Anything But Compromising

It is tempting to read the Declaration of Independence of 1776—much like the Federal Constitution drafted and ratified more than a decade later—as a compromise. After all, Thomas Jefferson’s “rough draught” was heavily edited by the Committee of Five (Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and John Adams), which made a whopping 47 alterations to Jefferson’s text before presenting the treatise to Congress on June 28, 1776. Not to be outdone, Congressional leaders implemented an additional 39 changes before finally adopting the Declaration on July 4.

Read in this way, the Declaration, particularly the second paragraph and the iconic phrase “all men are created equal,” appears aspirational at best, a project whose lofty ideals became mired in compromise between radical lawmakers and their more conservative counterparts. In an effort to secure enough Congressional support to proclaim independence and fight a war against Britain, American patriots ultimately backed away from natural rights, thereby deferring the realization of equality in the United States for generations.

But it’s important to remember that, at least in 1776, the Declaration’s main purpose was not to impart timeless and transcendent “truths” to a “candid world.” Instead, the Declaration was first and foremost a wartime treatise that was the product of a distinct moment in history. By the time Jefferson completed his draft of the Declaration in Philadelphia in June of 1776, war with Britain had been ongoing for more than a year, not just at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, but also in the Carolinas. A Continental Army, sanctioned by the Continental Congress and led by George Washington, had been raised to defend the colonies against British incursions. And Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, had issued a proclamation to all Patriot-owned enslaved people, promising freedom to tens of thousands of Black people if they joined British ranks and fought against their former masters. 

Because it was a response to a civil war that had already been unleashed, the Declaration was anything but compromising. It drew a stark line of distinction between “friends” and “enemies.” King George III was a “tyrant” unfit to be the “ruler of a free people.” Native Americans were now “merciless Savages” who sought to bring “undistinguished destruction” upon settler colonists on the western frontier. And enslaved people of African descent incited “domestic insurrections” with the intent of destroying the lives and property of provincial enslavers.

The construction of unyielding binaries in the Declaration served a critical purpose: to mobilize British American colonists to fight a war against one of the world’s most powerful empires. This unprecedented mobilization of people and resources in British North America, which drew thousands of men, women, and children from varying social backgrounds into the conflict and cemented alliances with Spain, France, and the Dutch Republic (after 1778), increased the state’s capacity not just to make war, but also to secure peace.

This was an urgent task given the lukewarm popular support for the war across Britain’s former colonies. Scholars estimate that just over a third of new Americans pledged unstinting support for the Patriot cause during the Revolution. Upward of a fifth of British American colonists doubted the viability of a sovereign American state, choosing instead to reaffirm their loyalty to King George III in their “Declaration of Dependence” of 1776. The remaining proportion of the population remained on the fence, unable—or unwilling—to choose a side. 

But if the Declaration sought to erase compromise in exclusionary language intended to banish—and later destroy—enemies of the state, it simultaneously created opportunities for negotiation and inclusion. A colonial tax revolt reimagined as a world-changing revolution forced contemporaries to rethink the established limits of the European states’ system and contemplate the inclusion of a new, non-European member: the United States. And the dire need for manpower and popular backing in a war that had been initiated and led by provincial elites opened the door to a negotiation of authority and the inclusion of a substantial number of non-elites, primarily non-property holding white men and religious dissenters, first in the war effort, and later in the newly constituted states.

As the Declaration proclaimed, a dissolution of all “political connection” with Britain enabled the creation of “Free and Independent States.” These states asserted power not just to “levy war” but also to “conclude Peace.” But despite these audacious claims, the colonies-cum-states had little capacity to exercise any of these powers in the summer of 1776. It took the war itself, a bloody conflict that stretched on for years and was fought on battlefields and in naval clashes in North America, the West Indies, and India, to create a legitimate state that could both end the war and enact peace in 1783.

Yet the new United States lacked legitimacy without recognition. As the opening lines of the Declaration asserted, the colonies formerly known as British North America were now a single “people.” And in “dissolv[ing] the political bands” with Britain, the new nation assumed a “separate and equal station” among the “powers of the earth.” Still, this claim, that the law of nations extended across the Atlantic, encompassing not just Europe but also “America,” was baseless without European assent. Still, only a smattering of nations actually recognized the United States before the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783: Morocco, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the Republic of Ragusa, and the Republic of Venice.

Recognition by other European states and increasing state capacity conferred legitimacy upon the new United States and enabled it to create a new system of laws and constitutions. By joining the European states system, the United States became a sovereign nation that was subject to—and governed by—the law of nations. In rejecting—or breaking—a consensual “union” with the British Empire, Patriot leaders forged their own confederation after 1776. In 1781, the first constitution of the United States, the Articles of Confederation, was ratified by Congress, thereby forging a “perpetual union” of thirteen states. And at the state level, new constitutions drafted in wartime replaced colonial charters as fundamental law authorized not by a king or parliament, but by a sovereign people.

Patriot leaders believed that equality was best secured through a “union” of states. In the Atlantic world, only a “union” with “civilized” European states would grant the United States equal status and establish it as a “treaty-worthy” nation capable of building military and commercial alliances that would ensure its survival in a dangerous world. In North America, the consensual union forged among 13 former colonies guaranteed the equality—and security—of all member states. Such equal status increased the capacity of the new nation to preserve itself and also ensured that “enemies” in war might not just be “friends” in peace, but also members of a more inclusive body politic.

American lawmakers understood equality in deeply historical terms. Even as the Revolutionary moment was defined by a new commitment to equal rights, so too was that definition of equality firmly tethered to—and informed by—a particular and contingent circumstance. The laws and constitutions drafted and ratified after 1776 functioned as an expression of equal rights during an era of tremendous violence and political, social, and religious upheaval. But crucially, Patriot leaders recognized that these laws were imperfect expressions of the “mother principle” of equality.

As Jefferson conceded in the early nineteenth century, the first Virginia state constitutions “had really no leading principles in them.” Owing to “our inexperience of self government” and obsessed with the “abuses of monarchy,” the earliest state legislatures “occasioned gross departures … from genuine republican canons.” But “experience and reflection” illuminated the problem of persistent inequality after 1776. Without equal representation, more seasoned lawmakers concluded, governments could not truly embody the “will of the people.” Postrevolutionary lawmakers sought to “correct the crude essays”—the state constitution—“of our first and unexperienced” councils.

Patriots firmly believed that greater equality would emerge as successive generations of American citizens sought to perfect the republican project. As they crafted new laws and constitutions, a rising generation of Americans would have to look to its own “reason and experience”—not that of the Revolutionary generation—to interpret and apply equality in new and more progressive ways. To force rising generations of Americans to look backward, to be beholden to the ideas of an earlier generation, was to forge a new kind of hierarchy, enabling the “dead hand of the past” to rule over the present.

The perfectibility of the U.S. republic—and its capacity to progressively broaden its commitment to equal rights—differentiated it from European monarchies. Men in monarchical governments “look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence” and “deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.” Moreover, they “ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human” and interpret their actions as “beyond amendment.” This patent refusal to improve and progress was like requiring a man to “wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy.” Additionally, forcing society to “remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors” had dire consequences—during the Napoleonic Wars, monarchs’ resistance to change “had lately deluged Europe in blood.”

The Declaration and the Revolutionary conflict revealed that progressive change—and a newfound commitment to equality and liberty—was a primary outcome of large-scale mobilization for war. But in the wake of the brutal war with Britain, Patriot leaders wondered how they could muster that same kind of mobilization in peacetime. Jefferson’s answer was “generational sovereignty,” his most innovative contribution to Anglo-American constitutionalism. He first articulated the concept in Paris, at the start of the French Revolution, where he served as a U.S. diplomat.

What he first proposed in a 1789 letter to James Madison amounted to a kind of forced mobilization. For Jefferson, progressive change outside of wartime would fail to occur if past generations attempted to rule over the present generation by creating a “perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law.” His solution, met with skepticism from his friend Madison, was that laws could not “live” more than a generation—19.1 years, according to Jefferson’s calculations. This calculated regime change would assure that “every generation is an independent nation.” Freed from the “dead hand” of the past, the living generation would adopt new laws that were reflective of their particular—and more enlightened—historical context.

Jefferson thought similarly about the emancipation of enslaved people. By implementing a gradual abolition scheme in Virginia, Jefferson hoped to force Virginians’ mobilization toward an anti slavery end. The pre-revolutionary generation of Virginians had been ardently proslavery, believing that enslaved people were “as legitimate subjects of property as their horses or cattle.” But the “younger generation” of the Revolutionary era, inspired by the “flame of liberty … kindled in every breast” in 1776, was persuaded to take action against bondage. Still, during the Revolutionary war, this action amounted to little more than the passage of a gradual emancipation law in the state legislature. However, the bill mandated that the next generation—of supposedly even more enlightened Virginians—would perform the work of emancipation and subsequently “remove” freed Black people to Africa or the West Indies, where they would become “a free and independent people.” With the “blot” of slavery removed, Virginia society would jettison one of the most pervasive features of inequality in the new nation.

Today, the Declaration we hold dear bears little resemblance to the document crafted—and revised—in the summer of 1776. To us, it is an inclusive and transcendent touchstone for the nation, an articulation of the principles—liberty and equality—that define us. But it’s important to remember that during the war for independence, the Declaration was a deliberately exclusionary and historical document intended to spark a cross-class mobilization of people to successfully prosecute a war against a sprawling imperial power in 1776. A broader commitment to equal rights emerged from this wartime mobilization, but Patriots nevertheless understood that equality remained a work in progress in the new republic. The pressing task for rising generations of Americans was to effect the same kind of mobilization incited by the Declaration for war, but in a time of peace. Only in this way would equality be more fully realized in the future.