue. Even after fighting in Massachusetts had begun, most American colonists resisted calls for independence throughout 1775.
However, public support for the cause of liberty grew as Christian ministers exhorted members of their congregations to recognize the fight against political tyranny as a struggle for God-given rights and a duty to pursue His will (and our happiness) here on Earth. Patriots of Massachusetts and Virginia worked tirelessly to shift public sentiment throughout the colonies and to persuade each colony’s representatives that the time for revolution had arrived.
Then an anonymously authored forty-seven-page essay was published in Philadelphia on January 10, 1776. Written by Thomas Paine and “Addressed to the Inhabitants of America,” its title was simple: Common Sense. Described by recently deceased historian Gordon Wood as “the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era,” it remains the best-selling American work of all time.
In the first half of 1776, American colonists read aloud from its pages in taverns and secret meeting places while British soldiers passed on nearby streets. Colonial sentiment quickly transformed from hopes for reconciliation with Britain to fervent cries for independence. Paine ignited in Protestant Christians a passion that united the colonies in a righteous war for freedom against the Crown.
After the Virginia Convention then meeting in Williamsburg instructed its delegates to the Continental Congress to push for independence, Richard Henry Lee proposed this motion in Philadelphia on June 7: “Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” A year of back-and-forth debate was finally brought to a head.
Although the mood among delegates to the Second Continental Congress had shifted toward general acceptance that a war against Britain was inevitable, unanimity was far from certain. The colonial governments of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina had not authorized their delegates to vote for independence. Lee’s resolution was therefore tabled for three weeks, so that delegates could return home and make the case for a formal declaration of independence.
After a “trial vote” on July 1 indicated that South Carolina and Pennsylvania would vote against Lee’s resolution and that Delaware’s vote was split between two delegates present in Philadelphia, South Carolina’s Edward Rutledge requested that the official vote be postponed until the following day.
What happened next is the part of history that often gets left out of textbooks. Between Monday and Tuesday, Benjamin Franklin strongly suggested to two of his fellow Pennsylvania delegates that they be absent for the final vote. Rutledge managed to convince South Carolina’s delegates to flip in favor of independence.
Meanwhile, Delaware’s pro-independence delegate, Thomas McKean, had already dispatched an urgent letter to Caesar Rodney, Delaware’s third delegate to the Continental Congress and a consummate patriot in favor of independence. Rodney was eighty miles away in Kent County training Delaware’s militia and providing General George Washington’s Continental Army with needed supplies. He was also suffering from a serious facial cancer that took his life eight years later at the age of fifty-five.
McKean’s letter arrived in Dover on Monday, July 1. Rodney, realizing that he was the tie-breaking vote for Delaware, did not hesitate. Disregarding warnings from the physicians treating his cancer, he mounted his horse and took off. Through thunderstorms and lightning, Rodney rode through the night over poor roads and across wild terrain. Stopping only once to change horses, he made it to Philadelphia in eighteen hours, a trip that normally required two full days.
Just as the voting in Philadelphia began, delegates heard heavy hoofbeats on the cobblestone outside of the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall). Exhausted, still in his riding clothes with spurs attached, covered in mud, and wearing a green silk scarf around his cancer-ridden face, Rodney strode in and took his seat.
“As I believe the voice of my constituents and all sensible and honest men is in favor of independence,” Rodney announced, “and as my own judgment concurs with them, I give my vote for independence.” His fateful ride secured Delaware’s vote for the cause of liberty. (Next time you find a Delaware state quarter in your pocket, take a look at the man riding on a galloping horse; that’s Caesar Rodney!)
Virginian Richard Henry Lee’s resolution for independence secured support from twelve of the thirteen colonies, with New York’s delegates abstaining from the vote as they still lacked formal approval from their colonial government (an error remedied seven days later when it voted tardily to “join with the other colonies in supporting” independence).
Unanimity among the colonies was important. It deprived the British of the opportunity to exploit colonial divisions. It also demonstrated to the American people that the colonies were united in purpose. The history of the War for Independence could have been much different had the delegates to the Second Continental Congress not found a way to come together.
The Pennsylvania Evening Post reported on July 2: “This day the CONTINENTAL CONGRESS declared the UNITED COLONIES FREE and INDEPENDENT STATES.”
John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail: “The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”
The American people, on the other hand, immediately recognized July 4 — the date the Declaration of Independence was unanimously ratified and first published by a local printer — as America’s Independence Day.
The delegates to the Second Continental Congress committed acts of high treason against the Crown — crimes punishable by torture and death. We Americans celebrate their treason every year on this day.
Our country was birthed in adversity, nourished on liberty, christened as the land of opportunity, guided by God, and preserved by His blessings. Two-hundred-fifty years later, let us pray for two-hundred-fifty more. Happy Independence Day!
Hat tip to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who died two hundred years ago today!
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.