By Dan McLaughlin
Monday, July 04, 2022
It is common enough to say that the
Declaration of Independence made America. Indeed, that is why we celebrate its
adoption by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, as the nation’s
birthday. In a legal sense, it is true: The Declaration formally announced to
the world that the United States considered themselves a single, sovereign
nation. The next seven years of war and treaty established in fact what was
declared in law.
The Declaration also made America in a
broader philosophical sense. The Declaration’s famous recital laid out the
foundations of the American idea:
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 to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed, –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.
It also listed among its grievances
against King George III his offenses against representative government:
He has
refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people,
unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the
Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has
called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and
distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of
fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has
dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness
his invasions on the rights of the people.
The Declaration’s theories of natural
rights, as framed in Jefferson’s language, have remained at the center of
American political thought ever since. Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass,
Calvin Coolidge, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ronald
Reagan are just a sampling of the American leaders who have invoked its words
and spirit.
As Lincoln wrote in 1859:
All honor
to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for
national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and
capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth,
applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and
in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very
harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
Coolidge, in his great address on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration, proclaimed its
principles “final”:
If all men
are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights,
that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the
governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.
But the role of the Declaration in making
America was not a one-way street. Jefferson did not invent its ideas through
the pure reasoning power of his erudite and hyperactive Enlightenment brain.
The concepts to which he gave voice were already American ideas.
American legislative self-government dates
to 1619, when Virginia convened its first elected assembly. American
constitutionalism dates to 1620, when the shipboard Pilgrims signed the
Mayflower Compact. The Pilgrims also gave us the earliest American icons of
liberty: specifically, the liberty of a religious group to form its own
community free of the government-established Church of England.
Early Americans brought with them multiple
inheritances, including the civilization of the West, drawn from classical
Greece and Rome; the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, drawn from ancient
Israel; and the economic system of early capitalism, free labor, free markets,
and the Protestant work ethic that derived from England, Scotland, and Holland.
But also of central importance was the Anglo-Saxon political tradition, which
placed a unique emphasis on individual rights, limitation of government,
representative institutions, and the English common law. While America would
become greatly more diverse after around 1830, the British inheritance was
crucial to the original development of American political thought. As John Jay
observed in Federalist No. 2:
Providence
has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a
people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing
the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar
in their manners and customs. . . .
“Tocqueville famously wrote that the
American was the Englishman left alone.” The seeds of English traditions
and Scottish philosophy grew more vigorously in American soil. With their
sparse European population, cheap land, lack of a settled aristocracy, and
distance from royal government, the colonies developed their own traditions and
identity over the century and a half between the Mayflower Compact and the
Declaration. The result was an American people who saw themselves as
self-reliant and self-governing even before they formally declared this to the
wider world.
In the decade leading to the Declaration,
ideas about natural rights and political self-government were, as Coolidge
noted, already “in the air” throughout the colonies:
[For] the
principles . . . which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not
required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the
texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were
earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of
how to live. They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of
God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are
all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit.
Placing
every man on a plane where he acknowledged no superiors, where no one possessed
any right to rule over him, he must inevitably choose his own rulers through a
system of self-government. This was their theory of democracy. In those days
such doctrines would scarcely have been permitted to flourish and spread in any
other country. This was the purpose which the fathers cherished. In order that
they might have freedom to express these thoughts and opportunity to put them
into action, whole congregations with their pastors had migrated to the
Colonies. These great truths were in the air that our people breathed. Whatever
else we may say of it, the Declaration of Independence was profoundly American.
Jefferson himself agreed. He was jealous
of his authorship, and deflected claims that he had borrowed his wording from John Locke, from George
Mason’s Virginia Bill of Rights, or from other contemporary colonial sources.
But in a letter to Henry Lee dated May 8, 1825, near the end of his life, he
was careful to emphasize that, in its ideas, the Declaration aimed
to reflect “an expression of the American mind” rather than his own creation:
Not to
find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely
to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the
common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their
assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to
take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied
from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression
of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit
called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing
sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed
essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero,
Locke, Sidney, &c.
Perhaps the best evidence of this is
simply that neither Jefferson’s co-authors (John Adams and Benjamin Franklin,
both highly opinionated and eloquent men) nor the fractious Continental
Congress made substantial revisions to Jefferson’s opening, as they did with
some of his enumeration of grievances. They evidently felt that his language
reflected “the common sense of the subject” on “truths” that were
“self-evident” to Americans of the day. What they said, when America declared
its independence, was what Americans already believed.
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