This past July, Americans celebrated the 250th anniversary of the founders’ signing of the Declaration of Independence. As the November elections approach, now would be a good time to reflect on what the Declaration said, what it meant and its place in American politics.
“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.” The second sentence of the Declaration, what journalist Walter Isaacson called the greatest sentence ever written, still stands as a powerful testament to our founding ideals. Indeed, Abraham Lincoln saw the Declaration as our founding document, calling it “the apple of gold” framed by the Constitution’s “frame of silver.”
The Declaration said to the world, this is who we are as a people, the Constitution inscribed it into law. Any attempt to interpret the Constitution without first considering the Declaration, misses the point of the whole enterprise. Looking at the Constitution without considering the Declaration’s promise of equality, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will result in reaching conclusions the founders never intended and would indeed consider sacrilege.
The notion that the Constitution must be looked through the lens of the Declaration was something shared by many of the founders. Future Supreme Court Justice James Wilson read the Declaration aloud at the start of the constitutional convention and again at the start at the Pennsylvania ratifying convention. During the convention to draft the Constitution, a committee of detail was tasked with drafting the actual document. They debated the need to restate basic principles or whether to focus on the nuts and bolts of the new Constitution. They decided the principles put forth in the Declaration were self -evident and could stand alone.
Other founders such as John Adams conceded that the Constitution needed something more, that it couldn’t control human passions without the cloaking of morality; morality provided by religion or something else. For many, that something else were the 35 words of the Declaration’s second sentence. Equality is the idea that all humans were equal and as equals, had a responsibility not only for themselves but for their community. The belief that without true equality, true liberty was impossible. Liberty is a precondition for the pursuit of worthy ends. Real liberty is the freedom to speak out, to worship or to assemble without fear of persecution by the government, but even more, the freedom to speak the truth as you see it, freedom to pursue your goals and the freedom to not have to ask permission to believe what you believe.
Somewhere in the last 250 years, we have strayed. We celebrated the 250th anniversary with no real idea what we were celebrating. We have come to see equality as something that comes with conditions, that some are less equal than others. We have come to accept a warped concept of liberty where the well-being of the individual is more important than the well-being of the community. We confuse license with liberty and condone the abuse of freedom and deprive others of their liberty merely because they look or speak differently or have different beliefs than the rest of us. The pursuit of happiness has become do what you want, when you want without regard for others. In contrast, the Declaration’s pursuit of happiness referred to a collective happiness, the right of the individual and the community to realize its full potential.
Looked at it by itself, without the Declaration as its filter, the Constitution has been interpreted to allow many of the abuses the founders feared and tried to avoid. Enabled by the Supreme Court, the president’s actions today read like a 21st century remake of the King’s “repeated injuries and usurpations” cited in the Declaration.
I do not know what the remedy is. I do know though, that it does not lie with a president who each day comes up with novel ways to abuse the power of his office. Nor does it lie with a Supreme Court which allows the abuses by viewing the Constitution, not through the lens of the Declaration as the founders intended, but through the lens of their own political leanings or ideology.
Perhaps the remedy lies within each one of us. In the words of Daniel Webster, the government still is “the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people and answerable to the people.” Maybe it is that simple. In November 1863, Abraham Lincoln looked at the death and destruction of the Civil War and saw an opportunity for Americans to rededicate themselves to the principles of the Declaration, that it was possible for the nation to “have a new birth of freedom.”
This is what the 250th anniversary should be about. A time to reflect on what the Declaration of Independence really means. To read it and see those words not only as text on a page, but as ideas to live by and govern by. If we can do that and elect people who are dedicated to those 35 words, we can regain what has been lost and have a government and a nation truly reflective of America’s promise.
Michael Pelchat is a retied pharmacist and history student who lives in Webster.