Democratic lawmakers might be the last group of people you’d expect to denounce the Declaration of Independence for asserting each single human being’s equal claim to the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet, such is the story coming out of Louisiana this week. Democratic Party legislators in the state House there have forced HB 1035 to be tabled, because its core proposal to have fourth- through sixth-graders recite the two most famous sentences in American history would require them to pronounce the falsehood that “all men are created equal.”
Democratic state representatives Barbara Norton and Pat Smith argued that it would be unfair for school children to recite the Declaration because “all men are not created equal,” and because the principles of American government that the equality principle gives life to “were used against races of people.” Both legislators seem to invoke the existence of slavery in 1776, as well as the fact that Dr. Martin Luther King had not been born yet, as proof positive of the offensiveness of the Declaration’s sentiments.
Setting aside the fact that King expressly spoke of “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” the author of the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln, anchored the whole of his presidential campaign and his two terms as president to “the central idea” of America, found in the Declaration, of the truth of human equality as the basis of republican government. Lincoln had much to say throughout his public life about the Declaration’s place not just for American society, but for the whole world and the future of that world:
Lincoln also had these words about Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson had to be nearly cudgeled by his fellow delegates to the Continental Congress in 1776 to strike an invective against King George from the Declaration’s original draft, which assailed him not just for condoning the practice of slavery, but for preventing the American Colonies from passing legislation to prohibit it:
Yes, of course, many of the Founders were hypocrites when it came to slavery. However, it was a hypocrisy whose tension rested between a firm belief in the truth of the Declaration’s principles and the wall of slavery’s long-standing practice in the South—a practice they understood as resting on positive law but nothing more.
Southerners of the founding generation understood that the political logic of the Revolution pointed inexorably to the eventual abolition of slavery for the blacks as well. The more that Americans based their arguments on the natural rights of all men as the Revolution proceeded, and not just the rights of Englishmen, the more that Americans noticed, by the same logic, that enslavement of blacks was also unjust. For by definition, slavery “takes the property of another without his consent.”
The popular narrative about American history for the past few decades conveniently glosses over the historic reality that in fact it took a counterrevolution against the Declaration’s principles well after the Constitutional Convention to continue and grow the institution of slavery. At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, 10 out of 13 states had suffrage for blacks—but by the late 1830’s, it was people such as Senator John Calhoun, George Fitzhugh, and Alexander Stephens who were bluntly proclaiming that slavery was a “positive good”, because “nothing can be more unfounded and false [than] the prevalent opinion that all men are born free and equal.” It was Lincoln’s appeal back to the Declaration’s principles of equality that chartered his course to preserve the Union and the experiment of self-government.
Did slavery exist at the American founding? Yes. Is it an evil? Yes. But did the Declaration of Independence enable slavery? Far from it. The Declaration substantiated an argument for the first time about the equal right to liberty of all human beings that directly undermined the institution of slavery. The political principle had to be first declared so that the political will would follow. Without the Declaration, there would be no Emancipation Proclamation, no Fourteenth Amendment, no Civil Rights movement.
We do a disservice to our nation’s founders when we ungenerously lambaste them for not being perfect. But we do a far greater disservice to our political future when we lambaste the very principle of our political and social life: that justice is the measurement of how well our laws and institutions maintain the equal right of all to life and to liberty.
