If all you know about the Declaration of Independence is that Nic Cage stole it in National Treasure, you’re missing out on some of the most beautiful ideas ever written. The Declaration of Independence, though it was written in 1776, remains relevant today because of the transcendent truths it contains. These truths include the individual worth of every person, and the right of every person to write the script1 of their own life.
What is the Declaration of Independence?
The Declaration of Independence is a letter from the American colonists to King George III. Authored by Thomas Jefferson, it lists the reasons why the colonists decided to separate from England. It was adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in a building that is now known as Independence Hall. The signing of the Declaration of Independence, and America’s subsequent separation from Great Britain, is why we celebrate Independence Day.
Is the Declaration of Independence law?
Unlike the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence is not law. However, the ideas it contains are foundational to our government. Abraham Lincoln referred to the Declaration as the “apple of gold” and the Constitution as the “frame of silver” around it, suggesting that the Declaration contains the priceless ideals, and the Constitution provides the structure and protection for those ideals.
You can think of the United States Constitution as the “what” and “how” of the American government, and the Declaration of Independence as the “why.” The Constitution describes in detail how the American government is structured and how it should function. The Declaration lists the reasons the founders thought we should form that government in the first place.
How is the Declaration of Independence structured?
The Declaration has two main parts – in part one, Jefferson lays out the principles that justify forming a new nation. In part two, Jefferson makes a list of all the ways the king of England has abused the colonists’ rights. There is so much to glean from the Declaration, but here I’ll focus on three beautiful truths.
Truth 1: All people are created equal.
This doesn’t mean that every person is born the same. Everyone has different talents and strengths, and unique personal challenges. What the founders meant by the statement “all men are created equal” is that no person has the inherent right to rule over someone else. All people are born equal in their right to be free.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote in one of his letters, “…the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
While some nations at the time believed in the divine right of kings, Jefferson dispelled that notion in the Declaration. In America, it doesn’t matter what type of “blood” you have, or who your parents are. Everyone is equal under the law.
Truth 2: Everyone has the right to live free (while respecting the rights of others).
The exact line from the Declaration is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” No matter who you are, you have the right to live free and make choices you believe are beneficial for your life. These rights were “self-evident” to Jefferson and the Founders, meaning that the fact that everyone should have these rights should be obvious to anyone through the use of their reason or common sense.
While the founders believed the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were “unalienable,” these rights were not meant to be unlimited, or untempered by law. From their other writings, it’s clear the founders didn’t believe these rights meant simply doing whatever you want without consequences. As founding father John Dickinson noted, every right comes with an accompanying duty. You have the right not to be killed, but you have the duty not to kill. You have the right to not be a slave, but you have the duty not to enslave others.
Once someone claims they have a “right” to violate the rights of others, freedom breaks down. That’s why we have government, according to one of the next lines from the Declaration. “To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,” Jefferson tells us. A central reason for the government’s existence is to keep us from infringing on each other’s inherent rights.
Truth 3: These rights cannot be legitimately taken away.
Jefferson writes that we are “endowed by (our) Creator with “certain unalienable rights.” What does this mean? If something is unalienable, it means it cannot be taken away or transferred to someone else. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness cannot legitimately be taken away by a tyrant. That’s because these rights were not granted to us by a person or even by the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence – they were given to us by our Creator. They are inherent in each of us as human beings.
In the inspired words of Alexander Hamilton:
“The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased.”
Our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were not created by our fellow human beings. As such, they cannot be legitimately destroyed. Our rights may be suspended, however, when we infringe on the rights of others. (For example, if we take someone else’s property or threaten someone else’s life, our liberty may be suspended (we’re sent to jail).
Of course, the fact that everyone’s rights are unalienable hasn’t stopped evil people from abusing those rights. Hitler. Stalin. Pol Pot. And tragically, human rights abuses are not limited to history. Slavery, human trafficking, persecution of racial and religious minorities, and terrorism are still the reality for many in our world. The Declaration of Independence was not a guarantee that freedom would never be challenged. Rather, it is a banner of truth under which we can unite when it is challenged. Because of the truths found in the Declaration of Independence, tyrants may terrorize, but they may not do so legitimately. Regardless of who is in power, individuals always have claim to their unalienable rights under God.
What about slavery?
Many modern readers of the Declaration of Independence are rightly troubled by the fact that the statement “all men are created equal” was made during a time in which many Americans, including some founders (and Thomas Jefferson himself), owned slaves.
Certainly, slavery was the exact antithesis of the ideals in the Declaration. So how could the founders have argued for individual liberty while such gross abuses of personal freedom existed at the time? Was it hypocritical for Jefferson to have declared that “all men are created equal” while at the time, some men (and women) were viewed as property?
Abraham Lincoln: “They Meant to Include All Men“
Interestingly, the question of whether black Americans were included in the statement “all men are created equal,” arose during the debates between Abraham Lincoln and his Democratic rival Stephen Douglas for the Illinois Senate. Just a few years before the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of slave owners on the infamous Dred Scott decision. Douglas supported this decision. He claimed that when the founders wrote “all men are created equal”, they were simply saying that British subjects in the American colonies were equal to British subjects in England. (Some scholars still make this claim today.)
Lincoln disagreed with Dred Scott and refuted the notion that the Declaration of Independence permitted it. He said that while the founders did not believe all people to be equal in “color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity” they did believe all people to be equal in certain unalienable rights. In his powerful speech on Dred Scott, he wrote:
“They (the founders) defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal–equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ This they said, and this meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them…They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.” (Emphasis added)
According to Lincoln, the founding fathers knew that not all Americans were enjoying equal rights at the time the Declaration was written. Still, abolishing slavery would be a struggle. This makes sense when you look at the context. Before the Declaration was issued, America was part of Great Britain, a country engaged in the transatlantic slave trade since 1663. Americans had effectively inherited slavery from the British Empire, and many founders thought it was inconsistent with the ideals of the new government., including Jefferson. However, other founders were in favor of slavery, making it impossible for it to be abolished immediately. During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, representatives from the Southern states threatened to leave the union if slavery was outlawed. To preserve the fledgling country, the other representatives compromised. They allowed slavery to continue but agreed to outlaw the slave trade by 1808. Without this compromise, there would not have been a Union, leaving the individual states vulnerable to European powers.
The Declaration and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Promissory Note”
The Declaration of Independence was not a statement about America as it then existed. It was an ideal for which Americans would strive, through the Civil War and on through the Civil Rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the Declaration, along with the Constitution, a “promissory note.” In his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, he said,
“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
King saw the Declaration as a promise made by the founders that all in America would enjoy equal rights. So far, that promise hadn’t been fulfilled. But King didn’t believe the ideals of the American Founding were the problem. Rather, the problem was that Americans had failed to live up to those ideals. He said:
“It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned…But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”
Since it was written, the Declaration of Independence has been a banner of truth for people fighting injustice and tyranny. Though it was written in America, the ideas in the Declaration apply to all people everywhere. As we believe, love, and fight for these ideals, we can help everyone live free.
- “By contrast, to the degree that probably most of us take for granted, in America, by and large, you get to write the script of your own life. In America, your life is like a blank sheet of paper, and you are the artist. In America, your destiny isn’t given to you, it’s constructed by you. This it seems to me, the idea of being the architect of your own destiny, this is the hugely important idea behind the appeal of America. And it is especially appealing to the young—anywhere in the world.”
Dinesh D’Souza, “What’s So Great About America?,” Bridges Alumni Magazine, 2003. https://kennedy.byu.edu/alumni/bridges/features/whats-so-great-about-america ↩︎