Everyone remembers how the Declaration begins, for at the start it is chock full of phrases and rhetorical flourishes that are difficult to forget. What American does not know the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” or that among the truths is the inalienable right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”? Fewer, but still many, recall that evocative turn of phrase, “When in the Course of human events(. . .)
But that is just it. The moral content is remembered, but its purpose has been, if not entirely lost, obscured to a significant degree. It is not a piece of moral philosophy. It is a declaration of independence on the part of the thirteen former colonies. The course of human events which fewer recall than the inalienable rights “endowed” by a “Creator” are ones in which “it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,” that other, of course, being England.
The body of this document is a brief in defense of the declaration, the moral philosophy forming the grounding assumptions and the list of grievances the rationale. At the end of this exposition comes the actual declaration, “That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved[.]”
Most important of all is “that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” Whatever the case for doing it might be, the declaration was doing something; it was announcing to the world that they were available to build independent ties with any other sovereign nation. In the midst of a war with their former government, this was no small matter. Finding a powerful nation to form an alliance with would make the difference between victory and defeat when a great deal of blood had already been spilled.
I know as an American I am supposed to believe in the righteousness of their cause, but quite frankly I find the list of grievances ridiculous, the notion that the colonies had been subject to “a long train of abuses and usurpations” designed “to reduce them under absolute Despotism” a laughable proposition. But it does not matter. They took action, and through their actions they forged a new nation, quite a different one from their colonial motherland. A nation envisioned, at first, as a nation of nations; as much an alliance among neighbors as a collective alliance between them and foreign powers such as France. In peacetime these war-leaders took action again, seeking to alter the terms of their internal alliance to assure their mutual prosperity but also to maintain the peace—peace among themselves first and foremost.
Men like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton envisioned the New World devolving into the kind of rolling regional warfare so characteristic of the Old World of their day. The production of the Constitution was, once again, a matter of taking action. Its compromises are infamous, but they were compromises in pursuit of peace after a long period of intense bloodletting. In a way, they failed, as a cataclysmic civil war broke out a little over seventy years later, along lines that would have been entirely predictable in 1787. But they also successfully created a government capable of waging such a war once, decisively winning, and putting to bed such open warfare among the states thereafter.
Any endeavor pursued by real human beings is bound to be imperfect, to cut corners that should not be cut, to compromise with that which should not, but perhaps must, be compromised with. These strains, tensions, and black marks expand with the ambition of the endeavor.
People have trouble accepting this truism of human nature. Those who wish to preserve their pride in human accomplishments are all too tempted to leave out any wart or blemish from the beautiful version of these accomplishments which lives in their minds. Those who insist on confronting human ugliness struggle to find anything redeemable, often coping by displacing their optimism to some other area they dare not scrutinize quite so closely.
The rationale for what they did, and the morality of many specific choices they made, is certainly open to question. What cannot be questioned is that that band of leaders accomplished something tremendous, nothing short of world-historic. And it has endured; the long reach of those deeds extend right into our own day.
Lincoln asked us to focus on the moral message of the Declaration, and this request was one of his many gifts to us. But we should not confuse the moral message with the accomplishment, nor think the path to progress is chiefly paved with better and better moral messages.
What was accomplished that day was the tenuous birth of a new nation, whose birth pains would continue for many decades hence and perhaps never quite ended. What we ought to emulate is not merely their firm public moral stance, but their unyielding boldness and ambition in the face of the ever present temptation towards complacency.
To those who take pride in the world-shaking achievements of previous generations, and to those who seek to emulate the boldness of their ambitious: happy Fourth of July.
It's always baffled me that those who often pride themselves on their own masculine independence also praise the Founders as near-infallible and are utterly and completely subservient to their visions. Very strange combo.