Q+A
As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, its founding principles—and its enduring contradictions—continue to provoke reflection and debate. In this conversation, Alex Keyssar, historian and Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, discusses the historical circumstances in which the Declaration was written, the ideals it sought to articulate, how its meaning has evolved over time, and the tensions between its soaring language and the realities of slavery, inequality, and political compromise.
Most importantly, perhaps, we need to remember that the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed and signed by members of the Second Continental Congress only after the war with Britain had already been underway for more than a year. The colonists had been voicing their grievances to Parliament for a decade and had made little or no headway; one dramatic expression of their frustration, the Boston Tea Party, occurred in December, 1773. Nonetheless, well into the 1770s most colonists likely believed that their problems with Britain could be resolved without a formal or dramatic change in the relationship between the colonies and the Crown. But the war – and Britain’s conduct of the war – accelerated a shift in attitudes about the desirability of independence. The discussions in Philadelphia in June-July of 1776 were preceded by numerous other, more local, proclamations or assertions of the need for independence. What was most distinctive about the July 4, 1776 Declaration – in addition to some of its remarkable language – was that it came from the Continental Congress, representing all of the colonies.
The “spirit” of the Declaration consequently was audacious and celebratory, but it was also marked by a sense of betrayal (by Parliament) and significant traces of anger. We need to remember that most of the text of the document (the parts that are less often quoted) consists of a lengthy recitation of specific grievances against Parliament and the Crown.
I think that the Declaration – like all such documents – ought to be understood primarily as rooted in a specific historical moment. Its intended audience was not posterity but contemporaries, in the colonies and in Britain. The Declaration was written to announce, and to justify, a political – indeed revolutionary – decision, one that would cost lives and further disrupt an already disrupted economy and society.
That said, the drafters of the Declaration – like the drafters of other pro-independence documents that were circulating around – felt obliged to ground their decision in principles that they believed to be enduring, if not timeless. The first two paragraphs of the Declaration are an articulation of those principles. The Declaration’s opening phrase “When in the course of human events” implies that the deeper, underlying issues in the conflict were not confined to a particular historical period. The same is true with the famous second paragraph, which begins by declaring that “we hold these truths to be self-evident.”
I think that we can take instruction (and even inspiration) from the Declaration’s principles and from its authors’ insistence that those principles be publicly articulated.
Historical research suggests that the Declaration was not regarded, or invoked, as a foundational or particularly resonant document at the end of the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth. The more conservative political faction of the era, the Federalists, did not really embrace all of the values voiced in the Declaration. But that began to change within a few decades, as the country did become more democratic and democratic forces sought sanction in the words of the Declaration. The shift was accelerated perhaps by the almost-mystical simultaneous deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration. Several decades later, Lincoln’s invocation of the Declaration in the Gettysburg Address underscored the significance of the document while simultaneously treating the notion that “all men are created equal” as a permanent, aspirational norm.
I always find it hard to answer questions about what people of a different era would have thought about our modern society and twenty-first century issues. So very much has changed, so much of the modern world would be unimaginable to citizens of the 18th century. But certainly the signers of the Declaration understood that change did happen – and that sometimes it happened rapidly. I also think that few of the signers would have been surprised to learn that slavery had been abolished; they knew – even if they were slaveowners – that the institution was indefensible. Whether they would have accepted or welcomed broader notions of racial and gender equality is hard to gauge. It is likely that they would not have been of one mind on such subjects.
I think – and I’m hardly expert on this subject – that the decision was both a pragmatic compromise and a moral failure. The pragmatism of the decision, at least as Jefferson recollected it, was to delete the condemnation in order not to lose the support for independence of at least two of the southern colonies. In that sense, it prefigured the compromises that would be made in writing the Constitution in 1787: that document too failed to eradicate slavery and even embedded it in the structure of representation in Congress through the “three-fifths” clause. There were coherent political reasons for these compromises, yet, as many contemporaries recognized, they were also profound moral failures, preserving an institution that violated the professed and public values of the new nation. As is generally true, those moral failures had enduring consequences: they have indeed bedeviled and tainted our history for the last 250 years.
Alex Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. An award-winning historian, he is the author of several books on American political and constitutional history, including The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author(s) alone and do not necessarily represent the positions of the Ash Center or its affiliates.
Democracy historian and theorist Danielle Allen joins Archon Fung and Stephen Richer for a special America 250 episode of Terms of Engagement to discuss what the Declaration of Independence says about freedom and equality and her recent scholarship on the surprising origins of the American Revolution.
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Commentary
First published in 2014, Professor Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration has been reissued with a new foreword this year to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
