This weekend, Americans will celebrate the 250th anniversary of our country’s independence in nationwide celebrations featuring backyard barbecues, fireworks displays, and concerts. President Donald Trump echoed the sentiments of many patriotic revelers and underscored the Declarations centrality to America’s political identity when he described the event. “With a single sheet of parchment and 56 signatures, America began the greatest political journey in human history.”

　　But America didn’t begin its journey by declaring its independence. Before those 56 men signed the hallowed document, important events had already made independence a reality. By the summer of 1776, America was well on its way.

　　The Declaration did not give birth to America. Its historical significance lies in recording the ideas and actions that culminated in revolution and independence and in telling America’s story. Its principal author, Thomas Jefferson, described the document as “an expression of the American mind.” Americans’ ideas about politics, self-government, and independence took shape over time, not in a moment. The political theorist Hannah Arendt put it more precisely: the Declaration is “the perfect way for an action to appear in words.” The words mattered because of the actions behind them. Those actions started America on “the greatest political journey in human history.”

　　The Declaration of Independence formally ended colonial government and marked the beginning of a period of constitution writing in the states that continues to this day. The decisive event, however, didn’t occur on July 4. It happened on May 15. On that day, delegates to the Continental Congress adopted a resolution recommending that each state sever ties with Great Britain, declare independence, and rewrite its constitution to establish new legislatures, executives, and judiciaries. John Adams considered the May 15 act to be “the most important Resolution, that ever was taken in America.” It “was independence itself.”

　　While the events of the summer of 1776 stand today as defining moments in America’s path to nationhood and self-government, that path began over a decade earlier when Great Britain abruptly changed its approach vis-à-vis the colonies. After the French and Indian War drained its treasury, Britain abandoned its long policy of benign neglect—leaving the colonists alone to manage their own internal affairs—and began to intervene in colonial affairs directly. That policy shift started an argument between the colonists and Parliament over fundamental political questions about sovereignty and the nature of representation. Americans didn’t answer these questions in 1776. They worked out the answers dispute by dispute across eleven contentious years.

　　The Declaration of Independence is one event—an important one—in America’s founding and its rise to greatness, but it is not the whole story.

　　The Stamp Act of 1765 started the debate. While the issue centered on taxation, taxation was not really the heart of the matter. The colonists’ objection to “taxation without representation” was an objection to being governed by a body—Parliament—in which they had no voice. During the period of benign neglect, the colonists became accustomed to governing themselves. That is why Americans resented Parliament’s decision to repeal the Stamp Act and pass the Declaratory Act of 1766, which asserted the right to bind the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” And it is why, in 1773, the colonists staged the Boston Tea Party to protest a law that lowered the tax on tea. The fight wasn’t primarily about tax rates. It was about who got to decide those rates.

　　What the colonists resented, in short, was being told they could not govern themselves—because by then they had been governing themselves for generations. Adams later acknowledged the source of their resentment while reflecting on the meaning of the American Revolution. In an 1818 letter, Adams asked Hezekiah Niles, “But what do we mean by the American Revolution?” “Do we mean the American War? The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.”

　　Adams did not believe that American self-government was born in the summer of 1776. He understood that it emerged from the colonial charters that first formed the colonists into political bodies, and from the colonial assemblies, such as Virginia’s House of Burgesses and New England town meetings, where colonists gathered to deliberate and decide matters together. Americans learned a great deal about self-government in these places. From their experiences in them, they began to understand that freedom depended on their ability to participate—to share in the act of governing themselves.

　　The uniquely American theory of constitutionalism that we celebrate today emerged out of the transatlantic debate. In October 1765, twenty-seven delegates from nine colonies met in New York for the Stamp Act Congress and drafted a formal statement denying Parliament’s right to tax them without their consent. It was the first time the colonies tried to speak with a single voice.

　　The Continental Congresses that followed continued that effort. At the center of the emerging tradition stood two ideas that would come to define American government—that sovereignty rests with the people themselves, and that the people must be directly represented in the government. British officials insisted that the colonists were already virtually represented in Parliament. The colonists learned, however, that wasn’t the case in their own state assemblies and town meetings. They believed that representation meant choosing the people who represented you.

　　So, when 56 men signed their names in Philadelphia, they were not beginning a journey. They were already deep into one—a long struggle whose object was a political system in which they could participate, in which they could be free. The Declaration gave that struggle its most memorable words. But the struggle itself had been underway for a generation.

　　This is why it matters how we tell America’s story. The Declaration of Independence is one event—an important one—in America’s founding and its rise to greatness, but it is not the whole story. It is a testament to Americans acting in concert to chart a new course for their nation. Treating the signing of the Declaration as the beginning of their journey mistakes the testimony for the thing about which it testifies—to honor the record of the deed while forgetting the deed itself.

　　When America celebrates its 250th birthday this July, it will honor something far larger than a single sheet of parchment. It celebrated the actions, not merely the words, that made all this possible. That is the story America should tell.