American Scripture:
Making the Declaration of Independence
By Pauline Maier
Knopf, 304 pages, $27.50
After more than two centuries, the Declaration of Independence remains the most radical document in the American political tradition. Originally, of course, it justified resistance to the government of George III. Responding to what they perceived as tyranny, the signers announced the creation of a new republic, and in a single stroke they rejected aristocratic privilege in the name of the people. Later Americans sometimes found the Declaration’s strong defense of human rights and equality embarrassing. They insisted that its universal claims surely did not pertain to women or blacks. But the rhetoric that sparked a revolution defied such critics, and however much various conservatives over the last 200 years have complained, the language of rights has prevailed.
Pauline Maier, the William R. Kennan Jr. professor of American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has no interest in retelling this familiar story. She focuses attention on the document itself, explaining in considerable detail how it actually came to be written and how during the 19th Century leaders such as Abraham Lincoln transformed a straightforward statement of political grievance into “scripture.” The tone is aggressively iconoclastic, and on most of the key points of interpretation, Maier insists that much of what we think we know about the Declaration of Independence does not hold up to close scrutiny.
Maier organizes the study around three popular misconceptions. First, she insists that most Colonial Americans would not have seen the act of declaring independence as particularly original. Others had already severed ties with Great Britain. In fact, during the anxious months before the Continental Congress drafted a statement, scores of small communities from South Carolina to New England proclaimed independence. It was not a decision taken lightly. After all, Americans had died at Lexington and Concord. Whatever the risks, however, ordinary people voted for liberty and resistance. For example, the inhabitants of Topsfield, a small farming village in Massachusetts, announced that the issue of independence was “the greatest and most important question that ever came before this town.” They pledged on June 21, 1776, to “support and defend” a declaration of independence from Great Britain with their “lives and fortunes, to the utmost” of their power. Maier reconstructs this climate of popular opinion, showing persuasively that many colonists had left the empire long before Thomas Jefferson ever got down to work.
The actual drafting of the Declaration presents Maier with a second set of interpretive problems. The trouble is Jefferson, a figure who obviously annoys Maier. He has received altogether too much credit for writing the text, she believes, leaving the popular impression that the document represents an act of individual genius. Not so, protests Maier. She demonstrates that he borrowed heavily from other documents of the period. Moreover, however much Jefferson may have claimed the Declaration as his own–something he did more frequently as he aged–it was in fact the product of a congressional committee. His colleagues John Adams and Benjamin Franklin made contributions at an early stage, and later the members of the Continental Congress edited Jefferson’s prose, deleting long sections of the working draft and polishing his style.
The difficulty with this narrowly procedural interpretation of the writing of the Declaration is that it does not substantially alter how we perceive Jefferson’s role in penning the most memorable passages, those that assured ordinary Americans that they possessed “certain unalienable rights,” among which were “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To be sure, the long lists of complaints against George III changed from draft to draft, and Congress undoubtedly brought order to the body of the main text. But the sections that have inspired Americans for a very long time were the product of Jefferson’s hand. Even if, as Maier contends here, “The sentiments Jefferson eloquently expressed were . . . absolutely conventional among Americans of his time,” they nevertheless achieved brilliant clarity and persuasive force in Jefferson’s drafts. Long after Americans resolved their differences with Great Britain, they responded as best they could to what Henry Clay called the ” `great fundamental principle’ ” that ” `all men are created equal.’ “
Maier’s final complaint is that Americans have systematically misread the Declaration, treating it more as a sacred text than as a statement produced by practical leaders who in 1776 wanted only to address an immediate political crisis. It is true that people who did not participate in the Revolution lost touch with the day-to-day affairs that occupied the members of the Continental Congress. For Lincoln such matters were of little enduring significance. As he explained to his own troubled contemporaries, if the Declaration simply justified separation from Great Britain, then it was ” `of no practical use now–mere rubbish–old wadding left to rot on the battle-field after the victory is won.’ “
Against such arguments Lincoln insisted that the Declaration was a living document, one that contained enduring values articulated by the founders of the republic and passed on to later generations so that they would appreciate in ” `plain, unmistakable language’ ” that all men were truly created equal. Jefferson and his congressional colleagues, Lincoln announced, ” `meant to set up a standard maxim for free men which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; . . . augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.’ ” Perhaps Jefferson would have disagreed with Lincoln’s interpretation. This is not a particularly fruitful line of speculation. Whatever writers in the past may have intended, their words inevitably acquire new meanings over time, and Lincoln was simply searching for a way to make the Declaration speak to a society convulsed by slavery.
Modern Americans have not done as well as Lincoln in translating the language of rights and equality to our own time. As Maier notes, the Jefferson Memorial Commission intended to inscribe one of the four main panels with key passages from the Declaration of Independence. The only problem was that the designer limited each panel to only 325 letters. Something had to go. Like the original members of the Continental Congress, the commissioners edited Jefferson’s text, this time dropping any mention of “the right of the people to alter or to abolish” any form of government that becomes destructive of the common good.
