Jon Meacham: Why the Declaration of Independence Still Defines America

At first the text attracted little notice — and what notice it drew was often dismissive. Written by Thomas Jefferson and revised by Benjamin Franklin during the crowded sessions of the Second Continental Congress in the summer of 1776, the Declaration of Independence has since been treated as near-holy writ, its celebrated line — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” — invoked as the standard against which Americans measure their country.

From dismissed draft to national creed

John Adams, envious of Jefferson’s renown as principal draftsman, insisted there was “not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before”. Jefferson himself conceded that the aim was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of…but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject” as an “expression of the American mind”. Some judgments were severe. In England, Jeremy Bentham derided the Declaration as “contemptible and extravagant”, and Samuel Johnson exposed colonial inconsistency with a piercing inquiry: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

Yet ever since it was signed, the Declaration has functioned as a sort of lodestar for Americans, above all during periods of conflict. Frederick Douglass, who had fled bondage and lay outside the Declaration’s claim that “all men are created equal”, still celebrated it as the essential American charter even in the gloom of the antebellum system.

What accounts for the Declaration’s staying power? Americans, I believe, turn to it for much the same reason people so frequently turn to holy texts, which tend to resonate to the extent they give readers and hearers a sense of life’s beginning, direction and ultimate end. Both command and covenant, the Declaration forms the scriptural foundation of America’s civil faith, supplying doctrine and pledge. We revisit it to recall victories secured — starting with the Revolutionary War — and to equip ourselves for struggles yet ahead.

It stands as our earliest statement of national hope, the creed for which a scattered collection of New World settlements elected to confront the globe’s strongest empire by force of arms. The Revolution’s origins were mixed, and scarcely all of them admirable. Independence followed prolonged disputes over authority and revenue after the Seven Years’ War, when London took on a heavier role in safeguarding its American colonies. “The Americans have made a discovery, or think they have made one, that we mean to oppress them,” Edmund Burke observed in 1769. “We have made a discovery, or think we have made one, that they intend to rise in rebellion against us…We know not how to advance; they know not how to retreat.” By summer 1776 — after Lord Dunmore, the British governor of Virginia, had offered liberty to every enslaved person who took up arms against the colonists — conflict had arrived. Still, despite American restrictions on who fell within the Declaration’s claim of equality, the principle of personal freedom, inherited from the British tradition, was — and remains — central to the national experiment.

And whenever that experiment comes under strain, the Declaration has proved valuable for naming the country’s troubles and mobilising popular energy to address them. Just as the Gospel of John connected the Christian account of a divine Jesus to the familiar Genesis narrative of creation by echoing the words “In the beginning”, American figures from Douglass and Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr have treated Jefferson’s language as indispensable for interpreting the present through the lens of the past.

Lincoln: a “rebuke and a stumbling-block” to tyranny

Lincoln likely first met the Declaration’s wording in William Grimshaw’s widely read “History of the United States”, issued in 1820. In his earliest significant public address, before the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, in 1838, he invoked the sacred character of the founding; and in 1859, just before his run for president, he praised the Declaration and its chief writer with deep veneration.

“All honor to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people”, Lincoln wrote, “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 to 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.”

At Gettysburg in 1863, Lincoln masterfully anchored the Union cause less in the language of the Constitution than in the lyricism of the Declaration: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The Constitution, the instrument of America, invited argument. Lincoln’s rhetorical wager — and he prevailed — was that America’s mission, rendered here as Jefferson’s “proposition”, stood beyond dispute.

Roosevelt and the Jefferson Memorial, 1943

Eight decades afterward, during a worldwide struggle with totalitarianism, Franklin D. Roosevelt reached for the Declaration to define Allied goals. On April 13th 1943, Roosevelt opened the Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin in Washington by joining Jefferson and the American Revolution to his own era and the second world war. “He faced the fact that men who will not fight for liberty can lose it,” Roosevelt said. “We, too, have faced that fact. He lived in a world in which freedom of conscience and freedom of mind were battles still to be fought through — not principles already accepted of all men. We, too, have lived in such a world. He loved peace and loved liberty — yet on more than one occasion he was forced to choose between them. We, too, have been compelled to make that choice.”

Martin Luther King Jr and the “true meaning of its creed”

And Jefferson furnished Martin Luther King Jr with the vocabulary of aspiration. “I have a dream”, King proclaimed at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” There, in the middle of the 20th century, amid a struggle for freedom, King — like Lincoln and Roosevelt earlier — found no more lucid formulation, no finer distillation of the American pledge, than Jefferson’s old phrases.

“For future use”: the Declaration in the present

In this present illiberal political moment, the Declaration supplies a degree of hope — which was always part of its design. “The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use,” Lincoln observed in 1857. “Its authors…knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.” What held at the start holds still.

Jon Meacham holds the Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University. He has written biographies of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln.

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