Humans have always gravitated toward physical objects of personal or communal significance, and we lament those that have disappeared. Think of all the great attempts to uncover or recreate the Roman Forum, the pyramids, the Sphinx — we gravitate to physical artifacts as we should.

America is a younger country, and one that regularly overturns its history. So we generally have far less of that than other nations. What we do have, uniquely, are the documents that founded us — starting with the Declaration, then the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation. Few older nations have the same connection to founding documents because they define themselves through more ancient physical artifacts instead.

When you stand before the actual parchment that John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson signed, it becomes a time machine. It brings you back to those founding moments in a way that then draws you to the ideas themselves. That’s where the physical and the philosophical mix. If we lost the document, we would still know what was in the Declaration — but it would be so much less tangible to us. We now treat it as a sacred trust, a national responsibility.

You chart several near-disasters in the book — moments when the Declaration could have been lost forever. Would our history have changed significantly if it had been destroyed?

In some ways, no. The Declaration was printed hundreds if not thousands of times in newspapers, broadsheets, and collections of documents. Everyone knew what it said. But I think we would have felt orphaned. Those men can never come back to sign it again. If the document had been destroyed — most notably in 1814, or potentially during the Civil War — every July Fourth since, we would have been celebrating in front of an empty shrine.

Think of the Ten Commandments. They are probably the single most reproduced set of beliefs in human history, and yet we still don’t have the original tablets, and there is an absence that has never been recovered. The Declaration would have been in that same category. There would have been guilt, I think, at losing a piece of paper so important that 56 men pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to each other by signing it.

That’s why someone like Stephen Pleasonton — the State Department clerk who spirited the document out of Washington just ahead of the British in 1814 — is a genuine national hero. Without him, for the past 212 years, we would have been celebrating July Fourth in front of an empty shrine. It would have been one of the great lost artifacts of history.

You promise in the book to dispel myths still wrapped around the parchment. What’s the most consequential one you correct?

I want to be clear that I’m not a myth-debunker by nature. Myths are important — they reflect the stories we want to tell ourselves. But you also have to say what actually happened.

With that said, I still believe the vast majority of Americans think two things when they look at the Declaration: that July Fourth is the day independence was voted, and that it’s when the document was written and signed. Neither is true. Independence was actually voted on July 2nd. To Congress, the 4th was essentially an administrative announcement. And there was no parchment on July Fourth at all — they didn’t even think to order one until two weeks later, and signing didn’t begin until August, continuing piecemeal over weeks, possibly months.

This myth is reinforced by the famous John Trumbull painting in the Capitol Rotunda, which most Americans assume depicts the signing. It doesn’t. It shows Jefferson and the Committee of Five presenting the draft to Congress — and it’s largely a fanciful scene to begin with. We want a single heroic moment of birth, like a baby coming out. The reality was far more human: They were in the midst of a war, members came and went, and they were dealing with a hundred other crises.

A few others worth noting: The Liberty Bell wasn’t rung on July Fourth — that’s a 19th-century myth. Dolley Madison didn’t save the Declaration in 1814; it was already across town at the State Department. And a surprising number of Americans assume George Washington signed it, when in fact he was up in New York commanding the Continental Army.

On the Right today, perhaps the defining divide heading into the next presidential primary is between those who see America as united primarily by a common ideal and those who say it is united by a common heritage. What does the Declaration have to say to both camps?

We are both. But let me get to the Declaration itself first, because I think it speaks directly to this.

Scholars have long debated the two great claims in the document: the liberty claim (free and independent, consent of the governed) and the equality claim (all men are created equal). What I argue, and what I think no one has quite expressed this way before, is that above both of those claims sits an overarching unity claim.

Look at the opening line. “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people…” Jefferson originally wrote “a people,” and it was likely changed by [Benjamin] Franklin to “one people.” That was a deliberate statement. These were 13 very different sovereign states — New Hampshire and Georgia had almost nothing in common — and yet they were declaring themselves one people. Jefferson then writes, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Not I, not Congress alone — we. And the founders close by pledging their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor not to the new nation, not to their states, but to each other.

This is a unity document above all. And every group that has appealed to it since — abolitionists, suffragettes, immigrants, civil rights marchers — has appealed to it not to be treated differently or given special status, but to be fully American. They understood intuitively what the document was saying.

That speaks directly to both MAGA nationalism and progressive revisionism today. The founders were supreme realists. They didn’t expect us to love each other — they certainly didn’t love each other. But they knew we could not hate each other and survive as a nation. If either side believes it can go it alone, demonize the other half, or declare them illegitimate, it will simply replay the greatest tragedy in our history. The Civil War didn’t happen because Americans were too different. It happened because they stopped believing they were one people.

You said we are both a creedal nation and a heritage nation. How do you hold those two things together?

The creed is the heritage. That’s how I’d put it. Of course, we are a creedal nation — if we weren’t, the vast majority of us wouldn’t qualify as Americans by blood or ancestry. But the creed itself must be lived. It has to be inherited and passed on, which is precisely what a heritage is.

What I’d call civic assimilation is the standard we’ve always asked of newcomers — not cultural assimilation, not breaking down the walls between your home and the outside world. You can speak what you want at home, eat what you want, worship how you want. But in the civic square, you must assimilate to the principles: that everyone has an equal right to that square, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or background.

TWO VISIONS OF AMERICA: THE COMING RUBIO-VANCE DEBATE

What worries me is that we are now seeing, on both the Left and the Right, a rejection of that civic standard. On the Left, the demand for differential treatment — carve-outs, exceptions, the suggestion that some Americans are outside the national story entirely. On the Right, the claim to a prior heritage that supersedes the creed — that some Americans are more authentically American by lineage or culture. Both of these are corrosive. And both, ironically, are rejections of the Declaration.

[Ronald] Reagan said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. The danger today isn’t that some foreign power extinguishes it — it’s that we extinguish it ourselves.