250 years ago today, future president John Adams declared this was “one of the happiest Days of” his life. As he recorded in his journal:

This was one of the happiest Days of my Life. In Congress We had generous, noble Sentiments, and manly Eloquence. This Day convinced me that America will support the Massachusetts or perish with her.

Why so happy? Because the First Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia and composed of respected Virginians like George Washington and Patrick Henry and Massachusetts natives Sam and John Adams, had endorsed the Suffolk Resolves, a series of 19 resolutions written by defiant colonists from Boston’s surrounding counties.

Why was this so monumental?

In one sense, the Suffolk Resolves were not unique. Other localities throughout the colonies issued similar statements of resistance. American colonists had long governed themselves through their own institutions, assemblies, and charters. They resented Britain’s creeping interference and were preparing, as they would in the Declaration of Independence, to present to a “candid world” the principles of a new nation. And yet the Resolves stand out as a refined version of widespread conversations that had been occurring in the colonies about political principles and was an intellectual precursor to the Declaration.

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The Declaration itself encapsulates the principles most central to the American national character. It did not spring suddenly from the singular pen of Thomas Jefferson. As Jefferson himself wrote, it was “an expression of the [A]merican mind,” and its “authority rests then on the harmonising sentiments of the day.” In voting to draft, finalize, and pass the Declaration, participants in various committees and associations, like the Committee of Five and the Continental Congress, had to come to an agreement. All told, the members of the conventions, committees, Congress, and the colonies achieved a consensus in “more than fifty separate instances at a minimum” as Dr. Danielle Allen demonstrates in “Our Declaration.”

Such a consensus was possible because, prior to the Declaration’s issuance, the American people had deliberated and united around a set of moral and political maxims. They did so in and through church pews, pulpits, and pamphlets. In a 1638 sermon, Reverend Thomas Hooker, who founded the colony of Connecticut, declared that “the foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people.”

Religious institutions were gathering places for the 70-80 percent of colonists who attended service on a regular basis, according to “We Still Hold These Truths” by Dr. Matthew Spalding. Likewise, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” published in the early months of 1776, sold approximately 500,000 copies when the population was just four million.

Public documents were a means of disseminating and discussing the ideas America would be dedicated to upholding. The Suffolk Resolves made clear that the actions of the British were not mere violations of man-made laws. Reaching back to first principles, Americans contended that infringements on the right of representation and self-government were, “gross Infractions of those Rights to which we are justly entitled by the Laws of Nature, the British Constitution, and the Charter of the Province.” Violations by the British of the laws of nature were the ultimate grounds for separation.

Natural laws are not about the physical laws of the universe, like gravity, but the moral laws that human beings do not author and cannot themselves change. For example, murder is and has always been wrong, despite it occurring in all human societies, and it would remain immoral even if Congress passed a law to make it legal.

Human beings have inherent equal dignity, a principle that is interwoven through America’s documents leading up to the Revolution and is resoundingly affirmed in the Declaration of Independence. Nine of the early state constitutions contained expressions of human equality in some form, founding scholar Dr. Thomas West notes.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights, adopted in June 1776, states that, “all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights.” And the Declaration of Independence memorialized this principle with the phrase, “all men are created equal.”

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Men is a substitute for all human beings, regardless of sex or social status. As John Adams wrote, equality:

“It really means little more than that We are all of the same Species: made by the same God: possessed of Minds and Bodies alike in Essence… All Men are Men and not Beasts…The Equality of Nature is a moral Equality only: an Equality of Rights and Obligations; nothing more.”

All species have their defining characteristics. Most essential to humanity is our capacity to reason and engage in self-government, not our physical features, like skin tone or size. Through reason, we can discern right from wrong rather than act on mere instinct. And human beings are capable of controlling their impulses, passions, and desires.

Such capacities mean it is unjust for people to rule over one another absent their consent. England had repeatedly violated those principles by dismissing elected colonial assemblies, rejecting colonial laws, and imposing their own without obtaining the consent of the colonists. Thousands of miles away, Parliament believed it could uphold the common good and represent Americans as subjects. But Americans had formed themselves into a new kind of people, united around the principles of human equality and consent of the governed, and the character of that people rebelled against being relegated to an inferior status.

Sustaining that character requires ongoing work. Each generation of Americans has to decide to recommit itself to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and it is remarkable that we have the opportunity to do so. We can choose to govern ourselves now, both as individuals and as a nation, if we maintain the principled consensus of our past.

While today marks the anniversary of the Suffolk Resolves, we are rapidly approaching an even more crucial anniversary: the 250th of the Declaration of Independence. Will we resolve on that day to continue in the work we began on July 4, 1776, or will we depart from the intellectual heritage that made possible our ongoing experiment in self-government?