What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
… your denunciation of tyrants… mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
— Frederick Douglass, 1852
Montpelier, Vermont
Stony Soil Vermont 
Do I think that the framers of the Declaration of Independence saw a nation of feed slaves, women voting and gay marriage? No, but there ideas were bigger than their ability to perceive. At least that is what I tell myself while watering my roof ahead of the neighbors annual fire works and gun bacchanalia.