Chapter Three: The Declaration
Once the fighting had started, the colonists had to say in writing what they were fighting for. What they wrote became the foundation the whole nation would stand on, and it contained a claim so large that the country would spend the next two centuries being forced to live up to it. The Declaration of Independence is where America said out loud what it believed a human being is, and where God belongs in the answer.
From grievance to a great idea
For more than a year after the first shots, many colonists still hoped to patch things up with Britain rather than make a final break. Two things ended that hope. The first was a blazing little pamphlet by Thomas Paine, Common Sense, which argued that it was absurd for a whole continent to be ruled forever by a distant island, and which sold by the hundreds of thousands.1 The second was the king himself. When the Congress sent a last petition pleading for peace, the crown refused even to receive it, declared the colonies in rebellion, and hired foreign soldiers to put them down. A people may forgive a government a great deal, but it is hard to keep hoping for reunion with a ruler who answers a plea for peace by sending an army of hired strangers. The door was not only walked away from by the colonists. It was shut and barred from the other side.
In July of 1776 the Congress adopted the Declaration. Most of the document is a long list of grievances against the king, set down to show a watching world that the colonists had borne much before resorting to revolt. But the part that changed history is the principle stated at the front. The colonists claimed their independence by appeal to "the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them," and then they made the boldest sentence in American history:
"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 and the pursuit of Happiness."
And they went on, just as plainly: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."2
John Trumbull, Declaration of Independence (1818-1819)
Why the grounding is everything
Read that sentence again and notice where the rights come from. Not from the king. Not from Parliament. Not from the Congress that was writing the words. From the Creator. A right that government did not give, government cannot justly take away. That single move is the deepest claim in all of American political thought, and it does not stand on its own. It rests on something older than the Declaration by thousands of years.
"And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them." (Genesis 1:27).
Men are created equal because every person bears the image of God. Their equality is not a measurement of talent or strength or wealth, where people are plainly unequal, but a truth about their Maker, who stamped His image on every one of them. The same dignity has another root in the one origin of all peoples.
"and He made from one man every nation of mankind to inhabit all the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26).
Take away the Creator, and the great sentence has nothing left to stand on. If there is no God who made us, then "all men are created equal" is not a self-evident truth at all. It is a pleasant wish that the strong are free to ignore. The founders did not say men are equal because they looked equal. They said men are created equal, and the word created carries the whole weight.
United States Declaration of Independence, parchment (1776), National Archives
The contradiction, named plainly
The document proclaiming that all men are created equal was written in part by men who held other men as slaves. Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves even as he wrote those words, had put into his draft a passage condemning the slave trade, and the Congress struck it out, unwilling to indict a commerce that several of the states meant to keep.3 The words that survived were therefore both nobler and more honest than the men who wrote them. They declared a principle the signers themselves did not obey.
Both facts must be held together, the noble claim and the ugly compromise, because the truth lives in their tension and not in either one alone.
There is even a mercy hidden in the gap between the words and the men. By writing the principle larger than their own practice, the founders left behind a standard that could one day be turned against the very injustice they tolerated. In the century to come, the enslaved and those who labored to free them would not need to invent a new argument. They had only to hold the nation to the words it had already published to the world, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with rights no government may justly touch. A claim can convict the man who makes it.
What it cost to sign
To put your name to such a document was an act of extraordinary daring. The signers closed by pledging to one another their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. They meant every word without exaggeration, for if the war was lost, every name on the page was a confession of treason punishable by death. They were not recording a victory already won. They were staking everything they had on a war they had every reason to fear they might lose.
The freedom they reached for was real, and it was only a portion of a deeper freedom that no document can secure. The Declaration claimed liberty for a people. It could not give the liberty that matters most, the freedom of a soul set right with God, and the wisest of the founders knew the difference.
"It was for freedom that Christ set us free" (Galatians 5:1).
For Reflection
"Man is the most exquisite piece in the creation. He is a microcosm, or little world. Man was made with deliberation and counsel. 'Let us make man.' Gen 1:26. It is the manner of artificers to be more than ordinarily accurate when they are about their masterpieces. Man was to be the masterpiece of this visible world, therefore God consulted about making so rare a piece. A solemn council of the sacred persons in the Trinity was called. 'Let us make man, and let us make him in our own image.' On the king's coin his own image or effigy is stamped; so God stamped his image on man, and made him partaker of many divine qualities."
Thomas Watson, A Body of Divinity4
Watson saw the very thing the Declaration's great sentence rests on. Man is not the equal of man in strength or wealth or wit, where people differ greatly, but in this he is: the same God stamped His own image on every one of them. That is the whole ground of the claim that all are created equal, and the psalmist had marveled at it long before any nation was founded.
"What is man that You remember him, And the son of man that You care for him? Yet You have made him a little lower than the angels, And You crown him with glory and majesty!" (Psalms 8:4-5).
Hymn
The Breaking Waves Dashed High
Felicia Hemans wrote "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England" in 1825, and her sister, the composer Harriet Browne, set it to music. It belongs here for the same reason the signers do: it remembers people who staked everything on a freedom they counted worth more than safety, who buried half their number on a cold shore and would not turn the ship around. The tune is PLYMOUTH.5
The breaking waves dashed high
On a stern and rock-bound coast,
And the woods against a stormy sky
Their giant branches tossed;
And the heavy night hung dark
The hills and waters o'er,
When a band of exiles moored their bark
On the wild New England shore.Not as the conqueror comes,
They, the true-hearted, came;
Not with the roll of the stirring drums,
And the trumpet that sings of fame;
Not as the flying come,
In silence and in fear;
They shook the depths of the desert gloom
With their hymns of lofty cheer.Amidst the storm they sang,
And the stars heard, and the sea;
And the sounding aisles of the dim woods rang
To the anthem of the free!
The ocean-eagle soared
From his nest by the white wave's foam,
And the rocking pines of the forest roared,
This was their welcome home!There were men with hoary hair
Amidst that pilgrim band;
Why had they come to wither there,
Away from their childhood's land?
There was woman's fearless eye,
Lit by her deep love's truth;
There was manhood's brow serenely high,
And the fiery heart of youth.What sought they thus afar?
Bright jewels of the mine?
The wealth of seas, the spoils of war?
They sought a faith's pure shrine!
Ay, call it holy ground,
The soil where first they trod;
They have left unstained what there they found,
Freedom to worship God.
Footnotes
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Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Philadelphia, 1776). (Available in the GraceHaven library.) ↩
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The quotations in this section are from The Declaration of Independence (1776). (Available in the GraceHaven library.) ↩
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Thomas Jefferson, "original Rough draught of the Declaration of Independence" (1776), Founders Online, National Archives. The deleted clause arraigned the British crown for the Atlantic slave trade. ↩
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Thomas Watson, A Body of Divinity (London, 1692), "Of the Creation of Man." (Available in the GraceHaven library.) ↩
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Felicia Hemans, "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England" (1825); tune PLYMOUTH. ↩