The Great Seal of the United States contains the Latin expression: Novus Ordo Seclorum.  A new order for the ages.  That new order began on July 4, 1776, the date that marks the first time in human history that one people founded a nation upon the principle that all human beings are equal.  The event is not without its curiosities.

July 2, 1776 might have been the national birthday.  On that date, the Continental Congress adopted a resolution that had been proposed on June 7 by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia:

Resolved, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

Independence had been enacted.  John Adams, an early advocate for independence, thought the act of July 2 accomplished his purpose. The next day he wrote to his wife Abigail, who was home in Massachusetts:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

It’s easy to make fun of Adams for predicting the wrong date for the national birthday, but he was prescient apart from the date.  There has been, every year since 1776, a great “anniversary Festival” and it does resound, with our American love of fireworks and public festivals, from one end of the continent to the other.  And, there has been something worth celebrating.

Independence was enacted on July 2, but not yet declared.  So, one curiosity is why Adams wrote his letter on July 3 and not July 5.  He knew the content of the Declaration.  He was one of the committee of five that had been deputed to work up the document.  He had reviewed it with the other members of the committee, including Benjamin Franklin and the drafter Thomas Jefferson and had presented it to Congress.  Congress began editing the document on the afternoon of July 2 and had not finished at the time Adams was writing his letter to Abigail.

The editorial process ended on July 4 with the decision to publish the document.  This was not the first time in history that a significant, indeed a monumental, political action was marked by the publication of a legal document.  English history is punctuated by such documents, such as Magna Carta and the Petition of Right.  Yet I don’t believe that any of these is commemorated by a holiday.  Similarly, the French Revolution produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, yet the event that is celebrated in France to commemorate their revolution is the storming of the Bastille, not the adoption of their declaration.

The Declaration of Independence occupies the place it does in American history and in American minds and hearts because it contains the clearest, most elegant, most incisive statement ever made in support of the proposition that all human beings are equal:

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.

Another curiosity is that the first truth cited is self-evident but not obvious.  Select any human attribute; no two people are equally endowed in their share of it.  The countless talents that humans may possess or lack are unequally distributed.  We are unequal in strength, intelligence, appearance, athletic ability, or any other quality that can be observed or measured.  Because every quality that is capable of being measured or assessed is also one in which individual humans will vary, it is impossible that the self-evident truth of human equality is meant to apply to those observable features of our lives.

It is obvious that slavery or any other system of tyranny is inconsistent with the principles of the Declaration.  In the early days of the American republic, the accepted wisdom was that the institution of slavery was inconsistent with the Declaration and would be removed as quickly as circumstances would permit.  By the 1850s, supporters of the institution saw it as a “positive good” and intended it to become permanent.  They adopted two different strategies for dealing with the tension between their position on slavery and the text of the Declaration.  One U.S. Senator (John Pettit, D – Indiana) claimed that the Declaration’s statement on human equality was a “self-evident lie” while another (Stephen A. Douglas, D – Illinois) claimed that it was intended to apply only to the white British residents of North America at the time the Declaration was adopted and to their descendants.

This kind of unseemly wriggling on the part of its critics is a testament to the power of the ideas in this excerpt from the Declaration.  As Abraham Lincoln replied to Douglas, the Declaration means just what it says and applies to all human beings at all times.  It is a statement of moral purpose, not a summation of observations.  We don’t earn our way to equality, we don’t have to be the member of any group, class, or interest to qualify.  Each of us achieves equal status with every other individual by virtue of our standing as humans.  No evidence is needed and no further evidence could affect this conclusion, which is why the Declaration identifies this truth as self-evident.

And every other statement in the second paragraph of the Declaration follows logically from the first statement.  As equals, we each own our lives and the fruits of our labors.  It is impossible to enjoy these rights without the support of our neighbors, just as it is impossible for them to enjoy their rights without assistance from us.  If we are all equal, then I have no right to govern you without your consent and you have no right to govern me without mine.  Further, we can measure the health of any government by how well it preserves, protects, and defends the equal rights of the citizens whose consent it has received.  When the health of any government, the measure of the protection that it offers, falls below a level deemed acceptable by the governed, they reserve at all times the right to remake their government to restore the state of health – the level of protection of their rights – that logic and reason tell them they have the right to require.  If you grant that all humans are equal, you cannot deny the equally self-evident consequences.

A further curiosity, rising to the level of paradox, is that the finest statement ever made in support of human equality was written by a man who owned slaves.  Patrick Henry, who could speechify himself into a fury, declaimed “Give me liberty, or give me death.”  Yet, he owned slaves at the moment he made that statement.  At least he recognized the hypocrisy of his position.  His defense was that he knew it was wrong, but he could not bring himself to live without the comforts that slavery (of others) provided him.  Not much of a defense.  The response of the typical Virginia aristocrat to this philosophical tension was to expunge the sin by freeing his slaves at his death.  Unlike many of his social class, Jefferson left his slaves as property to his descendants.  None of us can live up to our highest principles at every moment of every day our lives, so let us not judge harshly.  And history is exacting some revenge on Mr. Jefferson’s reputation.  If you tour Monticello, you will find that the docents adopt an extraordinarily harsh treatment of Jefferson’s views on slavery, holding that even his opposition to the slave trade was nothing more than a self-serving attempt to keep prices of slaves high by limiting supply.  I think they have gone overboard in their criticism, but he might have done more during his life to forestall it.

The paradoxical facts of Jefferson’s biography don’t affect the validity of his statement.  Perhaps even at the moment he wrote those words, he had unexpressed doubts about the application of his principles to his own circumstances.  In fairness, I should note that later sections of his draft contained strong anti-slavery language that was removed by Congress.  Jefferson is said to have been angered up to the day he died by the impudence of his Congressional editors.  Whatever his personal views may have been, the principles he enunciated with such clarity stand, as Lincoln noted, as a rebuke for all time to anyone who claims a right to govern others without their consent.

Which brings me to the last of the curiosities that have occurred to me this July 4.  In Washington, D.C., five great architectural monuments are laid out on two lines that intersect at right angles at the Washington Monument.  The National Mall runs west from the Capitol through the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial.  Another line runs from the White House south through the Washington Monument to the fifth site, the Jefferson Memorial.  It was the last to be built and was dedicated on April 13, 1943.  Jefferson’s birthdate was April 13, 1743.  At the time the memorial was planned, constructed, and dedicated, the federal government was as powerful as it had ever been to that time.  For the past 14 years, the government had been intervening in the American economy in ways that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.  When the nation went to war in 1941, the extraordinary powers thought necessary to win the war were added to those that had already been exercised.  The memorial was planned by officials who had proven to be remarkably comfortable in the exercise of power and confident in their ability to exercise it well.

But the exercise of power is not legitimate if it is performed without the consent of the governed.  If those who exercise power illegitimately do so out of good motives, that is preferable to those occasions, unfortunately far more numerous, when the motives are bad, but it is better still not to exercise power except with the consent of the governed.  And that consent can only be granted through the use of language, through precise constructions aimed at ensuring that when power is exercised, it is held within the constraints that the terms of consent have established.  The governing class of 1943 was not happy with these constraints.  They shortened Jefferson’s elegant statement, to remove references to the concept they found so inconvenient.  This is the portion of the famous paragraph that appears in the Jefferson Memorial:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.

Other statements from later parts of the Declaration are appended – it wasn’t a question of running out of space – but the statement about consent was excised.  The final curiosity – the final one that I have the patience to write about today – is that the author of the clearest statement ever written on human equality, a man who hated to have his work edited, suffered, on the 200^th anniversary of his birth and at the hands of the government he helped to found, the most egregious editorial treatment his work had received since the day Congress authorized its publication on July 4, 1776.