Re-reading the Declaration of Independence

Reflections on the Revolution in Philadelphia

[The Declaration] 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.

-Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Henry Lee, 1825

…of all the books that no one can write, those about nations and national character are the most impossible.

-Jaques Barzun

    The Declaration of Independence: it’s a strange thing to really look at, for the first time, a thing you’ve seen your whole life. Strange too that my least favorite subject in school was early American History, and Revolutionary History in particular. Powdered wigs, documents and committees, General Washington floating rather chubbily down the Delaware: so bloodless, so boring. Hypocrites to the man, I had thought, slavery into the nineteenth century! Freedom, indeed. Once, though, I remember quite a revolutionary little pleasure of my own: an exercise in argumentation. Sometime around third or fourth grade, my classmates and I were to write Revolutionary pamphlets. As all were at liberty to represent either the British or American interest, all hands shot up for America, the eager little sycophantic would-be patriots. I—a wised-up, bespectacled nine-year-old yet to have heard of, let alone read, Edmund Burke—I puffed out my chest and raised my hand for Britannia. I alone would defend her, squash these upstart insurrectionists, and risk all for noble King George. I would rein in, and reign over, these ungrateful, incipient would-be pamphleteers!

    Though always a quiet student, I enjoyed the assignment immensely, and I think my teacher took a kind of qualified pride in my distressingly unironic enthusiasm for His Majesty’s purely paternal concern for his colonial children. Certainly such enthusiasm stemmed partly from a play of devil’s advocate, and yet I do think I began really to love the regal British red coats, and took sincere pleasure in the arch argumentation of speaking down to these my comrades: entitled, rhetorically inflated, and so woefully misinformed. They were so dreadfully dismissive of those very real institutions which had allowed that infantile entitlement to flourish in the first place. Duty, King, and Country: to dissolve those bands would be folly indeed. And who would be foolhardy enough to take on the British Navy? I got an A—or its elementary school equivalent—and no small degree of ridicule from my more patriotic classmates.

    I give you this anecdote by way of introduction, but also to try to explain to myself how I came to study American letters, and why. Taking leave of my hasty youthful Anglophilia, I find my higher education has largely revolved around a question I keep asking because it seems important, vital even: what, in any real sense, does “America” mean. I think here of Jaques Barzun's observation that the business of writing about a nation is "the most impossible." Academia too often renders questions of nationhood and national style as naïve, uncritical, even empty. The emotion of national pride, as Richard Rorty wrote, has been largely repudiated by the academic left (Rorty 252). Rorty sees the possibility of a richer national pride: Rorty’s patriot may feel humble, even ashamed, but also sincerely proud of her country. We might here recall Michael Kammen’s People of Paradox. Kammen writes of the tricky business of writing about national “style”:

There is both grandeur and pettiness in the so-called American experience. Hence its interpreter must somehow be unambiguous about ambiguities, must see several sides of many questions without being ultimately indecisive in his conclusions. (Kammen xiii)

Like Kammen, I seem to be writing around the problem of writing about America, and thus I also write around the problem of writing about the Declaration.  How does one approach such a document?

    In his brief, punchy biography (or, better, sketch) of Jefferson, Christopher Hitchens argues that “[t]here is no other example in history, apart from the composition of the King James version of the Bible, in which great words and concepts have been fused into poetic prose by the banal processes of a committee” (Hitchens 23). But credit ultimately still goes to Jefferson as the Declaration’s author, Hitchens writing that rather than “inventing” or “imagining” America, “[i]t would be truer to say…that he designed America, or that he authored it” (Hitchens 5). Thomas Jefferson thought his government “the world’s best hope,” an institution through which the strength of its people could be channeled. “I believe,” he wrote in his first inaugural address, “[our government] the only one where every man, at the call of the law…would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern” (Jefferson 493). There is blood in these words yet, I think. To understand America, or the American Experiment, we turn to Jefferson; to understand Jefferson we could do worse than to turn to the Declaration.   

    Writing to Henry Lee, a distant relative and a brother Governor of Virginia, an octogenarian Jefferson explains “the object of the Declaration of Independence”:

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….[I]t 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.  (Jefferson 1501)

Radical but not original. An “expression of the American mind” was still expressed on paper by one American mind in particular. And the contradictions for which Jefferson is often vilified, are the contradictions pointed to in the Declaration as rendering its authors hypocritical and probably insincere. And yet I still shiver at the words: “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary…”; self-evident truths; “all men created are equal”; “inalienable rights”; life and liberty; lives, fortunes, and sacred honors. Liberty, above all, liberty. So where stem the troubles? Staughton Lynd, in his Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, identifies one particular tension within the document: “…the latent tension within the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence between an outlook on society based on property and a contrasting perspective built on conscience, or on self-determining human activity, could not long be avoided” (qtd. Kammen 237). We’re talking about, as Kammen points out, the nature of property and we’re also talking about the essence of mankind. Put together, we’re talking about the American ownership, in July of 1776, of a few hundred thousand men, women, and children. People as property.

     Natural rights and universal principles; theoretical beliefs and practical realities. Justice and reality can seldom be held in a single vision. In an 1852 commemorative speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglas would be rather frank to his audience as to just what exactly Independence Day means to the slave in America:

…a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham…your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery….There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

    Go where you may, search where you will…for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, American reigns without a rival. (Douglass 127)

We might picture the scattered applause, and gaping jaws. Still, Douglass addresses his contemporaries more than Jefferson. The Founding Fathers, Douglass writes, were “unlike the politicians of an hour! Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles” (Douglass 121). As much may be said of Jefferson, we do know. Congress cut about a quarter of Jefferson's original draft, the majority of the cut portions decrying slavery, that "execrable commerce" (Jefferson 22). The cuts crucially meant keeping the colonies together--these edits were very practical, probably necessary. He would have had to have been pragmatic, bending idealism down into the confines of  the dire situation at hand. And yet we still, with John Adams, admit pretty bitterly the probable necessity of cutting such language: "[King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery" (22). 

    Perhaps slavery was on Jefferson's mind when property became happiness. Though heavily influenced by the natural rights philosophy of John Locke, Jefferson makes a crucial change to this oft-quoted passage in Locke's Second Treatise of Government: "The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions… (Locke 9, emphasis original). Our inalienable rights no longer extend to ownership, but to being happy. Douglass wrote that the founding fathers “loved their country better than their own private interests” and perhaps this might help explain, if only a little, why Jefferson continued to own slaves. He held the country’s future to a higher standard; much higher than that to which he could hope to hold himself and his comrades in 1776.

Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of an American Slave. New York: Norton Critical          Edition, 1997.

Hitchens, Christopher. Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. New York: Harper Perennial,           2009.

Jefferson, Thomas. Writings ed. Merrill Peterson. New York: Library of America, 1984.

Kammen, Michael. People of Paradox. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Hackett Publishing, 1980.

Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books, 1999.