On July 4, 2026, the United States of America will celebrate its 250th birthday. But did you know that, for many Americans, our nation has two birthdays? While that day is widely recognized as Independence Day, it was nearly 89 years later—on June 19, 1865—that every American began to celebrate what freedom really means. When it comes to the foundation of our nation, many of us cherish those powerful words from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: “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.” Those biblical principles have been the bedrock of the American Experiment. But eleven years later, when the United States Constitution was signed and later ratified, those promises were not fully extended to a certain group of people living in the new nation—those who had been brought to the New World in the shackles of slavery. Incredibly, the country that prided itself on declaring that our rights came from God and not from government battled within its own ranks over whether it was legal ...