The Parallel Lives

In 1834, Ralph Waldo Emerson, lecturer and essayist, moved to Concord, Massachusetts. The following year he bought a home in the town of 2000 residents, where he remained for all his remaining days, with his wife Lidian and their children.

     Concord lies thirty-three miles north and west of Boston. Small town life suited Emerson. 

     The town’s claim to fame is that on April 19, 1775, its local farmers took up arms to defy red-coated British soldiers dispatched from Boston to Concord to seize arms. The pitched battles at first Lexington and then Concord were the first major battles of the American Revolution. 

     For the Independence Day celebration in 1837, Concord’s Battle Monument Committee asked Emerson to write a hymn for the dedication of an obelisk monument at the site of the Old North Bridge where the battle at Concord was fought sixty-two years before.

     Emerson obliged and wrote, “Concord Hymn.” He composed sixteen lines, divided into four stanzas of four lines each. The first stanza included one of his most memorable sentences.

    “By the rude bridge that arched the flood, / Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, / Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world.”

     Indeed, it was Concord’s farmers who first dared to defy King George III and his red-coated soldiers. They dared to take up arms against a king. They dared to initiate an insurrection. The news of their daring defiance traveled throughout the world. 

     Emerson did not attend Concord’s July 4 celebration in 1837, because he had reason to be in Plymouth. If he had attended, he would have heard his hymn sung by a Concord choir.

     Also, Emerson would have heard the Honorable Congressman Samuel Hoar give a speech. Yet, “the exact duration and full text of Hoar’s speech that day has been lost to history.”

     This week, on June 2, 2026, publishers will release a new book, “The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776.” Its author, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, is professor of history at the University of Southern California.

     Years ago, Perl-Rosenthal set upon a monumental research task. He searched for, found, and read 2500 of the extant July 4 celebration speeches given, out of more than 100,000, over the next century. He noted the changes in attitudes, as that century unfolded.

     There were those who spoke up because they did not share in the ideals that Jefferson stated in the Declaration: women, slaves, freed blacks, and Native Americans. Others spoke up and insisted that Americans are those who are born on American soil or who migrated here.

     It is common for human beings to believe that a given circumstance is inevitable. For example, for centuries kings insisted they had a divine right to rule over a land and its people. 

     Thomas Paine disagreed. In “Common Sense,” published in January 1776, Paine wrote, 

     “A French [guy] landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it.” Rid your thoughts of divine right, and a path to independence opens.

     In late June of 1776, Thomas Jefferson picked up a quill pen and wrote, “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.” 

     The biographer, Walter Isaacson, has declared that sentence perhaps the greatest ever written.        

     People read Jefferson’s sentence and clamored to get to America, where they could live a new life, one blessed with rights and liberty, where they could pursue joy and happiness.