Often attributed to Mark Twain — perhaps mistakenly, since no historical source shows he actually made the statement — “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” is a common and apt refrain when discussing the connection between historical perspectives and current events. By drawing on knowledge of what happened in the past, and why, we are better able to understand the flow and direction of the history collectively created in each new day.
“Past Rhymes With Present Times” is a series by Lloyd S. Kramer exploring historical context and frameworks, and how the foundations of the past affect the building of the future.
Americans have excellent historical and political reasons to celebrate this year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that the Continental Congress approved on July 4, 1776.
The Declaration defined the American Revolution as a struggle for national independence from the British Empire, but it also described an emerging national identity and the political aspirations for a new American republic.
John Trumbull’s painting, Declaration of Independence (1819), depicting the five-man drafting committee of the Declaration of Independence presenting their work to the Congress. The painting can be found on the back of the U.S. $2 bill. The original hangs in the US Capitol rotunda. It does not represent a real ceremony; the characters portrayed were never in the same room at the same time. (image via wikimedia)
Diverse Uses of the Declaration of Independence
This bold Declaration entered the global history of modern nationalism and politics by succinctly affirming an independent statehood and a new belief in the universal ideals of equal human rights and self-governing public institutions.
Although the rights of Black people, Native Americans, and white women would be severely restricted long after the eighteenth century, the Declaration’s theoretical affirmation of equal human rights was a radical statement in the historical context of 1776; and it remains a powerful, challenging idea whenever Americans carry this concept into the civic life of our own time.
The complex layers of the Declaration have generated political debates in every era of American history, and disagreements about its meaning have reappeared in the competing public campaigns to celebrate its 250th anniversary.
Congress created a non-partisan “America250 Commission” in 2016 to honor and celebrate the Declaration’s semi-quincentennial in each state. This commission has worked with government agencies, teachers, DAR chapters, and other local organizations to create public events that emphasize the multicultural legacies of the Declaration, the diverse participants in revolutionary-era conflicts, and the enduring belief in equal, unalienable human rights.
But the second Trump Administration (using an executive order in early 2025) launched a new “Freedom 250 project” as a public/private partnership that has sponsored its own historical exhibitions and organized Trumpist celebrations such as the “UFC Freedom 250” cage fights at the White House and a “Freedom 250 state fair” on Washington’s national mall.
The Declaration of Independence has often been cited for diverging public causes, however, and opposing political movements interpreted the Declaration with starkly different perspectives throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Conflicting views of the Declaration contributed to the American Civil War because southern enslavers rejected all interpretations of human equality that demanded the abolition of slavery as an essential next phase of the American Revolution.
Disagreements about the Declaration of Independence also shaped political strife during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s–and specific uses or abuses of the Declaration continue to influence the commemorations of 1776, hostility for immigrants, and right-wing efforts to demolish the Constitutional protections of birthright citizenship.
The Purpose and Themes of the Declaration
As most Americans learn from even the briefest accounts of their national history, the Second Continental Congress proclaimed its revolutionary separation from the British Empire in a Declaration that Thomas Jefferson and a specially appointed committee had drafted to explain why the American colonies were taking this decisive political action.
Jefferson summarized political theories about natural rights and the “contract” between national populations and their governments, and then the Congress revised or removed about one-fourth of his overall text, including a critique of the British king’s support for the slave trade.
Strong assertions about self-evident rights and self-governing institutions nevertheless remained in the Declaration along with a list of 27 specific grievances that condemned the king’s disregard for colonial legislative assemblies, the imposition of British tariffs, and the obstruction of international trade.
These grievances explained why “these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states,” but the claim for national sovereignty was also justified in the Preamble’s argument for universal human rights and consent-based governments.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the Declaration famously stated, “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 to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Interpreting the Declaration as a Statement of National Independence
The nationalist and universalist components of the Declaration created a “living document,” which meant that debates about its meaning could evolve from an early emphasis on the unjust actions of the British crown toward a later emphasis on the universal themes of human rights and self-government.
Slave-holding elites always argued that the Declaration of Independence had simply separated the American colonies from the British Empire and that the description of human equality referred only to the legal rights of white men in America and Great Britain.
Defenders of social, racial, and gender hierarchies thus rejected the universal claims of the Declaration’s Preamble, but this critique of equal rights became widely influential through the writings of Senator John C. Calhoun, who argued during the 1840s that the belief in equal natural rights was an absurd misunderstanding of all human laws and institutions.
Calhoun described the Declaration as merely an announcement that the American colonies “had become free and independent states,” so it was “a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty.” They were “subject” to the “laws and institutions” in the country where “they draw their first breath,” and nobody was born “free” or “equal.”
Such arguments shaped the southern secessionist movement and gained national influence when the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott case of 1857 that rights described in both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution applied only to white men. This interpretation of America’s founding documents ruled that Black people could never have equal citizenship rights in any US state. It was “too clear for dispute,” Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote in the Court’s majority opinion, “that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people” who “adopted this Declaration.”
Present-day white supremacists and most defenders of Confederate monuments therefore follow political predecessors such as John Calhoun and Roger Taney in viewing the Declaration of Independence as a statement about the freedom of white Americans or as a nationalist description of rights that should be denied to darker-skinned immigrants (and their American-born children) within the United States.
Interpreting the Declaration as a Wider Claim for Universal Equal Rights
Despite continual efforts to limit the famous document’s historical meaning, America’s nineteenth-century reform movements challenged the Calhoun/Taney limitations and constantly used the Declaration to argue that every human being holds “unalienable rights.”
This argument appeared in the Cherokee Constitution of 1827 and shaped David Walker’s demands in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829). Walker was a free Black North Carolinian (living in Boston) who quoted the Declaration to explain why Americans should immediately abolish their “cruel and tyrannical” slave system.
This critique was extended in the important speech that the Abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave in Rochester, NY on July 5, 1852, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
Douglass condemned the brazen hypocrisy of American enslavers who celebrated American freedom while holding millions of people in the chains of slavery. But he ended his speech with “hope” by assuring his audience that “the doom of slavery is certain” and by “drawing encouragement from the ‘Declaration of Independence’ [and] the great principles it contains.”
Similar themes came into the military struggle of the Civil War through the leadership of Abraham Lincoln and his political allies. Like Douglass, Lincoln read the Declaration as a vital document that defied the misinterpretations of both Calhoun and the racist Dred Scott Decision.
In the year after Justice Taney rejected all legal claims for equal Black citizenship, Lincoln praised the Declaration of Independence in a Chicago speech that explained how anyone who was born within the United States or who immigrated to the nation or who had ancestors in the country shared equally in America’s national commitment to unalienable rights and self-governing institutions. “That is the electric cord in that Declaration,” Lincoln argued, “that links the hearts of … liberty-loving men together, [and] that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists.”
This view of the Declaration’s “liberty-loving” legacy became Lincoln’s explanation for the purpose of the Civil War when he spoke at Gettysburg in 1863. Connecting the recent battle to principles that the Founding Fathers had declared “four score and seven years ago,” Lincoln insisted that Union soldiers were fighting for a nation that was “conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Although he did not live to see the Constitutional advances that abolished slavery, established the equality of birthright citizenship, and protected voting rights, Lincoln would have surely recognized how the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were connected to the Declaration of Independence.
Meanwhile, the Declaration’s assertion of equal rights was fostering new demands for gender equality that had emerged from the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. The women at that Convention used the language and format of the 1776 Declaration to affirm the “self-evident” truth that “all men and women are created equal” and to launch a movement that ultimately carried the ideas of the American Revolution into a 19th Amendment that established women’s equal right to vote.
Lincoln’s “electric cord” of freedom and equality also flowed into the new Civil Rights movement for Black rights after the Second World War. Martin Luther King Jr. described the Declaration as a “promissory note” to future generations of all races that were denied equal rights, and his inspiring speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 explicitly referred to both the original Declaration and Lincoln’s redeployment of its themes during the Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln, candidate for U.S. president, before delivering his Cooper Union address in New York,by Brady, Mathew B., approximately 1823-1896 (image via wikimedia)
Standing near Lincoln’s statue, King stressed that “Five score years ago, a great American” had “signed the Emancipation Proclamation” and re-envisioned how all people possessed “inalienable rights.” These rights were still blocked in the twentieth century, yet King reaffirmed America’s modern connection with its founding ideals. “I have a dream,” he famously declared, “that one day this nation will rise up and live the true meaning of its creed.”
The Declaration of Independence and the Current Crisis of Democracy
The Civil Rights Movement thus drew on the post-Civil War Amendments to revitalize the Declaration’s assertion of unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, however, we can see that the Calhoun/Taney critiques of equal rights are surging again in American political culture. This resurgence is driving the strategic fragmentation of Black-represented Congressional districts, the multiplying arrests of immigrants, and the distorting historical accounts of past leaders, conflicts, and Constitutional Amendments.
Lincoln’s “electric cord” often seems to hang by a thread, but his evocative restatement of America’s founding political principles still describes the steadfast aspirations of a democratic society and the equal rights of every person and social group in the United States.
Our patriotic work in 2026 must therefore continuously defend the guiding ideals of the Declaration of Independence, so that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Photo via Lindsay Metivier
Lloyd Kramer is a professor emeritus of History at UNC, Chapel Hill, who believes the humanities provide essential knowledge for both personal and public lives. His most recent book is titled “Traveling to Unknown Places: Nineteenth-Century Journeys Toward French and American Selfhood,” but his historical interest in cross-cultural exchanges also shaped earlier books such as “Nationalism In Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities Since 1775” and “Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions.”
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