The Declaration of Independence: An Exceptional Document
By Joe Sheffo
Assistant Opinion Editor
North County Times
Exclusive for the Flashreport
Independence Day, the Fourth of July, is the most unique of national holidays, not only in our own country but perhaps in any nation on earth, because it celebrates not just an event —- the decision of the 13 American colonies to part ways with Great Britain —- but an idea: that all men are created equal.
Unfortunately, for too long multiculturalists, leftists, and the ill-informed have made light of, and even denigrated, this achievement. According to them, Jefferson was a rich, white man looking after rich, white interests. When Jefferson said “all men” he really meant all men like himself, and he meant only men. This is probably the historical interpretation taught in most of our schools and universities.
I most recently heard this attitude in a commentary delivered by National Public Radio Weekend Edition host John Ydstie. Ydstie was actually commenting on the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, the first English settlement in North America, but his derision was clearly targeted at our founding document. After taking the usual swipe at Jefferson for not actually meaning what he wrote, Ydstie gets to the heart of the matter:
“The legacy of American slavery that started in Jamestown undermines the idea of American exceptionalism, the notion that this land was ordained by God as a moral beacon, a city upon the hill….That notion of exceptionalism that somehow our own country is morally superior is not unique to America, but it’s a perilous narrative wherever it flourishes.”
It is true that blacks were not afforded the same rights as Thomas Jefferson, either before the Declaration was written or for too long afterward. But it’s important to remember that neither were many white people.
As historian Harry Jaffa, author of “The Crisis of the House Divided,” one of the seminal books on Abraham Lincoln’s intellectual roots, has shown, Jefferson and his fellow Founders, while acknowledging this contradiction, were sincere in their intent. The equality they spoke of was, “a goal to be pursued and not a fact to be assumed.” It was his belief in this goal that gave Lincoln, “four score and seven years” after Jefferson had first described it in the declaration, the moral North Star he relied on to lead this country through our Civil War.
What commentators like Ydstie don’t realize is that when they argue that Jefferson didn’t mean what he wrote and that the Declaration of Independence is just an old parchment containing pretty but empty words, they’re actually aligning themselves, polemically at least, with the slaveholders and secessionists who would eventually, in defense of their “peculiar institution” and their departure from the Union, reject both the Declaration and the concept of equal and universal human rights that it contained.
Furthermore, to argue that Jefferson’s appeal to universal and equal rights for all men was somehow a sham because the laws of the 13 colonies in 1776 didn’t recognize them for blacks —- or women, or indentured servants, or those without property —- is a little like arguing that the rights we enjoy as Americans today are void because the concept of universal human rights is not recognized in China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and other dark corners of the globe.
The principle that all men are created equal, that they have inherent rights given to them by God (or "the laws of nature" or "nature’s God,” or, if even that makes you uncomfortable, the big wheel in the
sky) is the cornerstone of American liberalism and our country’s gift to the world.
That principle was true on July 4, 1076; it was true on that day, sometime in 1776 when Jefferson put goose quill to sheepskin; and it remains true this July 4th. It is a timeless and universal idea that applies to all people, in all countries, at all times. Jefferson’s Declaration was not only a recognition of the eternal and infinite source of our rights but a formal announcement of a new “course of human events.”
From thence forth, freedom, at least its American conception, was not to be based on precedent, tradition, and royal favor, as in Great Britain. It was not to be based on the positive laws of men, as became the case on the European continent. Instead, American freedoms would be founded on the will of God as expressed through the voice of The People.
Any other theory of the origin of our rights must be based on the idea that rights are vouchsafed by a person or government and can be withdrawn as arbitrarily as they were extended. This, of course, has been the governing philosophy of tyrants, despots, and authoritarian governments since the dawn of time.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote that "all men are created equal" he meant what he said. That the struggle to achieve that equality took nearly 200 years only means that, because of our country’s unique place in human history, the stakes were higher, the convictions deeper, and the triumph of equality before the law more meaningful.
The miracle of our nation’s founding is not that God-given, universal rights were only extended to certain men; instead, it is that in a time of absolute rule —- of kings and emperors, popes and potentates —- individual rights were extended to anyone at all. That the populations of large swaths of the planet have come to practice the rights articulated by Jefferson, or at least aspire to them, is a testament to their self-evident truth.