25 for 25: Snapshots from a quarter-millennium

The Declaration of Independence (1776)

America is approaching the end of its 25th decade since independence. The country's history during that time has covered a lot of ground. In this and subsequent essays I’ll describe events and developments, one per decade, that had particular effect in producing the country we live in today.

The Declaration of Independence (1776)

America would never have become America without the Declaration of Independence. It would have remained thirteen colonies within the British empire. The concept of the Declaration of Independence conflates two things: the vote in the Continental Congress to break with Britain, and the statement articulating the reasons for the break.

The vote was the work of John Adams and others who for months had been pressing for independence. American soldiers first clashed with British soldiers in April 1775. The Americans were defending a cache of weapons the British intended to seize. The men who mustered that day at Lexington and Concord didn't think they were creating a new country. They were simply resisting what they considered oppressive British actions. Had the British peacefully turned around and marched back to Boston, what became the Revolutionary War would not have begun that day.

But fire was exchanged, first at Lexington. Blood was drawn, and events cascaded. A running battle accompanied the British retreat to Boston. The day ended with the Americans more full of themselves than before and less inclined to suffer indignities imposed by the British government. The British, for their part, considered the Americans more rebels than ever, and they were more determined to teach them a lesson. 

The Continental Congress voted to create a Continental Army, with George Washington in command. Washington hastened to Boston and laid siege to the British inside the town. The siege lasted until the spring of 1776, when the British army sailed off. Washington guessed they would land at New York, and he marched there to await them.

Meanwhile the Congress debated what the fighting signified and what, from the American side, its objective should be. Encouraged by Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, a majority eventually concluded that independence was the only respectable outcome. On July 2, the Congress approved a motion offered by Richard Henry Lee that “these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.”

John Adams thought this action the decisive one. He predicted that July 2 would be remembered and celebrated in America. He was wrong. What Americans came to celebrate was not the action but the justification: the declaration of principles adopted two days later.

Thomas Jefferson was assigned the lead in drafting the declaration. Jefferson initially demurred, saying Adams ought to have the honor. Adams explained why Jefferson must do it. “Reason first: you are a Virginian, and Virginia ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second: I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular; you are very much otherwise. Reason third: you can write ten times better than I can." 

Most of the declaration Jefferson produced was an indictment of King George for sins of commission and omission against the Americans. Adams might have done as well as Jefferson on this part. But he couldn't have matched Jefferson's elegant introduction, in which the Virginian laid the philosophical groundwork for American independence.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident,” wrote Jefferson, "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."

Many other countries declared independence during the following two centuries. Their complaints against colonial masters weren’t unlike those of the Americans against the British. But none of them produced a declaration of causes that had anything like the impact of Jefferson’s. Many of them, in fact, borrowed from Jefferson’s declaration in writing their own.

The phrase that had the most enduring influence was “all men are created equal.” Jefferson was writing in a political context, and what he meant was that Americans were the political equals of Britons. Yet the words acquired a life of their own. In America they became the yardstick by which self-government was measured. Groups denied equal treatment quoted the Declaration against those doing the denying. The Declaration per se has no standing in American law, but the equality it avowed was eventually written into the Constitution via the Fourteenth Amendment. Jefferson’s assignment had been to justify American freedom. His accomplishment was to marry equality to freedom in America’s founding statement of principles.

Equality and freedom didn’t always get along, especially when equality acquired economic overtones. For a quarter-millennium Americans have argued about the tradeoffs between equality and freedom. Indeed this argument has underpinned nearly all the most important disputes in American democracy.

Some have blamed Jefferson for promising more than democracy could deliver. He might have copped to the charge. He was setting a high bar. He might also have pointed out that he asserted that Americans had a right to pursue happiness, not achieve it.