Sam Spencer of Portland is CEO of CEI-Boulos Capital Management and a former White House staff member under President Clinton.

As we gather this July Fourth weekend for fireworks, backyard barbecues and celebrations throughout Maine, our modern holiday can feel comfortable, even routine.

Here in Portland, thousands of people will gather on the Eastern Prom to watch the annual fireworks, but few will know of the momentous pre-revolutionary conflict that took place on that very ground two years before the Declaration of Independence, 252 years ago this July.

This place so familiar to us, known then as the “Great Hill” and as Munjoy Hill today, was not the scene of a historic physical revolutionary battle.

However, the fateful dialogue that unfolded between a future president and his best friend on these heights overlooking Casco Bay serves as a profound intellectual marker for American independence and represents a defining moment of unyielding commitment from a chief architect of the revolution and the new nation.

This painful and deeply personal fracturing of friendship between two lifelong companions served as a stark prelude to the fast-approaching revolution. The episode demonstrates that our democracy was not born out of easy consensus or inevitability, but out of agonizing individual choices and personal bravery. As our nation marks its 250th anniversary, that conversation so long ago can help us reflect on a sobering reality that has become apparent in recent years: freedom and democracy are not permanent guarantees.

In July 1774, two brilliant lawyers arrived in Falmouth — the community we now call Portland — while traveling the grueling eastern circuit of the Massachusetts Superior Court. One was John Adams, a leading attorney who had just been selected as a delegate to the First Continental Congress. The other was Jonathan Sewall, the king’s attorney general for Massachusetts and Adams’ closest personal friend. Away from the busy courthouse, they walked up the steep slope of the hill together to find privacy.

Strolling along the high, open ground and looking across to the Calendar Islands and the vast Atlantic Ocean, which divided them from their British rulers, the two men did not speak as enemies, but as brothers. Sewall, a dedicated loyalist, used the walk to plead desperately with Adams. He strongly urged Adams not to attend the upcoming Continental Congress — warning his friend that the assembly was inherently treasonous.

Sewall’s worldview prioritized the absolute, orderly authority of the Crown over the messy, unpredictable experiment of self-governance. He warned that Great Britain’s military might was irresistible and that political opposition brought the terrifying real possibility of being hanged for treason. He wanted to save his friend from ruin.

Adams listened intently to the man he loved most. Fully aware that defying the Crown brought potentially lethal consequences, any lingering hopes for political compromise vanished within his mind during this grueling conversation. Realizing that his path forward demanded total devotion to the colonial cause, he chose principle and courage over personal safety. He responded: “I know Great Britain is determined on her system, and that very determination, determines me on mine … The die is now cast; I had passed the Rubicon; swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country, was my unalterable determination.”

The conversation on the hill ended in an agonizing heartbreak. Adams later recalled that he turned to his friend and confessed, “This adieu is the sharpest thorn on which I ever set my foot.” They walked down the hill, parted ways, and did not speak again for 14 years. Just over a year later, British ships sailed into that very harbor and burned Falmouth to the ground.

We often sanitize the birth of our nation, forgetting that the Revolutionary War was, at its heart, a brutal civil war that viciously tore friendships, families and communities apart. It pitted lifelong companions against each other and forced ordinary people to choose sides, destroying social structures right here in Maine long before the first battlefield shots were fired.

Today, our public square faces a dangerous complacency, and the authoritarian impulse Sewall championed has found a modern echo. Polling data from the Pew Research Center reveals that nearly one-third of Americans now believe an authoritarian leader who can bypass Congress and the courts would be a good way to govern.

Like Sewall, a growing number of citizens are tempted to swap the difficult frictions of democracy for the perceived stability of an unchecked executive. We take our self-governing institutions for granted, forgetting that they only exist because ordinary individuals like Adams chose conviction over comfort and personal convenience.

The lesson of the Great Hill is that democracy demands active vigilance, even when it forces us to face the “sharpest thorn” in our own lives. Adams refused to compromise his principles simply to preserve his closest friendship, because he believed a constitutional, self-governing republic was the only system that could protect human liberty — a system he knew would remain terrifyingly fragile.

Independence Day must be an urgent reminder of our ongoing responsibility to sustain what was built. Everyone who believes in preserving our democracy today should treat July 4 not as a day of passive observation or blind patriotism, but as a direct call to action.

As the final echoes and smoke of Saturday night’s Independence Day fireworks over Portland Harbor fade, let us honor the fierce, lonely conviction forged by John Adams on our own shores.

If we are to “swim or sink” together as a free nation for another quarter of a millennium, let us protect our democracy today by recognizing it is a continuous struggle — and one that we must choose to safeguard every single day.