When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political
bands which have connected them with another. . .
The Declaration of Independence is by far the most important document, I think, in American
history. That phrase, "All men are created equal," is the most important phrase, as Abraham
Lincoln recognized, in our history. It has been used over and over again by every group
championing equality of one sort or another. 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.
This is a statement of First Principles that resonates with us today because it is true
of us today. That is that all men are created equal, and they are endowed with certain unalienable
rights. Jefferson got the language he used from Virginia's
Declaration of Rights, from a first draft written by George Mason. But he took George
Mason's language and made it much more poetic and powerful.
They didn't make their appeal on the basis of a nationality, ethnicity, race, sex, gender,
you name it. They decided to make their appeal a rational appeal, an appeal to reason. They
said, "Let facts be submitted to a candid world."
The Declaration, of course, goes through a long list of things that the King of England
had done to lead the colonists to break away. He is the culprit. There is no mention of
Parliament, which is interesting, in the Declaration even though Parliament was the author of the
Stamp Act, the Coercive Acts, all of the legislation that the colonists objected to. By 1776, we
Americans had concluded that we were tied to the Empire only to the King through the
Crown. And so that's the only break we had to make.
No one in the English Parliament directly represents the American colonists, but nonetheless,
the Parliament claims that it virtually represents the American colonists just like it virtually
represents various other constituencies in England itself.
When they said there should be no taxation without representation, they were citing a
fundamental principle of the Enlightenment. That one had fundamental rights. That inhere
in the individual, rights to one's property, one's liberty and one's life, which cannot
be infringed upon unless one has a say in how these rights are going to be limited.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces
a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw
off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security
The Declaration was the legal case that the colonists made on their own behalf as to why
they were not actually traitors to the Crown. They were making out their legal case for
why they were justified in separating themselves from the English government, and resuming
a state of nature between themselves and the English government.
Many of the founders argued that they needed to revolt from England because they needed
to protect their natural rights, their innate rights as human beings.
What government gives you is not your rights. It provides a wall, if you will, a security
so that you can exercise that which you already possess simply by being human. Life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness. This is what you have simply by virtue of being a human.
But, what do you lack? The protection, the security of those rights. You have this super
valuable thing in a very insecure or vulnerable state.
To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from
the consent of the government. Not any power at all that a majority might seek to have,
but only their just powers. Nor have We been wanting in attentions to
our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature
to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us.
It was using Locke that the founders believed that America was not granted its natural rights,
was not granted its legitimate political rights under the British crown. Therefore they use
very Lockean arguments, almost Lockean language, within the Declaration.
An unalienable right is a right you can always get back when you decide you want to reassert
the exercise of that right for yourself. It was necessary that they be inalienable to
negate the British argument that they'd already been tacitly surrendered up to the British
government. But many of them were also arguing that they
needed to protect their rights as Englishmen. The Founders believed that they were being
more true to the British constitution than the Brits themselves. That they were trying
to restore to reestablish the rights in the British constitution. And this was according
to the Whig theory of English history. Now the real Whigs, as they were called, are those
who believed that the British constitution in its pristine state was one that favored
government only by the people and government that protected these individual rights.
The notion of rights is very much a part of English culture. It's part of the Common Law.
And when they're debating the English authorities in the Imperial crisis, they kept referring
to their rights, but these are English rights. At one point, in the Continental Congress,
in 1774-75, they begin to realize that if they keep appealing to English rights, that
it's a little awkward if they're going to move towards independence. So they just simply
rhetorically change the English rights to natural rights.
The Declaration of Independence is hugely important because it memorializes the idea
that the government rests on the consent of the governed. Once Americans no longer felt
they could consent to British government, they had a right to form new forms of government
for themselves. That was the genius of the founding. They
actually wrote it down. This is what we believe to be true about human beings. This is what
we believe to be true about the purpose of government.
Of course it's a major step into modernity because it's saying that we at birth are born
equal and all the distinctions that we have among us are due to our upbringing, our education.
In other words, it's all nurture, not nature. So one important feature of the American Revolution,
is that ultimately it becomes a revolution against the King and against aristocracy.
It started primarily as an independence movement separating North America from England, but
not necessarily a movement against the nature of British government as such. Tom Paine is
extraordinarily important in this way, in helping to rally the people of the North American
colonies to the revolutionary movement. And he does it in part by calling on them to embrace
republicanism, embrace a more popular government and reject hereditary forms of government
represented in aristocracies and the King. And that sweeps through the North American
continent like wildfire. It's embraced by the Americans. It becomes a feature of their
revolutionary constitutions that are being formed in the states and so by the time you're
drafting the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia, it is a fundamental feature of the American
political culture that's going to be a popular form of government that we're not going to
have a king like there is in England, we're not going to have a hereditary aristocracy
like there is in England. I would say nowadays it's commonplace for
people to dismiss the Declaration as being irrelevant to our Constitution because it
obviously was something, it came before the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution
comes later. It's not supposedly a legal document, but in my view, the Declaration does state
the political theory of the United States. This is the political theory on which the
country was formed as a separate country. It was unanimously agreed to by representatives
of the people. First comes the Declaration, and then comes a form of government to secure
the rights identified officially in the Declaration of Independence. It becomes a background document
that I think is important to interpreting what comes later, and that is two cracks at
government, including our Constitution.