As July 2 approaches — the date in 1776 when the American Continental Congress voted for independence — the tangled strains placed during the last seven years on patriotism, love of country, backing for the lavish bravery of service men and women are as prominent as they are searing.

July 2008 is already stirring conflicting — though no less heartfelt — thoughts and emotions regarding this crucial time in the life of the United States. One speaks here not just of handsome rhetoric of love of country, or of admiration and gratitude for the founders and the most brilliant of those who followed, but about the troubled mind and heart articulating such expressions of allegiance.

According to all soundings, that heart and mind characterizes a majority of U.S. citizens.

The points of dissonance are many: A divisive war, economic mire and, for some, a shredded Constitution (violations to the First Amendment freedoms of speech and association). Yet support for military men and women often isn’t political. It breeches all ideological bounds.

It’s about embracing brave people in danger, courageous people sundered by war’s brutality.

Still, for others, the reality of what those men and women are ordered to do carries heavy political baggage. But empathy and support trump politics when talking with those returning, no matter how bitter soldiers may be that  fellow citizens are against the “war on terror.”

Conversely, no matter how bitter service men and women are who see a purposeless war, a venal act by national leadership, many go back voluntarily.

That divided heart is not new. It was there as the thirteen American colonies tried to negotiate a fair balance with Britain regarding the exercise of their economic and civil rights as equal citizens of England. It was even there as the Continental Congress began voting on the Declaration of Independence July 1, 1776. Fear was in the room as the first preliminary vote was taken.  Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania and  South Carolina hesitated at the last moment. A final vote was postponed until July 2. By then, Delaware had all its delegates present. New York abstained, but did not oppose. Two opposing Pennsylvania delegates absented themselves and their colleagues voted  yes, South Carolina, feeling patriotic pressure, joined the majority.

Much of the Declaration listed grievances with England. The olonies had been created by the Crown, not Parliament. Parliamentary laws pertaining to economic and civil matters were made by representatives of English citizens. The  citizens in the colonies had no legal representation in the Parliament.

The British government’s Mercantile Acts curtailed New England trade with the West Indies. In 1764 the export tax on goods shipped to the colonies from England was hiked from 2.5 percent to five percent.

Customs ships were stationed in American waters to prevent smuggling, “writs or issuance” allowed Crown officers to search “suspected” premises. In 1763, the British government had proclaimed that all settlement to the west had to stop at  the crest of the Appalachians.

The Stamp Act of 1765 imposed a tax on Colonial newspapers, all legal and other documents. This, and similar “taxation without representation” provoked riots in several colonies.  Each such act created a deeper breech between the colonies and Britain.

Yet, by July, 1776, only a minority of Colonists backed secession from the British Empire. By John Adams’ count, fully one third of the Colonists opposed the rebellion and one third were indifferent.

Separatists prevailed because they fathomed both the basic impulses of British rule and colonial rejection of predatory government. And because they were immeasurably more articulate — with both spoken and written word — than the lumbering, arrogance-blinded British government, which exercized power so clumsily as to be easy targets of Colonial satirists and thinkers (Paine, Franklin, the Adamses, Jefferson, Hamilton). And because, after a certain point, their quick eloquence and alert foresight became animated by the fact that, as Franklin said, “We must all hang together or we shall surely hang separately.”

The founders’ daring, their intellectual — and common sense — grasp of the ramifications of British policy, and their intuition regarding their own circumstances issued from the fact that they truly were the “provincials,” the borderland people the British believed them to be. Living at the margins of western civilization meant that all acts had sharp consequences. Distant from the  great centers of European learning and science, financial muscle and military power, everything they did had to be performed with habitual attention, with greater intent, care and canniness than was the case in Europe, where options were greater and consequences seemed less dire. Adams was a working farmer. Washington, once a frontiersman and Indian fighter, became, like Jefferson, and many others, an agriculturalist.

Modern art critic Kenneth Clarke famously noted: “When the culture of the metropolis becomes stale, provincials...bring the vigor of fresh energies.”

Not only were the ducal homes of the British wealthy  lavishly different from those of rich Americans, so were the stately homes of less affluent gentry. English country squires and ladies painted by Gainsborough radiate an assurance and self-satisfaction that makes farmer-lawyer Roger Sherman of Connecticut, painted by Ralph Earl, look rustic and clumsy in manner, which Sherman surely was. But Sherman possessed one of the most innovative, wide-ranging political minds of his time. Colonial America was a tiny, remote place. Yet there the rustic Adamses’ and Shermans’ flexed a prehensile intuition, a concentrated mental and physical energy that challenged “received opinions.” Montesquieu, a brilliant man, believed that republics must be small or fail. The conviction that dual sovereignties — states within nations — could never exist was a certainty in Europe.

“Why can they not?” asked Oliver Ellsworth, another Colonial rustic.

“It is not enough to say they cannot. I wish for some  reason.”  Such irreverent questions produced answers that not only stunned Europeans, but went on to transform their world. Those  answers: The Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers, the Constitution.

But today, as our misguided economy wavers, its tons of daily toxic emissions foolishly creating global warning, and a recklessly conceived war sows enmity everywhere, the inheritors of the amazing colonial legacy seem as complacent, cossetted and self-satisfied as the court of George III. A life too easy, too plasticized, too bristling with cars that tell you where you are, a life made too trivial, too self-centered and distant from the ordinary facts of life...has all this made us unable to be as intelligent as those founding provincials? Elaborating on this, a historian recently said, “Anxiety about our own decadence is a familiar feature of American life. Hold on to that thought. The rube you see may be your savior.”

(Next:  The difficulty of emulating the U.S. founders in choppy terrain.)