As America turns 250, how the Declaration of Independence endures

On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted a document introducing a new nation to the world, composed of 13 “free and independent states.” 

This Declaration of Independence, read to crowds gathered in town squares across the colonies, announced the ideals “of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—words that 250 years later, make the Declaration one of history’s most quoted and enduring texts. But what did the Declaration mean to the colonists 250 years ago, and how has its meaning changed along with the nation?

To explore some of the biggest questions about the nation's founding, we turned to four University of Chicago scholars: Prof. John Mark Hansen, a political scientist who studies American democracy and participation; Prof. Alison L. LaCroix, a legal historian and constitutional law expert; Prof. Steven Pincus, a historian of Britain and its empire; and Prof. Eric Slauter, a scholar of early American literature and culture who is currently curating a Newberry Library exhibition on the Declaration. 

In this edited Q&A, they examine what the Declaration meant to colonists in 1776—and how its meaning has changed as the nation grew.

When the Congress declared that “all men are created equal,” what did readers in 1776 understand that to mean? How does that differ from how we read it now?

Slauter: In 1776, the claim that “all men are created equal” was a philosophical premise to establish the right of revolution. For many today the words represent a foundational promise. 

It took generations of Americans to bring these words to the center of our understanding of the Declaration of Independence and to transform a manifesto of secession into a charter of liberty, equality and rights, but that process started as soon as the Declaration hit the streets in 1776.

So, who noticed the equality claim? A few American Loyalists and British writers, who scoffed at the distance between the high-sounding pretensions of Congress’s theories and the practice of slavery. A writer in a London newspaper in September 1776 described the Declaration’s philosophy as utter “nonsense.” He lectured Congress on the meaning of the word “unalienable” and how out of place it was in the Declaration: “where there are Slaves,” he noted, “Liberty is alienated.” 

More interesting is the reaction from a small number of abolitionists in the new nation. They asked: Could the Declaration of Independence truly mean what it said? And what did those “self-evident” truths promise the enslaved? Rev. William Gordon seems to have been the first to get those questions into print, in a newspaper in Boston in October 1776, pointing explicitly to the fact that Congress had appealed to “the Supreme Judge of the World” for the rectitude of their intentions. 

Were Americans then “acting hypocritically”? Gordon was hardly alone in asking, and we believe that months earlier a young Black soldier named Lemuel Haynes placed the sentence that has since become a creed on an unpublished antislavery manuscript. The White minister was, however, the first to get a printer to emphasize those words with italics and invite readers to hear them differently: “all men are created equal.”

What kind of state did the Declaration's signers actually want when they broke from the British?

Pincus: The Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration wanted an activist state. They deplored the recent abandonment by Britain’s Tory governments of a developmental approach to their colonies. 

Prior to 1760, the year of George III’s accession to the Crown, American colonists believed that Britain had sought to promote the development of its North American colonies and appreciated that they formed the most dynamic part of the imperial economy.

After 1760, however, Britain’s governments sought to decrease the massive and growing sovereign debt by shifting more of the tax burden onto the colonists. In particular, they placed constraints on North American trade, limited migration into the colonies and prevented the reorientation of the North American economy. 

The Committee of Five members were furious that George III had vetoed a series of colonial acts aimed at restricting the slave trade. In their view, the persistence of the slave trade encouraged a colonial economy that would concentrate wealth in the hands of the large planter and tend toward oligarchy. They wanted a government that would actively promote liberty and prosperity for the majority of the population.

The Declaration isn't law—and yet many treat it as if it’s part of the Constitution. What is its legal status, and why has it remained so central to American constitutional argument?

LaCroix: The Declaration isn’t part of the U.S. Constitution as a formal matter, given that the Declaration was written in 1776, well before the Constitution was written in 1787. 

But the Declaration was very much viewed by the American revolutionaries as a constitutional document in the broader sense of a framing agreement that would make day-to-day governance possible. In fact, at the same time that the Continental Congress appointed the committee that drafted the Declaration, it created two other committees: one to develop a plan for forming foreign alliances, and one to draw up “the form of a confederation” with the Articles of Confederation, which were America’s first crack at a constitution.

Since then, the Declaration has become one of America’s founding documents, a category that also includes the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), and perhaps also documents that predated the U.S. Constitution but were formative for its drafters, such as England’s Magna Carta (1215) and the English Bill of Rights (1689).

The Declaration was written to be circulated—printed, posted, read aloud. How did ordinary people actually encounter it in 1776?

Slauter: Congress voted on independence on July 2. Later that day, the Pennsylvania Evening Post became the first newspaper to report that Congress had declared the colonies “FREE and INDEPENDENT STATES.” This short revolutionary notice appeared on the back page of the paper, sitting beside an advertisement offering a reward for the recapture of a Black man named Ishmael who escaped his enslaver and declared himself free and independent.

On July 4, 1776, John Dunlap became the first person to set the phrase “all Men are created equal” in type. As some of the authors of the Declaration of Independence stood in his Philadelphia printshop, the Irish-born printer used sheets of Dutch paper to craft a broadside for distribution in America and Europe. He selected upper-case letters imported from Britain for the document’s most important sentence: “That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES.”

But likely many more people would have heard rather than read the Declaration. Its text was first proclaimed publicly from the State House (now Independence Hall) in Philadelphia on July 8. On July 9, George Washington ordered it to be read to the army in New York “with an audible voice.” 

Even before those public proclamations, on July 6, the text appeared for the first time in a newspaper. On July 8, Dunlap put it on the front page of his own newspaper. By Aug. 2 the text had appeared in over 30 newspapers across the new states. In nearly two-thirds of those the egalitarian words of the Declaration sat by notices advertising the sale of human beings or rewards for the return of those who had emancipated themselves. 

The iconic text many picture when they think of the Declaration, the words written on animal skin, was not signed until early August, after the news had reached ordinary people across the new nation.

How did “the pursuit of happiness” end up in the Declaration? What did it mean to Jefferson's contemporaries—and what does it mean now?

Slauter: These words could be found in several well-known texts. A half-century earlier a young Benjamin Franklin even set that exact phrase in type in a book about natural religion, and we know that John Adams read that book and that Thomas Jefferson owned it.

Some commentators have simply assumed that Jefferson intended this phrase to be a revision of the last part of John Locke’s phrase “lives, liberties, and estates.” But in truth Jefferson was working from another text, the draft version of a declaration of rights for Virginia principally written by George Mason and already circulating in Philadelphia newspapers when Jefferson was drafting the Declaration.

Mason placed “pursuing and obtaining Happiness and Safety” alongside “the Means of Acquiring and Possessing Property” in his list of natural rights. The phrase thus spoke beyond property.

In Jefferson’s version, I’d say “pursuit of happiness” stands in the Declaration’s short enumeration of natural rights as a placeholder for other important freedoms. 

This includes the individual right of freedom of conscience, and as a seed for the collective right of revolution: the right “to alter or to abolish” an old government and replace it with a new one that better secures “Safety and Happiness.”

Political parties as we know them didn't exist at the founding. How did they come about, and how did they reshape the system the founders built?

Hansen: Political divisions, James Madison wrote in Federalist 10, are “sown in the nature of man.” 

Madison and the other designers of the Constitution tried everything they could to mitigate their effects. The “parties” that emerged within a decade were elite coalitions supporting and opposing President John Adams. There were also such factions during George Washington’s presidency, but it was not as divisive. These early coalitions weren’t parties as we think of them today, organizations that nominate and support slates of candidates for office. 

That function emerged from supporters and opponents of President Andrew Jackson, his supporters becoming the Democratic Party and his opponents the National Republicans and shortly the Whigs. The first national nominating conventions chose candidates in the 1832 election.

The main reason for their appearance was the extension of suffrage beyond a narrow elite to include almost all adult White males, the first “mass suffrage” in the world, as noted above. Mass suffrage necessitated mass mobilization of voters, hence the organization of enduring organizations dedicated to electing their candidates.

Set against other events such as England’s Glorious Revolution or the French Revolution, what was distinctive about the American Revolution and its founding document? Why didn’t we see the reinstatement of monarchy in some form here?

Pincus: Revolutions in general come about when the old regime decides for whatever reason—geopolitical weakness, or comparative economic underdevelopment—to modernize the state. This makes it possible for their critics to agree on the need for reform but reject the specific proposals put forward by the government. The decision by the old regime to modernize left conservatives, those who would defend the old regime, with no place to turn. In the case of Britain in the late 18th century, George III and his Tory ministers had decided the best way to pay down the sovereign debt was to transform the imperial state into one that compelled the colonies to pay for the cost of wars that had been fought to protect the colonies. 

This new desire to tax the colonies and restrict their foreign trade provoked uprisings across the empire—in Ireland, in South Asia, in Britain itself, as well as in North America. The patriots, as the opponents of this new Tory program for the imperial state were called, were victorious only in North America and in Ireland because the Tory government marshaled its resources to defend India and Britain. 

Patriots across the empire wanted to limit the power of the Crown, insisting the king and his government needed to be constrained by laws. Because George III, in the view of the North American colonists, had broken through the norms that limited the power of the executive, they designed a government that would have more formal limits on that power. The president, or executive, that the Americans created was intended to be more formally delimited than the English king. 

Meanwhile, patriots in Britain agitated for radical parliamentary reform. Patriots in Ireland insisted on legislative, judicial and political independence of the Irish Parliament.

The American Constitution’s creation of the presidency was of a piece with these reforms. What was distinctive about the American Revolution was not its corpus of ideas—these were shared by patriots across the British Empire—but rather the patriots’ victory against the Tory government of then-Prime Minister Frederick North. The American Revolution needs to be understood as part of a pan-imperial program for radical state reform in the form of limiting the power of the executive so as to create a government that would serve the interests of the people, understood as a mass public of consumers.

How did most Americans identify themselves when the country was founded—as citizens of individual states, or of the United States? How has that changed in the intervening years?

LaCroix: If we could go back in time to the 1760s and '70s in Boston or Charleston, we would find a lot of people referring to themselves as “British North Americans” and invoking the “rights of Englishmen”—especially when they were challenging, say, the power of Parliament to legislate for the colonies, rather than allowing the local colonial assemblies to regulate.

In the early 19th century, there was a lot of discussion of what American-ness meant, including many, many orations and essays on topics like “American literature” and “American government,” sometimes celebratory and sometimes a little anxious. Of course, state affiliation was always important; Jefferson, for example, put the law of states other than Virginia in the category of “Foreign Law” when cataloguing his library.

In the period between the Founding and the Civil War, how did Americans invoke the Declaration—and who got to claim it?

LaCroix: Different generations have emphasized different parts of the Declaration that seem responsive to the issues of their specific moment. In the beginning, the most important aspects of the Declaration were the “bill of particulars”—the colonists’ complaints against King George III—and the announcement that the U.S. was stepping onto the world stage as its own independent nation. In the early 19th century, the “all men are created equal” idea increasingly entered public discourse in the context of debates about democracy and extending the vote (to all White men, rather than only property holders), and the entrenchment and expansion of slavery. 

In 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln called for Americans to embrace both the Declaration and the Constitution as the “political religion of the nation.” Abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass invoked the Declaration’s equality principle to challenge slavery’s defenders, and to rebut proslavery uses of the Constitution. Most famously, in his Gettysburg Address of 1863, Lincoln used the Declaration as the starting point for American history in order to recommit his war-weary listeners to the nation’s dedication to “the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Scholars sometimes refer to the period after the Civil War as a “second founding” of the nation. How did the first founding compare to that second founding?

LaCroix: It’s important to remember that the whole category of “founding” can really only be applied after the fact, and that designating any period as a “founding” invites debate about when it began and ended. The three “Reconstruction amendments,” as the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments are known, fundamentally reshaped American constitutional structure and rights. And they also changed the text of the Constitution itself, which is both important on its own terms and also obvious to anyone who reads the Constitution. 

But as I argue in my book The Interbellum Constitution, Americans of the early 19th century, living between the first and second foundings, had their own distinct understanding of what the Constitution was and what the founding had meant, even though they didn’t change the literal text of the Constitution. So while I think both the 1770s-80s and the 1860s-70s count as “founding” moments, we shouldn’t assume that outside of those moments, everything just stayed the same—or that the only source of constitutional meaning is the text of the document.

Looking across 250 years, when did American participation in democracy surge—and what drew people in?

Hansen: There are many ways to participate in a democracy. From the outset, the First Amendment enumerated four essential “process rights.”

These are “freedom of speech [and] of the press” and “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Much of the story of American democracy has been the exercise of rights other than the right to vote, particularly through the organization of associations: political parties, civic groups, lobbying groups, trade associations, labor unions, social movements and so forth. 

Americans had a genius for coming together in private associations, Alexis de Tocqueville argued, calling it the “mother science” of democracy in America. And it was these rights that the American people used to extend access to the right we all identify as the sine qua non of democracy, the right to vote. The Constitution did not guarantee a right to vote, leaving it to the states to confer the franchise. It was closely limited in the first decades of the republic to property holders and taxpayers.

The restrictions fell away as new states and the original 13 competed for settlers and for the political support of the merchants, mechanics, farmers and laborers whose cooperation was essential to the development of the country. But the franchise was also hard-won by the efforts of associations dedicated to egalitarian principles, such as the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement and the women’s suffrage movement.