Trump eventually settled for displaying a copy, but the document has clearly been on the administration’s mind—perhaps predictably so, given the semiquincentennial celebrations Trump will soon preside over. It was announced in April, for instance, that a limited edition of passports this year would feature John Trumbull’s iconic painting of the draft declaration’s presentation to Congress alongside the text of the declaration—with Trump’s portrait overlaid on top of it, naturally.
The text of the declaration is the arena we return to, time and again, to debate America’s purpose and American identity. In recent decades, its self-evident truths have been flattened into truisms—innocuous clichés, available to all, that commit our leaders to vanishingly little.
True as all this may be, one needn’t refer to the Declaration of Independence for reasons why Trump is unfit to govern. And the declaration did more than separate us from the impetuous king about whom it offered a handy list of complaints. Exactly how much more, of course, has been contested throughout our history—the text of the declaration, it might be said, is the arena we return to, time and again, to debate America’s purpose and American identity. In recent decades, its self-evident truths have been flattened into truisms—innocuous clichés, available to all, that commit our leaders to vanishingly little. Those who signed it 250 years ago understood the possibility that they had condemned themselves to death. Today, the Declaration of Independence is the safest, most sterile ground in American rhetoric. But it needn’t be. The declaration and its history are instructive because they offer us reasons not only to resist would-be kings, but to make our own claims against the systems that foist would-be kings upon us. The declaration, even today, can be read as an invitation to a task that presses upon us as or more urgently than the cause of independence did: to “alter or to abolish” the systems destroying our country and our world.
And in a pattern that seems to recur throughout American history, delegates were sent to the Continental Congress with explicit and futile instructions to heal the growing divide any way they could. On March 16, for instance, the Delaware Assembly told its delegates to take up whatever measures “as shall appear to them best calculated for the accommodation of the unhappy differences between Great Britain and the Colonies, on a constitutional foundation.” Just over a month later, those “unhappy differences” finally culminated in a chaotic day of skirmishes between British troops and already mobilized militiamen at Lexington and Concord, just outside British-occupied Boston.
These were the escalations that elevated independence to serious discussion for the first time after years of clear and consistent opposition from most patriot leaders, to the delight of radicals like John Adams, who mused that the Prohibitory Act, in particular, had already amounted to an “Act of Independency.”
On May 10, Congress passed a resolution recommending that each of the Colonies “adopt such government as shall, in the opinion of the representatives of the people, best conduce to the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular and America in general.” Five days later, it narrowly approved a preface to the resolution assigning blame for the Colonies’ woes to “his Britannic Majesty, in conjunction with the lords and commons of Great Britain” for the first time. The resolution also declared that it was “irreconcileable to reason and good Conscience, for the people of these colonies now to take the oaths and affirmations necessary for the support of any government under the crown of Great Britain.” One delegate, Adams wrote in his diary, “called it, to me, a Machine for the fabrication of Independence. I said, smiling, I thought it was independence itself: but We must have it with more formality yet.”
But while conditions were more favorable for independence, the resolution was stymied by a dilemma: Many delegates weren’t allowed by their instructions to back independence, a move that, ideally, would be supported as close to unanimously as Congress could manage. So the resolution was tabled as the Colonies, localities, militias, and other groups took it upon themselves to draft not only new state constitutions, but new instructions for the congressional delegates and other resolutions backing independence, some of which are collected in the historian Pauline Maier’s American Scripture. And some of these documents justified independence in terms that would have been familiar to readers of Enlightenment-era political philosophy, including the work of John Locke. “Whensoever therefore the legislative shall ... endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people,” he wrote in his Second Treatise of Government, “by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.”
But as it happened, the document Jefferson and the committee produced was quite grand, beginning with a preamble that framed the question of independence in elemental human terms. “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” it read, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
The account of Colonial history offered by Jefferson in his initial draft of the declaration is, it should be said, fascinatingly unhinged in places. In one line edited out of the final document, for instance, it is claimed that colonists had settled America “unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britain.” And in one section Congress deleted altogether—one of the most extraordinary and mystifying passages Jefferson ever wrote—blame for the slave trade is laid almost entirely at George III’s feet. The king had “waged cruel war against human nature itself,” he thundered, “violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death, in their transportation thither.” And attempts to abolish or restrict slavery, he alleged, had been suppressed out of a determination “to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold.”
Jefferson’s character and the character of the country being written and legislated into existence would eventually be judged by the terms established in the declaration’s second paragraph. An earlier pass at the Lockean ideas it would contain had been made by fellow Virginian George Mason in his Virginia Declaration of Rights, which proclaimed, in already familiar and widely used language, “That all men are born equally free and independant, and have certain inherent natural rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety,” and also declared that the people “hath an indubitable, unalienable and indefeasible right to reform, alter or abolish” bad governments.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Ultimately, those words would matter less to the American cause, in the near term anyway, than the declaration’s final proclamation—that the 13 Colonies were “Free and Independent States” with “full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”
With the 2nd of July firmly and obviously established as the day Americans would commemorate their independence, all that remained was the issuing of an official document announcing and explaining to the world what Congress had already done. Delegates collectively and carefully edited the draft of the declaration presented to Congress. To Jefferson’s frustration, their edits were rather extensive in places—tempering or eliminating Jefferson’s most tendentious claims most of the time and making the text more rhetorically fluid and graceful. On July 4th, Congress finished its work, approved the document, and sent it off for printing and distribution.
The British, meanwhile, long convinced that American patriots had been bent on independence to begin with, read the document incredulously, taking particular exception to Jefferson’s listed grievances, which critics alleged had been wildly exaggerated or made up entirely, and to the hypocrisy of denouncing Dunmore’s proclamation in a document that made appeals to human equality.
And Americans, naturally, began memorializing the anniversary of the nation’s arrival in the world well before the war ended. When Congress decided to commemorate the first independence day in 1777, it began its preparations belatedly. The 4th happened to be the earliest a celebration could be put together, with all the “pomp and parade” Adams had hoped Americans would take to on the 2nd. That change stuck. The declaration itself, however, would fade from public consciousness for some time—it was little read or remarked upon after the war’s end and directly referenced only rarely in state bills of rights and the discourses surrounding the Constitution.
Many of the chains that had yet to be broken, of course—at Jefferson’s own Monticello and elsewhere—bound the limbs of American slaves. And in the deepening political and social crises of what we now call the antebellum era, the tension in the declaration between its claim that “all men are created equal” and the reality of slavery was resolved by the defenders of slavery by rejecting the claim. “Taking the proposition literally (it is in that sense it is understood), there is not a word of truth in it,” John C. Calhoun said in an 1848 Senate speech.
These rival perspectives on the declaration clashed most famously and significantly in the 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, where Lincoln defended a reading of the declaration that clearly left no room for the subjugation of human beings, whatever their condition or station, while rejecting racial equality. “There is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he said in one exchange. “I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects–certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”
There’s little evidence that Lincoln considered expanding the rights of women an especially important part of completing that “unfinished work,” and most who shared his views didn’t. But feminists and suffragists also took up the language of the declaration for their cause—the “Declaration of Sentiments” adopted by the attendees of the convention of Seneca Falls in 1848 asserted that “that all men and women are created equal” and detailed “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” And although it’s passed from memory even on the left, the declaration was also an especially important symbol for the early labor movement and its supporters. The Fourth of July, the historian Philip Foner wrote in We, the Other People, his regrettably named compilation of declaration-inspired documents, “was a day of parades, banquets, and festivals—a day for renewing the Spirit of ’76, for dramatizing the demands of the working class.”
Gradually, however, the left’s deepening ties to an international workers’ movement shaped by Marxism and class-based critiques of the American founding came to discourage appeals to the declaration and nationalist rhetoric more broadly, though there have been exceptions in the last half-century.
These shifts in perceptions of the declaration at the margins of American politics coincided with the deepening of a mainstream consensus around the declaration’s meaning and import. “The Declaration is the Polaris of our political order—the fixed star of freedom,” Gerald Ford said upon the bicentennial. “It is impervious to change because it states moral truths that are eternal.” Though the Constitution had changed and would continue to change over time, he added, “the Declaration will be there, exactly as it was when the Continental Congress adopted it—after eliminating and changing some of Jefferson’s draft, much to his annoyance. Jefferson’s immortal words will remain, and they will be preserved in human hearts even if this original parchment should fall victim to time and fate.”
“The soul of America is defined by the sacred proposition that all are created equal in the image of God, that all are entitled to be treated with decency, dignity and respect, that all deserve justice and a shot at lives of prosperity and consequence,” Joe Biden said in a 2022 address at Independence Hall. “Democracy begins and will be preserved in we, the people’s habits of the heart—in our character … the willingness to see each other not as enemies but as fellow Americans.”
It might be reasonably protested that human equality is still not a settled question in America. What the declaration’s history tells us, however, is that the concept of human equality, as professed by abolitionists, slave owners, feminists, chauvinists, communists, and capitalists alike, itself settles very few of our differences. This is partially because the concept of human equality is inert without political commitments and acts of interpretation that put us into conflict with one another. As such, the remarkable thing about the declaration’s place in the American story isn’t the extent to which appeals to it have unified us. It’s the extent to which those appeals haven’t.
The human right to revolution was among the self-evident truths the declaration professed and the one that made it effectual as a document. It is also the self-evident truth politicians today are likeliest to omit from their accounts of the declaration’s significance.
The human right to revolution was among the self-evident truths the declaration professed and the one that made it effectual as a document. It is also the self-evident truth politicians today are likeliest to omit from their accounts of the declaration’s significance—dropped in favor of appeals to human equality as a shared principle that might bring Americans together to solve our problems without tearing the system down. “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America,” as Obama put it. “We are one people.” The promise of this civic nationalism, and of the now-prevailing reading of the declaration, was its potential to unify Americans of many ideologies and no ideology—the hope of bringing parties and peoples with profoundly divergent conceptions of America’s challenges and the solutions to them into alignment with a common understanding of America’s purpose. This was a capacious vision of American identity precisely because it was empty—one that offered a triumphalist account of where America has been and what America has accomplished in lieu of a concrete, contestable, and potentially divisive vision for where America should go. In the near-decade since Obama left the presidency, fascists have asserted themselves in that vacuum.
Whether the stewards of our systems accept it or not, the politics of systemic collapse have returned. Last fall, CNN found that 76 percent of Americans believe the U.S. political system is in need of either “a complete overhaul” or “major reforms”; a similar poll earlier in the year from Navigator Research found 74 percent support for the assertions that America’s political and economic systems need “major changes” or need “to be torn down completely.” This past spring, nearly 60 percent of respondents to an NBC News poll reported feeling that both the American political and economic systems were stacked against them.
True as all this may be, societies have never been remade by the restatement of grievances alone. Those who seek change on the scale we deserve and hope for are obliged to offer the American people a particular understanding of human life, what human beings are entitled to, and, divisive and contestable as they may be, strong ideas about what specific political, social, and economic arrangements are best suited to the preservation of human life, liberty, and happiness. The manifestations of the concept that “all men are created equal” that we’ve come to take for granted—the ones the stewards of our existing political institutions now celebrate—were built from such ideas and from conceptions of the American project those who established this country would have found incomprehensible. Fortunately, they were only our first generation of Founders. Many Founders since have reenacted the declaration and given its words new life. Now it is up to us whether it will survive as a mere artifact or as an example.
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