A (Mostly) Happy 250th American Birthday

As you may have read, Americans are said to be in a sour mood as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. President Trump is unpopular, real wages are flat, and many on the political left don’t even think July Fourth is the real anniversary. They prefer 1619, the year the first slaves arrived.

Yet to our mind the remarkable news of this anniversary is that our free republic has stood for a quarter millennium and prospers still. The nation has faced many stress tests over the decades, not least over the last 10 years. Yet the Constitution’s guardrails have largely held, and the principles of the Declaration of 1776 endure. All of this is worth celebrating. ***

That America emerged from the revolution as a free republic at all is something of a miracle. Most revolutions end in blood and tyranny, not liberty. As historian Gordon Wood has documented, the U.S. revolution was “radical” in its ideas about liberty and the rights of man. Its ideas emerged from the British Enlightenment—David Hume, Adam Smith, John Locke—that so influenced Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.

“All men are created equal” was about as radical an idea as you could express in 1776. Yes, that equality was imperfectly realized at the time. But the seed was planted, and then nurtured in the soil of the Declaration’s call for liberty and self-government. And as Wood explains in his great book, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” these ideas would spread and unleash the republican spirit of free men and women who built America.

The two Presidents after the Founders who best understood the Declaration were arguably Lincoln and Calvin Coolidge. Lincoln invoked the universal principles of the Declaration...

The Declaration’s gift of freedom and equality is our duty to preserve.

This is hilarious. I've long said that for many Americans, the only thing they know about the Declaration of *INDEPENDENCE* is that it's about "equality."

No. It's about *INDEPENDENCE*.

It is *NOT* about "equality." That line "All men are created equal" was not seen as applying to slaves when it was written. For the representatives and the populations they represented, it was about white Colonists. There was little thought that it should apply to slaves at the time it was written, (except for Jefferson of course) it was meant to argue the case of Englishmen.

It was Later seen to be hypocritical that we should say such a thing, yet not give the slaves their freedom, and some men did subsequently free their slaves as a consequence of pondering this idea.

But it is a modern conceit to believe the Declaration which justified the Separation of the 13 Colonies from England, is somehow about "equality."

It isn't.

There was little thought that it should apply to slaves at the time it was written, (except for Jefferson of course)

Jefferson did write the Declaration. There must have been a reason he made a philosophical, rather than a merely legalistic argument. He was making a generalization about mankind -- man as man, man in the state of nature -- and leaving it for us to decide how to apply it. John Adams worked similar language into the Massachusetts Constitution, and Massachusetts courts interpreted it as making slavery invalid. Others didn't go that far, but there was something of a consensus in the founding generation that slavery was incompatible with Republican values. They weren't ready to get rid of it, but they thought a future generation would. That changed as the money started rolling in from cotton.

That is a very reasonable assessment. Jefferson meant to make that line an issue about slavery from the beginning, and of course he worked other anti-slavery sentiments into his original draft.

The more pragmatic members of the Committee of five realized this was a no-go, and sensibly struck all the passages that would be problematic.

I'm sure they looked at that line and thought "We'll leave that in. People will think it is about them, and it makes the whole thing sound better, besides if we removed it, Jefferson would be pissed."

But the Citizenry? Slavery wasn't in their mind when it was drafted and signed, but Jefferson's clever little concept continued to percolate in the background, and as you've said, it had an impact in Massachusetts in the 1780s.

Of course it was judicial activism, because nobody who approved that constitution thought they were abolishing slavery at the time, but Activist judges have been twisting the text of a law for a very long time to get what they want.

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