AMERICA250 | Declaration’s truths still reverberate across U.S., around the world
Its unprecedented ideas continue expanding, leading the way for other countries
The Dakota Scout holds these truths to be self-evident: We are all created equal, life, liberty and property remain unalienable rights, and the United States of America is still history’s best example of these virtues being reflected by people through representative government. We celebrated America’s enduring spirit with a June 26 special section focusing on the 56 men who risked life, liberty and treasure 250 years ago in signing OUR Declaration of Independence.
This essay is the first in a series of features showcased there; the full section will publish at TheDakotaScout.com Friday, followed by more revolutionary content through July 4.
1,320 words. 1,458 if you include all the words on the parchment and the names of the 56 signers.
The signers. They put their names to a most remarkable document that restated rights injured again and again by a distant government, a parchment King George considered treasonous.
But above all, it enunciated something completely new to history: “unalienable rights.”
Why is the Declaration of Independence so fascinating, and so enduring, 250 years since it was given to the American people and to the rest of the world?
As scholar Jonathan Pidluzny puts it, “Before the Revolution, no nation had ever asserted the right to establish a new form of government from ‘reflection and choice’ that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.’”
Their core concepts seem obvious in today’s America: People have rights merely by virtue of being human, not rights granted to them by kings or governments. All people have equal rights, which include the rights to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The story of the United States is of continuously extending those ideas, like ripples in a pond, to Americans beyond the 56 signers – and beyond our borders.
Expanding through America
The Declaration was invoked over and over in America’s pursuit of liberty.
The Rev. Lemuel Haynes of Connecticut, the first black man ordained as a minister in the United States, cited the Declaration of Independence’s promise against the practice of slavery in the very year it was written. His 1776 sermon was titled “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping.” Many of the signers also saw the incompatibility of slavery with their ideals, often working after the Revolution to limit or ban it in certain areas.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an abolitionist who also advocated for the rights of women, cited the Declaration in the Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848. This tracks with Abigail Adams warning her husband and future President John Adams to “remember the ladies” during the Revolution. Of course, voting for women wouldn’t happen until the 19th Amendment was ratified in August 1920.
Frederick Douglass, a former slave who escaped to the North from his Maryland plantation, gave a fiery speech on July 4, 1852, to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society: “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” He wanted America to fulfill the promise of the Declaration to all Americans. He lived to see slavery abolished.
Of course, President Abraham Lincoln mentioned the Declaration in the first few sentences of his historic Gettysburg Address on Nov. 19, 1863, months after the terrible battle of Gettysburg on July 1–3, 1863. He wondered whether “a nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could endure. His resolve during the Civil War ensured it would.
One hundred years ago, on July 5, 1926, President Calvin Coolidge, the only president to be born on July 4 (and who loved South Dakota; his summer residence is still in the Black Hills), gave an oration in Philadelphia celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Declaration. It’s a great address in its entirety, but one portion stands out:
“If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. referenced the Declaration in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech of Aug. 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial: “In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men – yes, black men as well as white men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Worldwide impact
Here’s a small listing of countries in just the first 70 years after 1776 that cited the Declaration of Independence in their own revolutions: Venezuela (1811), Greece (1822), Belgium (1830), New Zealand (1835), Liberia (1847) and Hungary (1848). Venezuela even used verbatim language from our Declaration: “these united Provinces are, and ought to be, from this day, by act and right, Free, Sovereign, and Independent States.”
Nineteenth-century Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth (who was feted throughout the United States, including before the Congress and the White House, in 1851–52; there’s a bronze bust of him in the Capitol) once called the American Declaration of Independence “the noblest, happiest page in mankind’s history.”
By the end of the 20th century, there were 120 democracies on the planet, and as Professor David Armitage of Harvard has noted, more than half of the nations in the United Nations “have a founding document that can be called a declaration of independence,” with many inspired directly by Jefferson’s words.
A supplement celebrating this remarkable document is included in this issue of The Dakota Scout. Enjoy learning about the 56 extraordinary men who defiantly signed their names to a document that inspired freedom in their own time and country and throughout the world still today. They defied an unjust king and brought forth “a new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln so eloquently stated. That experiment in freedom continues, if we have the courage to follow their example.
Happy 250th anniversary of our Independence Day!
Aaron Levisay is an occasional contributor to The Dakota Scout and the chairman of the Sioux Falls Independence Day Parade board.
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