The Declaration’s Elusive Promise

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . .” This profound statement from the Declaration of Independence struck at the hearts of men and women 250 years ago and still strikes at the hearts of many today who seek recognition and vindication in its promises. Its force comes from two primary features. First, the gravity of its statement. It claims verifiable truth; in fact, it purports to stake out a claim so obvious that one hardly needs mathematical or logical proofs to demonstrate it. Second, and the primary concern of this essay, is the universality of the claim that all men are created equal. It does not bracket certain individuals, for good or for ill. None are excluded from its grandiose declaration. The problem, however, is that even as the Declaration made this universal claim, it remained extremely limited in its application by those that signed it. However, overly focusing on the practical, contemporary application of the Declaration distorts its true meaning, both then and now.

The ostensibly simple truth that all human beings were created equal remains contested primarily because of its elusiveness, both in meaning and in application. What does it mean to be created equal? In one sense, that answer is made clear in the subsequent clauses. Men were made equal in “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It does not claim that human beings were all equal in their material goods, moral capacity, or intellect. Equality was limited to the rights that human beings had. But this also meant that those other qualities—material goods, moral capacity, and intellect—had no bearing on the Declaration’s most important claim. What mattered for freedom and self-governance was whether a being could be counted as part of the human family or not. To be part of the human species meant that each person had those natural rights which were essential to self-determination, critical among them being the pursuit of happiness.

The tension becomes most apparent, however, in its application, even to the point of distorting the plain meaning. For example, the Declaration proclaimed that natural rights naturally led to self-governance, but at that moment most residents could not vote (not to mention the many other disadvantages women faced in civil society). Even more problematic was the reality that many remained in bondage—figurative and literal. At the time of the Declaration’s signing—a time that heralded an unprecedented era of freedom—the “self-evident” truth of human equality faced a constant contradiction that plagued the young nation: slavery. Just how self-evident could these truths be if the signers of the Declaration—in the same moment of time they penned their names—were depriving human beings of just about every dignity (let alone right) imaginable? The pursuit of happiness for the enslaved would have to wait. 

This set of circumstances naturally raises the question: What good are the Declaration’s pronouncements if they do not operate to prevent even its drafters from exercising tyranny over others? Perhaps the Declaration’s meaning has been taken for granted. Is it possible that its meaning has been misunderstood, that its drafters fully intended to continue slavery and that—by extension—its pronouncements did not have universal application? These questions persisted from the founding generation through the antebellum period and have cropped up at certain inflection points in this nation’s history. The residuum of this contention remains felt and debated today. Thus, a consideration of this nation’s past and how it relates to the present can bring clarity to whether the Declaration’s pronouncements were indeed true and universal. It also allows us to consider whether failure to embrace its promises fully at its inception have indelibly bound future generations to a false promise and an intractably unequal future. 

First, a look into the drafting process of the Declaration demonstrates clearly that the tension between its principles and the existence of slavery was not idly dismissed or overlooked. Long before, the record has made clear that Thomas Jefferson—a slaveholder—included a damning paragraph on the Atlantic Slave Trade, written to convey Jefferson’s sense that slavery was imposed upon Americans to the detriment of both Africans and Americans alike. First, the king captured Africans, depriving them of their “most sacred rights of life & liberty”; by 1776 the king incited insurrections among those slaves to deprive Americans of theirs. True, even here there is not an explicit call for the end of slavery. Yet, Jefferson marked the institution with clear opprobrium. And this fit Jefferson’s overall temperament toward slavery. He was instrumental in measures that would stem its spread. His influence played a role in matters from the Northwest Ordinance, which established an anti-slavery policy for the territories, to legislation that would all but end the Transatlantic Slave Trade at the earliest possible moment under the Constitution. Considering his natural rights philosophy, such actions would be hardly noteworthy. Though Jefferson hinted often at his suspicions that slaves (and blacks more generally) were “lesser than” in the realm of intellect and moral capacity, he intimated time and again that such possibilities said nothing about their natural rights. As he wrote to Roger Weightman, “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.” No man was naturally suited to be a master, nor any other naturally suited to be a slave. 

And yet Jefferson fell short of advocating for abolition, which he understood to be an intractable dilemma. For instance, in response to concerns over the Missouri question in 1820, Jefferson intimated that he would gladly see full emancipation become reality but remarked that “we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” Slavery presented a dangerous situation for the Union. It was wholly incompatible with the nation’s aspirations, and yet passions animating its permanence could not simply be ignored. Sensing that his generation was unequal to the task of emancipation, Jefferson expressed hope that future generations would do what he could not. Jefferson was painfully aware that he was a walking contradiction. Indeed, he was a microcosm of the fledgling nation.

Still, Jefferson’s condemnation of slavery never made it into the final draft. It was rejected during the revision phase at the Continental Congress. The only portion of the paragraph that survived was reprimanding the king for inciting slave rebellions. There could have been several reasons for this rejection. One potential concern might have been the anti-slavery wave emanating from England that worried southern plantation owners. Somerset v. Stewart had just been decided a few years prior, where Lord Mansfield invalidated the claim of a Virginian slaveowner who attempted to remove James Somerset from English soil. Mansfield, invoking language reminiscent of natural law, held that, because slavery was unlawful in England, Somerset could not be detained and reduced to involuntary servitude. Some in the colonies interpreted that decision to suggest that natural law challenges might invalidate slaveholders’ claims. Such fears could create hesitancy to include language strongly suggesting abolition in the Declaration. Another concern, and much more to the point, every colony in America at that time permitted slavery. Even if the truths outlined in the Declaration would mean the end of slavery, a fragile nation built on fragile alliances could hardly demand abolition upon declaring independence. And so, they compromised. The Declaration retained language that denounced slavery as a theoretical matter but did virtually nothing to denounce it as a practical one.

Perhaps to the founders in 1776 that compromise—omitting an unmitigated denunciation of slavery—was a small price to pay for indispensable unity. But that price in blood would prove itself much greater than some (or most) imagined. The compromise would, in one way or another, influence U.S. history for the next 250 years. And it started with the Constitution. The same compromise haunted the Constitution’s drafting and later interpretation. The drafters went to great lengths to ensure that the Constitution did not legitimate the idea of owning property in man, and yet provided several protections for the institution, again for the sake of Union. 

This created ambiguities that future generations of Americans would have to work through. The first inflection point was the late antebellum period, a time in which there was much agitation around the question of slavery. Did the Declaration, and later the Constitution, set the nation on a path toward abolition and equality? The answer to this question was not always clear, even by partisan considerations. Take, for instance, William Lloyd Garrison, one of the most well-known abolitionist agitators of the time. Few gave more to the cause than Garrison. And yet he consistently disparaged the Constitution, and at times the Declaration as well. In a speech titled “The Dangers of the Nation,” delivered on July 4th in 1829, Garrison noted the hypocrisy of the Declaration, a document outlining many grievances that justified breaking despotic political bonds with Great Britain, the signers and champions of which were inflicting on the enslaved harms that even “a greater Jefferson” could scarcely capture in writing. Still, there were other abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass, who consistently invoked the Declaration as the great harbinger of freedom and the Constitution as the instrument that would make it reality. Abraham Lincoln, arguing for an anti-slavery vision of the nation, opined that the Constitution ought to be understood as enshrining the Declaration. The Declaration was an apple of gold, the Constitution the silver framing that encased it. Invoking Jefferson in a different sense, it was not the founders who failed as much as it was succeeding generations who failed to take up the founder’s mantle of freedom and progress to its next natural stage. (Anti-slavery advocates, such as Salmon P. Chase, often invoked the memory of Jefferson in fighting the “Slave Power.”) 

Some pro-slavery advocates—such as Stephen Douglas—embraced the Declaration as establishing the ultimate principle of popular sovereignty, which allowed a people to choose for themselves whether they would have slaves. Others, such as Chief Justice Taney of the US Supreme, proclaimed that the Declaration did not apply to blacks, that they had “no rights which white men were bound to respect.” And yet still, as the nation moved closer to the brink of Civil War, some of the staunchest pro-slavery advocates, such as John C. Calhoun and Alexander Stephens, pointed to the ideas of the Declaration and the Constitution’s embrace of them as the greatest mistake of the founders. All men were not created equal. Some men—white men—were more equal than others (blacks). The Confederacy, Stephens proclaimed, would replace the false teaching of the Declaration with a true foundation of white supremacy.

Even after a Civil War and Reconstruction, inequality continued to characterize American lives, and some critics pointed the finger at the Declaration. Herbert Croly, a preeminent intellectual of the progressive movement, wrote in one of his seminal works, “The Promise of American Life,” that America remained unequal precisely because it adhered to Jefferson’s natural rights philosophy. Setting aside whether the Declaration spelled the imminent demise of slavery or at least eventual abolition, the very idea that government should be built on the notion that all men were created equal in their capacity as rights-bearing individuals spelled disaster. The “Square Deal” of equal rights meant that inequality would forever be enshrined. Though all human beings are born with equal rights, they are born into unequal situations, primarily due to property rights. If life were a race, then the Declaration ensured that some began at the start, while others began their journey from the second and third legs. The tragedy was that society then tells those at the beginning that they had the same chance for success as anyone else, for “all men were created equal.” Putting Croly’s criticisms against the backdrop of black history, then, slavery would forever ensure that blacks started somewhere closer to the beginning of the race than their white counterparts. In place of the earlier sentiment that the equality of the enslaved would have to wait, perhaps the more accurate statement would be that equality—at least for the enslaved and their posterity—would never come.

Suddenly the Declaration’s compromise presents the possibility of an intractable dilemma among American people: committing to its philosophy as a way of American life would be to fortify inequality. And it would be a pernicious one at that; descendants of slavery would be marked with an inequality that, in a generation or two after Reconstruction, would be of their own making. That they failed in life, or had less than others, was their own lack of ingenuity, or their own inept intellectual or moral character, or all of the above! 

It is this frame of thinking that has generated new ideological movements, such as the 1619 Project, or new critiques of the founding, such as one might find in Kermit Roosevelt’s work. But a closer look reveals that these arguments, to borrow from one of Frederick Douglass’s favorite biblical metaphors, resemble new wine in old skins. The 1619 Project seeks to recast the entirety of the nation’s founding and subsequent history in terms of slavery. Not unlike Garrison, the project paints an image of a hypocritical regime fighting for freedom while strengthening the bonds of oppression. Even if some of its historical claims are inaccurate, if Croly has a point, it is hard not to see a through-line from slavery to present-day inequality. Roosevelt’s work, on the other hand, takes a more hardline approach, arguing that Justice Taney was right. The Declaration itself enshrined slavery. The point was to protect the rights of those who had them—whites and their property in slaves. It was never meant for the enslaved. The compromise, then, would be considered more as a necessary correction. And the Constitution that followed simply ossified the Declaration’s darker intentions. The problem, according to Roosevelt, is that we (including the 1619 Project) continue to reify the Declaration as a symbol of freedom that it was never meant to be. As Croly prescribes, it would be better to disassociate ourselves from it and re-found the nation on new ideas of true equality—an equality that ensures equal outcomes.

Where does this leave us, then? Did the early compromises of the Declaration inevitably leave us in a mire of inequality that we cannot escape? Or worse yet, was the very design of the Declaration to keep us in the mire? If either of these claims were true, the incessant calls of the nation’s most celebrated political figures would be nonsensical. Abraham Lincoln would have had little reason to suppose that the Declaration was an apple of gold that, if adhered to, would set the nation on a path of ultimate abolition. Even more so, Frederick Douglass would have little basis for praising the founders for seizing on eternal principles and enshrining them in the Constitution, which Douglass famously referred to as a “Glorious Liberty Document.” More egregious still, Martin Luther King, Jr., would have no leg to stand on in demanding that the promissory note—as evinced in the Declaration and the Constitution—be fulfilled. Taney’s response would be: “You see the inequality blacks face? Promise fulfilled!” 

But there is a reason Lincoln, Douglass, and King loom large in American history while others—Calhoun, Taney, Stephen Douglas, Stephens, and (to a lesser degree) Garrison—have faded into relative obscurity. They were not just speaking to (and some might say speaking into being) an identity that resonated with Americans; they were speaking to something true. The Declaration’s permanence has less to do with its immediate operation—declaring freedom from an oppressor. After all, Jefferson could have simply written: “We, the people of the United States of America henceforth declare independence,” full stop. Rather, it was the proclamation of human equality, of inalienable natural rights that has captured the American psyche and has remained a constant source of agitation and hope in American lives. Lincoln, Douglass, and King all hearkened to the Declaration for what it promised to do, even more than for what it did.

And herein potentially lies the greatest lesson of these great figures and their relationship with that great document. Douglass lauded the founders, but not for their slaveholding; nor did he incessantly disparage them for the same. The greatness of the founders lay in two things alone: 1) they seized upon eternal principles and committed them to writing, and 2) they were prudent enough to compromise for the sake of Union and still provide the means for future generations to realize those eternal truths. In that sense, there is no need for hagiography. One can acknowledge fully that the Declaration’s very signing required compromise with one of the vilest institutions ever perpetrated by man. That reality will likely require, in perpetuity, renewed calls to adhere to the Declaration’s grand pronouncements, and not to its authors’ practices. As Douglass intimated, sometimes this will require America’s greatest patriots to be its greatest critics. But the Declaration binds those individuals across time. The point is not to displace the nation’s founding or its ideals, but to ensure its fulfillment. This is what it means for the Declaration to remain the apple of gold for the Constitution, whose purpose is to form “a more perfect Union.” This project has persisted for 250 years. If we cling to its promise, it might persist for another 250 more.