What Begins Where the Declaration Ends?

The Declaration of Independence–was, in today’s parlance, a press release, meant to explain Congress’ dramatic action and encourage domestic commitment to and enthusiasm for the cause of independence, and gain foreign support for the new United States in its struggle against Britain.

The Declaration went beyond the announcement of this new United States, however. It was a charter of revolutionary purpose, providing what Carl L. Becker in his celebrated study called “a moral and legal justification” for the American action.[1] That is, it’s not simply the act of independence from Great Britain that we commemorate and celebrate, but the rationale for that action. 

The facts Congress submitted to “a candid world”–a catalog of “the long train of abuses and usurpations”–nineteen in all–were meant to demonstrate that King George III had acted in a tyrannical fashion against the American colonies. Alongside the list of grievances, the Declaration provided an argument for why such grievances justified Congress’ decision to sunder ties with Great Britain–a brief statement on the origin, purpose, and authority of civil government: 

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.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Informing a candid world was just the beginning of the Declaration of Independence’s career. While the document served its purpose in the summer of 1776, slowly over the course of the next fifty years, it had become invested with sacrality, becoming a powerful proof-text to support the cause of liberty, as later Americans reached back to its claims to advocate for their rights. 

Already by the 1820s, antislavery forces were referring to the Declaration of Independence as the “national covenant,” and both sides of the question were beginning to realize that the seeds of Jefferson’s ideas were going to sprout, whether into the flowers of liberty or, as John C. Calhoun later warned, into “poisonous fruits.” With its affirmation of the “self-evident” truths of human equality and unalienable rights detailed in the first sentences of the second paragraph and the political theory that emerged from them, that legitimate government depends upon the consent of the governed, in the hands of the opponents of slavery the Declaration came to be a most formidable rhetorical weapon. It could be appealed to as a “higher law” unto which the “positive law,” the Constitution itself would have to be proved. In their hands, the Declaration of Independence was transformed from a document proclaiming the right of separation from the old regime to an indictment of the political community that had come to be.

Even as the radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison famously condemned the Constitution as a “covenant with death” and an “agreement with hell,” [2] the movement could regard the Declaration of Independence as providing the ammunition for their cause. The Northern “New School” Presbyterian Albert Barnes wrote that slavery “is a violation of the first sentiments expressed in our Declaration of Independence, and on which our fathers founded the vindication of their own conduct in an appeal to arms.” “Nothing can be more true,” he continued, “than the declaration in the immortal instrument which asserts our national independence, that ‘all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that among these are life and liberty.’”[3] Frederick Douglass famously proclaimed the Declaration to be “the RINGBOLT to the chain of your nation’s destiny,” its principles to be “saving principles.” [4] It may have not had legal weight, but the Declaration was a powerful moral indictment of the nation’s hypocrisy.

To counter such claims, slavery’s defenders deployed several different arguments. One was to accept Jefferson’s formulations but to claim that the natural equality and endowment of rights referred solely to the white English colonists in their dispute against the British government, and not to the Negro or the Indian, a point that was supposedly proven by the fact that the latter were not subsequently granted citizenship under the U.S. Constitution. This argument was adopted by Chief Justice Roger Taney in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford decision of the Supreme Court. Another approach was to argue that those now troublesome words were incidental to the argument for independence. Some proslavery voices simply dismissed those “self-evident truths” as neither self-evident nor true. Jefferson’s assertion of natural rights was disparaged as “a self-evident lie” and his text mocked for its “glittering and sounding generalities.” In any event, the instrument had accomplished its work in the summer of 1776 and had no further role in American governance or politics. If all this were true, Abraham Lincoln sneered, the Declaration would be nothing but “old wadding left to rot on the battle-field after the victory is won.” [5] 

However, for Lincoln, Kentucky-born, the Declaration was “a living document for an established society, a set of goals to be realized over time,” as Pauline Maier has noted.[6] Its claims were true and applied to all human beings; and so he could proclaim: “Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it.” [7] In response to the Dred Scott decision, for example, Lincoln countered the argument that Jefferson’s words referred only to white colonists. “I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects,” Lincoln said. The Declaration simply claimed that all men were “equal in ‘certain inalienable rights’…. This they said, and this they meant.” And this, for Lincoln, demonstrated what their Declaration was about. “They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.” 

The Declaration was not simply directed at the needs of the moment, setting forth the justification for separation from Great Britain, but was rather a calling for the future of the republic: “The assertion that ‘all men are created equal,’ Lincoln stated, “was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, nor for that, but for future use.” “Its authors meant it to be,” Lincoln alleged, “a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism.” [8]

Further, for Lincoln, the Declaration’s assertion of equality served not only as a “standard maxim for a free society” or a stumbling block to thwart the designs of would-be despots; it was very the foundation of American belonging and patriotism. At the beginning of his campaign against Stephen Douglas, Lincoln claimed that the Declaration of Independence provided the “moral principle” that those who were not descended from “our fathers and grandfathers”–those “iron men” who “fought for the principle that they were contending for” became American–as American, indeed, as those “descended by blood from our ancestors.” “We have besides these men,” Lincoln remarked in a July 10, 1858 speech in Chicago,

among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. 

It was a commitment to the principle of the Declaration–that all men are created equal–and the felt experience of equality in their lives, that transformed immigrants and children of immigrants into Americans and bound them so organically to the founders–using that biblically suggestive phrase “blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men,”–to the founding of the republic, and to each other as citizens. “That is the electric cord,” Lincoln continued, deploying the more contemporary metaphor of the telegraph cable, “in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.” All who believed–and they believed because it was their reality–were sons and daughters of the Revolution, part of the “people” that the instrument had announced. 

Further, this also meant that new immigrants and the children of immigrants had skin in the game, as it were. If the Declaration was as his opponent Senator Douglas had argued, if it only announced the American break with Great Britain, if it only maintained that “the people of America are equal to the people of England,” would this not sever the connection that they felt? “Now I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form,” Lincoln continued. The arguments made justifying the inequality of American Blacks were “the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world.” And he pressed the implication for those who stood before him and those who would later read his words: 

I hold if that course of argumentation that is made for the purpose of convincing the public mind that we should not care about this, should be granted, it does not stop with the negro. I should like to know,” he asked his audience, “if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out! Who is so bold as to do it! If it is not true let us tear it out! let us stick to it then, let us stand firmly by it then. 

The destiny of recent immigrants and Black Americans–of all Americans–were bound together. Americans would either “unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal,” or become “one universal slave nation.” [9]

Five years later, as he stood among the graves of those who had fallen at Gettysburg, the president canonized this reading of the Declaration of Independence that had long been preached by antislavery men and women. The “new nation” that “our fathers” had conjured into being, he said, was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The War was the great test of that possibility; the dead had given their lives for its endurance. In that pithy statement, what had been a rationale for separation was transformed to the announcement of a national endeavor: a nation founded on a proposition, its destiny a project, its citizens charged with continuing to build a radically new form of human society–that “unfinished work.” [10]

The historian Gordon S. Wood recently noted that “Americans created a state before they were a nation, and much of American history has been an effort to define the nature of that nationhood.” In the Declaration Lincoln found a solution to the problem raised by its native pluralism, that is, “how the great variety of individuals in America with all their diverse ethnicities, races, and religions could be brought together into a single nation.” The distinctiveness of America’s pluralism led to its distinctiveness of appeal to a universal creed. The creed of the Declaration would become a tool for the absorption of immigrants and for nation-building. Americanness was not fundamentally about blood or soil or heritage. It could only be based on a belief in the nation’s first principles, “​​turn[ing] such an assortment of different individuals into the ‘one people’ that the Declaration says we are.” Lincoln’s July 10, 1858 Chicago speech served as the proof-text.[11]

In his provocative book After Nationalism, Samuel Goldman has demonstrated that promoting such an “ideological account of national identity” became paramount especially during wartime, promoted by politicians and civic organizations, articulated by scholars, taught in public schools, reinforced by the media. Creedal nationalism could be deployed to advance racial equality and defend democracy at home and abroad against its ideological foes, notably fascism and communism. It would become ”the orthodoxy of midcentury liberalism.” [12]

It was to this orthodoxy that Rev. Dr. Martin King Jr., a century after Gettysburg, appealed in his renowned “I have a dream” speech: 

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 — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

While King referred to the Founders as “the architects of our republic,” rather than “our forefathers,” the people nonetheless became the “heirs” to their promise. And while King accused the nation that “defaulted on this promissory note,” and nonetheless called upon the people “to make real the promises of democracy”—not only for those of European descent but for all people: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and lives out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” It is, it’s worth recalling, that vision which starts off King’s enumeration of his dreams of a just and righteous America. [13] In this respect, as James M. Patterson has noted, King’s position is consistent with the view that the Declaration is a covenant affirming a higher law guaranteed under God. [14]

Yet, Goldman notes that even as the American creed was actively promoted as the foundation of civic identity and the unifying bond of the nation, there has always been a tension between the desire for unity based on it and the disorderliness of its actual pluralism. And such striving for a national consensus that was so prominent during the Cold War began to slacken in the 1960s and 70s, as the civil rights movement seemed to stall and racial tensions waxed and Americans became increasingly disenchanted with the war in Vietnam and their political leaders. In such a political climate, Americans became more interested in articulating their differences than proclaiming a creed that ostensibly united them by overcoming or effacing their particularities.

That is not to say that politicians have stopped appealing to the idea of America as a creedal nation or that such appeals fell on deaf ears. We can find multiple examples from both Democrats and Republics, liberals and conservatives. It’s almost a political cliché. It’s noteworthy, for example, that when faced with the challenge of his association with the firebrand pastor Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., presidential hopeful Barack Obama delivered a speech affirming his conviction in the nation’s civic creed, chastising Wright for his lack of faith in the American democratic project and failure to appreciate the progress that had been achieved. And it’s noteworthy that the reception to that address was largely positive, and helped defuse the issue in the primary. Many, many other examples could be submitted.

Yet today, the claim that America is a “creedal nation,” that its citizens affirm “a proposition,” is loudly challenged by populists and national conservatives, as well as postliberals left and right, as an unstable or false basis for the political community. They are unimpressed with the paradox of American identity being given by assent to a universalistic creed. Political theorist and national conservative organizer Yoram Hazony, for example, has claimed that the idea that America is a “creedal nation” defined by the sentiments of the Declaration is “a myth promoted in the service of liberal dogma.” The “Enlightenment-inspired” Declaration of Independence, in his view, was only a false start. Those who immigrated from elsewhere were adopted by and into the nation, taking on its language, assimilating into its culture, identifying with its history, rather than becoming citizens of a “neutral” state. In his recounting of American history, Hazony audaciously deputized Lincoln as an icon of his national conservatism, despite the sixteenth President’s well-known appeals to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence as the very foundation of his political vision.[15]

Postliberals such as Patrick Deneen regard the Declaration of Independence as a Lockean-liberal document which helped bring about a regime devoted to the protection of individual rights (and the individual’s self-fashioning) rather than one promoting human solidarity and a vision of the common good. Self-proclaimed “heritage Americans,” our contemporary nativists, assert that their ancestry and folkways–Anglo-Protestant religion and culture– ought to impart them a greater place in American life than more recent arrivals, that those who claim to be more deeply rooted in the past have a greater stake in the present and claim on the future, a birthright which their fellow Americans do not share. That particularity–of place, beliefs, and way of life–is what makes Americans American for this identity politics of the right. Or some of them.

And there are those, like Professor Wood, who resist such arguments, remaining steadfast in their understanding of and commitment to America as a creedal nation–“the Revolution and its Declaration of Independence offered us a set of beliefs that through the generations has supplied a bond that holds together the most diverse nation that history has ever known.” This is a conception that ought to be sustained, especially given the alternatives, which would limit Americanness to a community of descent or assent to a thick conception of the common good, those who imagine they can deal with the reality of its pluralism by profoundly transforming or cutting out a great swath of the nation’s population. 

Should we honor the Declaration of Independence as a curious artifact of our past which, having done its work, can be celebrated and studied for what it has achieved, without being distracted by its “glittering and sounding generalities”? 

Or shall we regard it, as Lincoln did, as “a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression,” and the “electric cord” linking us to one another as fellow citizens?

First of all, we ought to acknowledge and understand the key role the document and its argument has played in American history. It encouraged American patriots fighting the Revolution, and continued to motivate again and again–in the struggle over slavery, during the Civil War, throughout World War II and the Cold War and the Civil Rights Era. And it could do so because people found meaning and purpose in its claims. Second, if the Declaration promoted an “orthodoxy,” it was one that allowed people of different faiths and viewpoints to accept it, as consistent with or coming out of their own traditions. Secularists could see the text as an expression of Enlightenment rationalism; Protestants as a reflection of biblical teaching; Catholic thinkers as emerging from the natural law tradition; and Jewish intellectuals could regard it as a covenantal document indebted to the Hebrew Bible. Americans of all faiths were thus able to find areas of common ground that supported rights and liberties that tyrants and tyrannies had sought and continue to seek to annihilate. 

It’s worth returning our attentions to its public argument: the document’s claims about the nature of human beings and the rights of individuals, and the origins and ends of government; about political commitment and solidarity (“the people”); and about what the Declaration is silent, the best kind and structure of regime for a free people to live within. The American people, we might say, were–and continue to be–formed by the political project.

And our attention ought to be turned to the virtues and shortcomings of the Constitution and the ordering of a government that protects our rights and provides us the freedom to pursue our happiness. And to participating in some way in the civic project of the maintenance of political order that serves to protect our liberties. 

The real, hard work of politics, that is, of the people figuring out how to live together, begins where the Declaration ends.

* * *

Notes

[1] Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Vintage Books, 1942), p. 7.

[2] William Lloyd Garrison to Rev. Samuel J. May, July 17, 1845, in Walter M. Merrill, ed. The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison (1973) 3: 303. The Liberator, May 6, 1842.

[3] Albert Barnes, The Church and Slavery (Philadelphia: Parry & McMillian, 1857), pp. 33, 37.

[4] Fredrick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” (1852).

[5] Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Springfield, Illinois” (June 26, 1857), Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 2 [Sept. 3, 1848-Aug. 21, 1858].”, 2:407

[6] Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), p. 207.

[7] Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Peoria, Illinois” (October 16, 1854), Collected Works, 2:276.

[8] Lincoln, “Speech at Springfield, Illinois” (June 26, 1857), Collected Works, 2:405-6.

[9] Lincoln, “Speech at Chicago, Illinois” (July 10, 1858), Collected Works, 2: 499-501.

[10] Lincoln, “Address Delivered at the Cemetery at Gettysburg,” (November 19, 1863), Collected Works 7:717–23.

[11] Gordon S. Wood, 2025 Irving Kristol Award Presentation, American Enterprise Institute (November 17, 2025).

https://www.aei.org/research-products/speech/2025-irving-kristol-award-presentation/

Also, https://www.wsj.com/opinion/why-america-is-a-creedal-nation-75676aa8

[12] Samuel Goldman, After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), pp. 64-65.

[13] Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream” (August 28, 1963).

[14] James M. Patterson, Religion in the Public Square: Sheen, King, Falwell (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Chapter 2.

[15] Yoram Hazony, Conservatism A Rediscovery (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 2022), pp. 82-83; The Virtue of Nationalism (New York: Basic Books, 2018), pp. 160-61.