How the Declaration of Independence Became an American Scripture

The Declaration of Independence was not initially a revered document. In fact, for the first 15 years or so, it was virtually ignored. It was the act of declaring independence that people celebrated, not the document itself. It was a sheer historical accident that we ended up celebrating independence on July 4, when the written Declaration was formally adopted, rather than July 2, which is when Congress actually voted to declare independence. The Declaration only came to be revered a generation later, when people were looking back on the Revolution as an age of heroes.

It’s interesting that the vast majority of the Declaration’s text is a list of grievances and a justification of the states’ reasons for breaking away from Britain. Today we mostly ignore these, except for historical purposes. There are only a few lines that state general philosophical principles that people today treat as authoritative—most notably, the line that says it is “self-evident” that all men were created equal, with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Sometimes we also quote the line that declares the right to revolt against a tyrannical government. And that’s about it. Besides the parts that we mostly ignore, there are also some parts we’d probably completely reject, such as the part that paints the “merciless Indian savages” as indiscriminate destroyers of human life. Or, perhaps, the part that treats the 13 colonies as united, but “independent states” rather than as territories under the jurisdiction of a federal government.

Ironically, the parts that we do quote, we probably aren’t interpreting in their original sense. The first draft of the Declaration made no reference to God or a Creator, so we might say that Jefferson initially did not really intend it to be a religious document. The line that says all men have been created equal was not intended by Jefferson to apply to blacks or women. Neither was the concept of a right to revolution. Jefferson himself was a slaveholder, and although he wasn’t against emancipation per se, he was a gradualist on the question and believed that the calls for immediate emancipation were a ploy to expand federal power. It is also significant that the idea of the equality of mankind was not a dominant theme in the Declaration, nor was it a theme to which its first audience paid much attention.

So how did the Declaration come to be the embodiment of the American idea of equality? Well, it’s really because of the inadequacy of the Bill of Rights—and, I’d suggest, the Bible—on the subject. There was nothing quotable in the Bill of Rights about the equality of all humanity, and nothing that could be used to end slavery. And while there were definitely passages in the Bible that could be quoted to make an anti-slavery case, the slaveholders quoted the Bible just as much, and actually seemed to be winning that debate. The anti-slavery interpretation required an appeal to the spirit behind the text, whereas the pro-slavery folks could appeal to the letter of the text—the literal, surface meaning. It was easier to find pro-slavery than anti-slavery prooftexts.

In the Declaration, though, you arguably had the charter of the American Republic, and it very clearly said that all men were equal. Even though it wasn’t a legally binding document, the anti-slavery crowd could make a strong argument that it was hypocritical for Americans to revolt against Britain on the principle of human equality, and then turn around and enslave a sixth of the country’s population. And in this case it was the letter of the text that said it, and there were no contrary prooftexts that the pro-slavery crowd could appeal to. They were reduced to arguing that the Declaration was wrong, and that this was a “self-evident lie,” not a self-evident truth. This is exactly the kind of argument that had gotten the abolitionists in trouble. Some abolitionists were liberal Christians, and had argued that when the Bible spoke approvingly of slavery it was simply wrong. You can imagine that most people thought pretty poorly of abolitionists for that reason. So when the pro-slavery crowd started saying the same about the Declaration, this was a major victory for the anti-slavery side, because now it was the pro-slavery people who were trampling on a sacred document and the sacred heritage of the nation. By the time Lincoln was running for President, he was using the Declaration and its teaching of human equality as a major plank in his campaign platform. For Lincoln, the Declaration was the nation’s all-encompassing moral charter. The Union victory in the Civil War helped to universalize this view.