On the Fourth of July, The Bulwark asks readers to imagine a Revolutionary War that never ended in a United States of America. The premise is simple and unsettling: if Congress had stayed inside the British Empire, the holiday’s fireworks might have marked something very different.
John Hancock signed the parchment on August 2, not July 4, and the piece says more than 50,000 lives would have been spared in the alternate outcome. It also argues that no whole cities would have been devastated and no families split apart by the war that followed.
Congress in Spring 1776
Most members of Congress did not have independence on their radar at the start of 1776. The body in Philadelphia and the Continental Army were still aimed at forcing the British to repeal the Intolerable Acts, a goal that had already followed the pattern set after the Stamp Act, when street protests and economic boycotts helped push London to nullify it.
By early 1775, that approach had failed to move the needle. The article says killing a few redcoats then seemed like the next obvious step to get London’s full attention, a sign that the argument had shifted from pressure to confrontation.
Thomas Jefferson on May 6
On the night of May 6, Thomas Jefferson’s always-frail wife again fell ill. That detail sits inside the article’s larger point: Congress remained deadlocked in spring 1776 over whether to push for fresh peace talks or throw in the British Empire’s towel altogether.
John Adams is described as someone who could have been told to let others in the Assembly Room handle the volatile situation. Instead, the story treats the deadlock itself as the hinge that could have sent the colonies toward talks rather than separation, with the fate of the Revolutionary War still unsettled.
London and the Fourth of July
The counterfactual goes well beyond one vote or one signature. The article says the United States would have had more equitable health care, the metric system, a shared capacity to sing the original lyrics to the tune of My Country, ’Tis of Thee, and a far deeper appreciation for cricket.
What the reader is left with is not a calendar note but a turning point: whether Congress in Philadelphia would have stayed focused on accommodation or crossed fully into independence. The piece leaves that unresolved, and uses the night of May 6 to show how close the split may have been.
