I am fond of a post I published on July 4, 2014. Here it is again with some revisions and updates.  As attacks on America’s heritage intensify – both attacks on morale such as the 1619 Project and physical attacks by mob action against monuments, public spaces, and the peace and security of citizens – I thought it worthwhile to repost these thoughts as a way to reach out to readers who have not written off the American enterprise.  There are ironies and tensions in our founding, to be sure, but not the nihilism, ignorance, or ill-will of the mob or of those who incite them.

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 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 Richard Henry Lee of Virginia had introduced on June 7:

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 (spelling and punctuation untouched):

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” resounding with fireworks over a territory that expanded until it reached from one end of the continent to the other and beyond, although we may have to put an asterisk next to 2020.  And, whatever the individuals may think who have broken windows, repurposed retail inventories, pulled down or defaced statues, and taken possession of public spaces, 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 (Jefferson, Adams, Ben Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman) that had been deputed to work up the document.  He and Ben Franklin had reviewed Jefferson’s initial draft with the author.  The committee presented the document to Congress on June 28.  Congress began editing the document during the afternoon of July 2, after passing the Lee resolution.  They 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, including Magna Carta and the Petition of Right.  Dutch provinces adopted an “Act of Abjuration” in 1581 that amounted to a declaration of independence from Spain. 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, indeed in world history, 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 and qualities that humans may possess or lack are unequally distributed.  We are unequal in strength, intelligence, patience, willingness to defer gratification, tolerance for risk, 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 a statement rather of our equal endowment of natural rights.  The unequal distribution of observable attributes does not tell us anything about who is authorized to govern and who is required to accept government by others.  No human possesses qualities that fit him or her to govern without consent.  As humans have interacted with the natural world over the course of millennia, we have come to govern many species through domestication.  We have learned that, for example, dogs, cattle, sheep, and horses are suited by their nature to be governed by humans.  Each of those species has distinct features that fit its members to domestication and control, to government, by humans.  There is no such feature that fits a human to be governed by another human except by consent.

It follows that slavery or any other system of tyranny is inconsistent with the principles of the Declaration.  Jefferson attempted to write that point into the long middle section of the document, the bill of particulars demonstrating that the King of Great Britain was unfit to govern the people residing in what had been his colonies.  Here is the indictment on slavery in full (spelling and punctuation untouched):

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Joseph Ellis points out that the paragraph blames Britain for introducing slavery into the colonies and then accuses the King of threatening to end it.  He also notes that the text never hints that slave owners themselves bore responsibility for continuing the practice.  The newly independent states could not unite around a document that included this language. South Carolina and Georgia would not have it.  In order to preserve unity on declaring independence, Congress pulled the paragraph on slavery from the text they authorized for publication.  There were other edits as well.  Jefferson remained bitter to the end of his days about the mangling of his work by writers less gifted than he was.

They pulled the particular charge from the indictment, but they kept the statement of the self-evident truth of the equality of all individuals.  A Congress loaded with slaveholders excised detailed language indicting the practice of slavery but endorsed a self-evident truth that was inconsistent with the institution of slavery and would eventually lead to its demise.  Lincoln thought that the apparent tension in this position would resolve over time.  He saw the principle of equal natural rights of all persons as the “standard maxim of free society”. It is the ultimate goal and purpose of government, to be advanced and, we can hope, ultimately achieved in the fulness of time.  “They meant simply to declare the right so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”

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 events would allow.  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.  Some, for example Senator John Pettit (D – Indiana) claimed that the Declaration’s statement on human equality was a “self-evident lie”. Others, such as Stephen A. Douglas (D – Illinois) claimed that, while it was true, 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 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 a 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 further evidence could strengthen 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.  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.  The governed reserve at all times the right to remake their government when the health of that government, the measure of the protection that it offers to the equal natural rights of all, falls below a level deemed acceptable by the governed.  If you grant that all humans are equal, you cannot deny the equally self-evident consequences.

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.  (He attributed the same motive to those in the Congress who insisted on the removal of the anti-slavery paragraph I quoted earlier.) I think they have gone overboard in their criticism, but he might have done more during his life to forestall it.

And now, in 2020, his ghost has more to worry about than criticism from frowning docents at Monticello.  The mob is coming for his statues, his memorial, and his likeness on Mount Rushmore.  It appears that their efforts have peaked short of success for now, but this won’t be the last time we hear from them.

The paradoxical facts of Jefferson’s biography don’t affect the validity of his statement.  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 I’ll touch on 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 and across the Tidal Basin to the fifth site, the Jefferson Memorial.  It was the last of the five 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, beginning with the Hoover administration and continuing through the New Deal, the government had been intervening in the American economy in ways that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.  When the nation entered World War II 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.

But the exercise of power without the consent of the governed is not legitimate.  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 written documents, 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 the concept they found so inconvenient.  This is the portion of the famous paragraph that appears in the Jefferson Memorial, marked to show the words they deleted:

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, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Did they leave those words out to save space?  Other statements from later parts of the Declaration appear below the quoted language. It wasn’t a question of space.  They removed the phrase on consent because they didn’t want to remind the public that it was there in the original.

It’s not a minor excision.  A government “instituted among Men” that takes the first part of the famous sentence seriously, one that believes and acts on the principle that all humans are equal in their natural rights, the right as Lincoln said to eat the bread that one’s own hands have earned, must necessarily believe that no one has a right to govern another person without the other’s consent.  That is the logical consequence of the self-evident truth that all persons are equal in their natural rights. That’s one reason, the most important reason, why slavery is inconsistent with the principles of the Declaration.  But when a government ignores the terms of the compact under which its power was granted, it violates the purpose for which it was created.  To quote Ronald Reagan: “We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around.”

If you think you have the right to govern me without my consent, you don’t think we are equal.

As I have written before, one of the great ironies of the nation’s presentation of itself on the National Mall and the Tidal Basin is that the author of the clearest and most elegant 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.