The ideas of the Declaration were already in the American air in 1776.
The ideas of the Declaration were already in the American air in 1776.
I t 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.