Fall/Winter 2006: On Principle

Our Body of Ideals

The changing meaning of equality in the Declaration of Independence

By Anthony A. Iaccarino

Today, when Americans think about the rights they enjoy--or ought to enjoy--they frequently invoke the Declaration of Independence. Contained within this document is an apparently unambiguous and inspirational assertion of every person's equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What the founders meant by equality, however, is considerably different from our own. Besides having a more narrow sense of who possessed these rights--which excluded women, blacks, and white men who didn't own property--most of the founders primarily considered the Declaration an affirmation of the equal and independent status of the United States in the international political arena. Subsequent efforts to transform the Declaration into a living and breathing egalitarian political creed may thus owe less to the founders and more to the ingenuity and ongoing struggle of those traditionally marginalized from American politics and society.

When the Declaration comes to mind, most of us can only recall its more ringing phrases: "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 & the Pursuit of Happiness." However, beyond these familiar passages from the preamble our knowledge begins to fade. If asked to recite from memory a few sections from the lengthy bill of indictment against the King of England, which constitutes the bulk of the document, most of us would probably remain at a loss for words.

As the historian Pauline Maier has suggested in American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, although we now consider the passages on equality, liberty, and happiness to be the most important sections of the Declaration, the signers would have thought otherwise. In June 1776, the revolutionaries urgently needed a concrete justification for separation from England. It was, therefore, the king's "long Train of Abuses & Usurpations," listed in the Declaration's extensive bill of indictment, which included such injuries as the imposition of new taxes, the suspension of colonial legislatures, and the stationing of large standing armies, that mattered most to the Declaration's signers.

And in the years immediately following the American Revolution, the Declaration nearly drifted into obscurity. There were, at the time, good reasons to deemphasize the significance of the document. The Declaration had, after all, successfully served its earlier purpose of justifying independence, and newer, more pressing matters, such as constructing state and national governments, now occupied the attention of political leaders. Besides, the first two presidents--George Washington and John Adams--were busy trying to improve political and economic relations with England, and trotting out the bill of indictment against a tyrannical George III was not the best way to convince Britain to open its ports or remove its soldiers from Western forts.

Furthermore, to the emerging Federalist Party of George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, the Declaration's preamble sounded dangerously similar to the language of French revolutionaries, who, by the mid-1790s, had executed Louis XVI, waged war on the monarchies of Europe, and instituted a reign of terror to enforce conformity to the cause--all in the name of the rights of man. Many Federalists, therefore, preferred not to invoke the Declaration, for fear that doing so might stoke the flames of radicalism.

But not all Americans shared the anxieties of the Federalist leadership. The 1790s witnessed the birth of partisan politics, with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison leading the emerging Republican opposition against what they considered the Anglophilic and monarchical drift of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton. Jefferson and Madison expressed great pride that the ideas contained in the Declaration had helped to inspire a revolution in the heart of Europe. Indeed, the onset of the French Revolution led many Americans to reevaluate the significance of their own war for independence, giving them the confidence to recast it as an event of great historical significance whose political principles, embodied in the Declaration, promised to inspire a revolutionary transformation in political life throughout the world.

A century ago, the Progressive historian Carl Becker wrote in his book The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760-1776 that the War of Independence, which had begun as a struggle for "home rule," eventually became a struggle over "who shall rule at home." The way that the revolutionary generation interpreted the Declaration itself might be viewed in a similar manner. In 1776 most Americans considered the Declaration primarily as a rationale for political independence. Only later, in the 1790s, would Americans begin to understand the Declaration in a way more familiar to us today: as an eloquent articulation of the principles of liberty and equality at the core of American political life. This more radical view of the Declaration would find expression in the raucous political clubs of the new nation, the irreverence of the emerging opposition press, and the growing number of petitions for freedom presented by enslaved African Americans.

Not long after the War of 1812, as the Federalist Party and its effort to disparage the libertarian and egalitarian interpretation of the Declaration collapsed, a new partisan realignment took shape, with the emerging Democrats and Whigs both claiming descent from Jefferson and his party. This development only intensified the older Republican veneration of the Declaration and Jefferson as its drafter.

Such reverence was reinforced by the fact that many of the revolutionaries were now dying. As the first generation of Americans born into the newly independent republic came of age, they sought to maintain the heritage of the revolutionary past by creating a pantheon of early national heroes and enshrining certain foundational texts. When two of the more famous surviving revolutionaries, Jefferson and Adams, both passed away on July 4, 1826--the fiftieth anniversary of the official Declaration of Independence--this seemingly providential occurrence lent an almost sacred aura to the founders, the Fourth, and the Declaration itself.

As Americans increasingly came to view the Declaration as a sacred text, they enlisted it on behalf of a number of causes. Although the Declaration possessed no legal authority, it was useful to those who wished to seize the moral high ground in political debate. Women's rights advocates and abolitionists both employed the Declaration in this manner. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," declared attendees at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the first women's rights convention held in the United States, "that all men and women are created equal." Using the bill of indictment in the Declaration of Independence as a template, but revising its original language, delegates proclaimed that "the history of mankind is a history of the repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her."

The fugitive-slave-turned-abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who also happened to be at the Seneca Falls Convention, excoriated his contemporaries for tolerating slavery, yet found hope in what he considered to be the egalitarian thrust of the Declaration. "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?" asked Douglass, in an 1852 address before the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. "I answer," he replied,

a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery ... There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Despite this rebuke, Douglass praised the revolutionaries who had "staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor on the cause of their country," and he admired "the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in the Declaration of Independence." He then called upon his own generation to carry on the work of the founders and remain true to the spirit of the Declaration by engaging in a great struggle for the abolition of slavery. Only then would his own generation be worthy of calling themselves the legitimate heirs of the American Revolution.

But with so many marginalized groups draping themselves in the mantle of the Declaration, it was inevitable that its new status as an embodiment of egalitarian political principles would be reevaluated. A growing number of Southern defenders of slavery and their "doughface" Northern allies challenged the abolitionist interpretation of equality in the Declaration. In 1848, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, earlier a great admirer of the Declaration, argued that there was "not a word of truth" in the claim that all men were born "free and equal." And Indiana Senator John Pettit, no friend of abolition, is quoted by Maier as bluntly calling the Declaration's statement on equality a "self-evident lie."

And yet, despite this rejection of the egalitarian character of the Declaration, most Southerners chose not to repudiate the text's apparent defense of equality. Rather, they found ways of preserving its relevance and meaning in a time of heightened sectional tension over slavery. Chief Justice Roger Taney's majority opinion in the U.S. Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case was perhaps most typical of such efforts. Scott, the slave of an army surgeon, had resided for extended periods with his owner on free soil. After being transferred to the army surgeon's heirs and relocated to the slave state of Missouri, Scott sued for freedom in a federal court, arguing that his lengthy residence in a free territory had made him a free man and that his citizenship rights were now being denied. In crafting his opinion, Taney argued, among other things, that Scott, as a black man, was not a citizen and possessed no right to sue in a federal court. The Declaration upheld the principle of equality, Taney claimed, but for whites only. "[I]n the eyes and thoughts of the men who framed the Declaration of Independence," he wrote,

... a perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery ... and which they then looked upon as so far below them in the scale of created beings, that intermarriages between white persons and negroes or mulattoes were regarded as unnatural and immoral, and punished as crimes, not only in the parties, but in the person who joined them in marriage. And no distinction in this respect was made between the free negro or mulatto and the slave, but this stigma, of the deepest degradation, was fixed upon the whole race.

At once asserting the egalitarian principles of the Declaration and claiming that they applied to whites only, Taney rejected Scott's freedom suit.

If some defenders of slavery argued that the Declaration stood primarily for white equality, others emphasized the original use of the Declaration: justifying the liberty of individual states and the equal station that they deserved in the international political arena. Indeed, the Southerners who eventually founded the Confederacy claimed that they were the true torchbearers of the Declaration. In his inaugural speech as President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis pointed out that Southerners had "merely asserted the right which the Declaration of Independence defined as inalienable," by which he meant the inalienable right of sovereign communities to rebel or secede when there existed compelling evidence that government was threatening their life, liberty, and happiness. Indeed, a compelling case can be made for the fact that Southerners, more so than Northerners, remained faithful to the original intent of the Declaration. The Southerners' emphasis on white equality and their distrust of centralized authority accorded well with the views of an earlier generation of revolutionaries.

It was Abraham Lincoln's interpretation of the Declaration, however, that would eventually become the dominant one. Indeed, his view is the one that most Americans have come to share today. For Lincoln, the Declaration was far more than a mere justification for independence. If it were merely that, he argued in an 1857 speech in Springfield, Illinois, the document would be "of no practical use to us now--mere rubbish--old wadding left to rot on the battle-field after the victory is won," and a mere "interesting memorial of the dead past ... shorn of its vitality ... and left without the germ, or even the suggestion of the individual rights of man in it."

For Lincoln, the Declaration did not establish equality for all. Rather, it laid out the promise of equality for all. The authors of the Declaration, according to Lincoln, meant "to declare the right so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as the circumstances should permit." He continued,

They meant to set us a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, and 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.

Whether we agree or not with Lincoln's interpretation of the founders' intentions--and there are good reasons to doubt Lincoln's more grandiose claims on their behalf--his understanding of the Declaration, if shorn of the more controversial claims about original intent, is widely accepted today.

And yet, it is important to remember that Lincoln ultimately advanced his interpretation not merely through the power of his words, but through the force of arms as well. Indeed, had it not been for the Union victory in the Civil War, an alternative, more limited view of the Declaration--one compatible with the views of Confederates--might have prevailed much longer.

As should be evident by such controversies over the meaning of equality in the Declaration, the document has as much power to divide as to unite. Although it contains a set of principles to which Americans frequently express allegiance, debates over the precise meaning of those very principles also helped plunge the nation into a bloody civil war.

Not surprisingly, the meaning of those principles continues to remain the subject of ongoing debate. What, for example, is implied when we currently invoke the phrase "All men are created equal"? Is the policy of affirmative action, for example, a violation of the principle that justice should be color-blind, or is it a legitimate remedy for centuries of legal inequality? And what of same-sex marriage? Ought same-sex couples to enjoy an equal right to the state and federal benefits as men and women in traditional marriages?

After having served its purpose in justifying political independence, the Declaration has become a reference point for domestic political debates over the meaning of equality in American life. These controversies will no doubt continue. Ultimately, the Constitution, along with legislative statutes and judicial rulings, will legally define the rights and privileges of citizens and noncitizens in the United States. Nevertheless, we will continue to invoke the Declaration as a higher moral and ethical standard, a text containing a body of ideals that Americans ought to live by. And if history is any guide, those who feel excluded will no doubt invoke the Declaration in their future efforts to gain a more equal place in American political and social life.

Published in the Fall/Winter 2006 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2006 Oregon Council for the Humanities