A Declaration for Our Times

On July 4th each year, America celebrates that day in 1776 when the Second Continental Congress ratified its decision to secede from Great Britain, and adopted the Declaration of Independence to explain the reasons it had done so.

The Declaration sets forth in its second paragraph words that have become a touchstone for the aspirations of America’s values:

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.

Yet those words meant, back in 1776, far less than we might have wished. “All men” did not include women, certainly. Nor did it include Black men, or Native American men, or, frankly, any who were not white men who worshiped in Anglican churches.

There are other parts of the Declaration that we tend to recall less well than that second paragraph. The middle section includes a list of grievances against King George III that justified the decision to declare independence. In an early draft, Thomas Jefferson included the following:

[the king] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s [sic] most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery into another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. . . . [and] determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce . . . .

An odd objection, that, coming from a slaveholder himself. But this clause did not survive the Declaration’s review by the Continental Congress, which removed it from the draft. Yet Congress did retain a complaint that the king “has . . . endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages . . . .”

To modern eyes, the contradiction between a lofty statement of human equality in the face of the institution of slavery and hostility to native people is painfully apparent.

Yet even at the time, the hypocrisy inherent in the Declaration did not go unremarked. Thomas Hutchinson, who had been the royal governor of Massachusetts, the Tory pamphleteer John Lind, the English abolitionist Thomas Day, and other British Tories all denounced signers of the Declaration for declaring that “all Men are created equal” while holding slaves.

This fundamental inconsistency is the original sin of America, the wellspring of decades of strife that inevitably led to the Civil War. The words of the Declaration of Independence were either a rebuke of the South’s “peculiar institution,” or must not have meant what they appeared to mean. In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, Stephen Douglas argued that, in fact, the reference to “all men” in the Declaration referred only to white men.

Yet, in his October 1854 speech in Peoria, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln said:

Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a "sacred right of self-government." These principles can not stand together. . . . .

Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. . . . Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. . . . If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.

The Declaration of Independence embodies a historical contradiction between lofty principles and base practice. To those who, from 1776 to the modern day, have not been included in “all men,” the promises have long rung hollow.

But Lincoln reminds us there is another way to understand the Declaration. It is possible to be both moved by the words of the Declaration and the courage of those who wrote them, and disappointed by our failures to live up to them. We can honor the founders for aspiring to a nation unlike any other ever seen, while recognizing some of them as deeply flawed individuals.

Those failures, those flaws, do not defeat the power of the words and the aspirations they reflect.

The founders did not succeed in creating a perfect union in 1783, when the war was won, or in 1789, when the Constitution was adopted. But in their writings, they envisioned that “more perfect union,” a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

That ideal nation still eludes us, and perhaps it always will. But that does not give us leave to cease to aspire, to put aside the hard work of making a perfect union.

We – all of us, Native Americans, immigrants, and the descendants of immigrants and slaves – have claim to the legacy of the foundation of America, to the vision of a new nation unlike any other before it. We cannot change the errors of the past. But the future is ours, to correct those errors, and to create a country that lives up to the aspirations of the Declaration of Independence.

Have a very happy Independence Day.