The Bookshelf: When Words Are Deeds 

The nation’s semiquincentennial, which we marked on July 4, was the occasion for a number of new books about the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. I’m sure I’ll get around to reading some of those in future—if they’re good, they’re durable—but lately I’ve been revisiting some older works on the subject that still hold up. I’ll get to those in a moment, but first I want to consider what we have been celebrating this year. 

Not every country has a founding moment, an event in history of which it has definite knowledge as the year, the month, even the day when that nation came into existence. It would be presumptuous of us Americans to claim that we are unique in knowing this about our country, or even the first in history to know this about ourselves—perhaps the Swiss or the Dutch have older claims than ours—but this should not detract from our patriotic sense of achievement in this respect.  

Yet what was that date when the United States of America properly came into being? Is the nation’s nativity the date on which its present government, under the Constitution, came into being through ratification, June 21, 1788? (Or was that the following spring of 1789, when the First Congress met and President Washington was inaugurated?) Or, since the Constitution recognizes that it is perfecting something already existing—making “a more perfect Union”—maybe the right date is March 1, 1781, when the Articles of Confederation were finally ratified—though Congress had been tacitly operating under its norms for more than three years. Or perhaps what matters is something external but important to us—the de jure recognition of our status as an independent nation in the Treaty of Paris, on September 3, 1783. 

These are important events in our history, but every schoolchild knows the right answer: that our country’s birth was on July 4, 1776. (Even John Adams came to see that his initial impulse was misplaced, to celebrate July 2, when the resolution carried for independence.) That 1776 was the right year was indelibly stamped on the American memory by Lincoln’s opening words at Gettysburg: “Fourscore and seven years ago”; 1863 – 87 = 1776. And too few of us notice that even the Constitution affirms this, dating its own composition to the year of our Lord 1787 “and of the Independence of the United States of America the twelfth.” 

The American consensus about July 4, and not about one of those other dates in 1781, 1783, or 1788, should impel us to notice something else. Those other events, of constituting governments or concluding a treaty, involved political action of some kind. This government now exists! This country is now recognized by others—not least by its former colonial ruler! Much remained to be done, of course, to effectuate these acts of creation, yet each one was a kind of completion as well as a beginning. They finished practical things and began practical things. But July 4, 1776 is different: the event and the action of that day consist entirely in the words uttered: This is who we are, and the saying is the doing. Later events on the other days I’ve mentioned would make good on the saying, yet our felt identity as Americans has always turned on a conviction that a thing was done on July 4, though all that occurred was that a piece of writing was finished. 

Little wonder, then, that so much of our political history revolves around questions of intellectual history. What did that piece of writing, the Declaration of Independence, mean? What does it mean still? Are the things it says true? In what relation does it stand to the Constitution? In what sense, if any, does the Declaration govern? What ethic, what spirit, what sentiments does it impart to the people who declared that day that they were a new nation? Did they declare themselves a nation, or merely a Union of thirteen sovereigns? In short, what were the founders doing, by saying what they said? 

They were, so far as their own “sacred Honor” was concerned (those are the last two words of the Declaration), announcing the existence of a new nation of states, by renouncing their former allegiance to the British monarch. They were not thereby constituting the nation’s new government, though the states it comprised had already begun to reconstitute their own governments. In a biblical figure Abraham Lincoln would later employ, the Declaration was the “apple of gold” for which the Constitution adopted later was the “picture of silver,” the frame made to preserve it. What mattered most about the Declaration, Lincoln argued, was that it was the “philosophical cause” of the Union, “the expression of that principle” that made the American Revolution more than a mere separation of America from Great Britain.  

Hence the most interesting books about the Declaration of Independence are those that take up its principles and arguments with the utmost seriousness, as matters of intellectual and not merely political history—indeed, as matters of political philosophy. A good example from more than a century ago is Carl L. Becker’s The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922). In two consecutive chapters, Becker considers “The Historical Antecedents of the Declaration,” the first being “The Natural Rights Philosophy” and the second a “Theory of the British Empire.” In this way he rather conventionally treats the opening two paragraphs of the Declaration (where the natural rights philosophy appears) separately from the larger body of grievances against King George III (which exemplify the Americans’ theory of the empire). This tends to slight the underlying unity of the Declaration’s argument as a whole, but it is not an altogether wrongheaded reading. Unfortunately, while Becker’s treatment of the Americans’ understanding of the British empire—and of how in their view that understanding had been traduced by Crown and Parliament—remains fresh and instructive, his discussion of the Declaration’s natural rights philosophy now reads as an outdated artifact of Becker’s own progressivism. Becker’s eighteenth century is an era when “Nature was the new God.” He gives us a thin secular Enlightenment liberalism thesis owing almost everything to John Locke—a Locke understood as fundamentally simpatico with the French Revolution he did not live to see.  

But readers should stay for Becker’s very informative central chapter on the drafting and revision of the Declaration, and a subsequent chapter on its literary qualities, which is also well done. Becker’s treatment of the writing of the Declaration by Thomas Jefferson, and its editing by the Continental Congress, would not be superseded until Pauline Maier’s American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997). (Still another useful account of the Declaration as a collective writing project appears in Danielle Allen’s 2014 book Our Declaration, a richly worthwhile read that nonetheless has some philosophical defects I identified here a decade ago.) 

Maier opens with a solid description of the events immediately leading up to the Congress’s decision to declare independence in July 1776, and then offers a groundbreaking account of what she calls “the other ‘declarations of independence,’” of which she found “at least ninety” adopted by Americans at the state and local level in the spring and early summer of that year. In appendices to her book, Maier supplies a catalogue of these “other declarations” and a representative sample of them. The picture that emerges reinforces Jefferson’s claim, a half century later, that his Declaration was not intended “to say things that had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.” 

Only after discussing these precursors does Maier give her treatment of “Mr. Jefferson and His Editors,” which supplies more detail than Becker had provided and should now be regarded as the standard account of the Declaration’s composition. Her final full-scale chapter, however, argues—with too little evidence in support of this thesis—that the Declaration was “all but forgotten,” “disregard[ed] … in the earliest years of the new nation,” only to be elevated by the generation that witnessed the deaths of the last revolutionaries. It is true that as its fiftieth anniversary approached, there was more attention to the Declaration—naturally enough, as this year’s 250th once again demonstrates—but that rising attention was not from a low that deserves to be called “disregard.” 

These fifty-year intervals have all heralded notable celebrations—1826, 1876, 1926, and (in living memory) 1976. And scholars took note of the bicentennial, as did the general public. For the bicentennial, for instance, the American Enterprise Institute sponsored a series of lectures in the years immediately beforehand, given in various cities, and gathered them into a book titled America’s Continuing Revolution. The eighteen essays in that volume included fine contributions from Ronald Berman, Edward Banfield, Peter Berger, Robert Nisbet, Caroline Robbins, Daniel Boorstin, Irving Kristol, Martin Diamond—and Gordon Wood, who died this June, just before the semiquincentennial. But Wood, who remained active past the age of ninety, had already contributed once again to an AEI celebration of the American Revolution, providing an essay in the first of eight volumes the think tank has now published as part of a “We Hold These Truths: America at 250” commemoration. Contributors to AEI’s latest celebration of the founding include Thomas Kidd, Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Robert P. George, Lucas Morel, Diana Schaub, Akhil Reed Amar, Harvey Mansfield, Allen Guelzo, and Wilfred McClay, among many others. The authors do not all take the same view of the documents, ideas, and events they discuss—and that makes the essays lively reading—but what they have in common is the conviction that the American Revolution was an intellectual and moral event in the history of the world, as well as a political and military one. 

That understanding of the Revolution as an intellectual and moral event, whose fundamental principles are expressed in the Declaration of Independence, has been what Lincoln called the “electric cord … that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.” No one delved more deeply into Lincoln’s attachment to the Declaration of Independence than the late Harry V. Jaffa in Crisis of the House Divided (1959) and A New Birth of Freedom (2000). In the latter book, Jaffa hammered hard at the moral relativism he perceived in Carl Becker’s book on the Declaration. And indeed, Becker had insouciantly remarked: “To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question.” This was foolish, and worse than foolish, for nothing in our political life can matter more than whether we have founded our country on truth or falsehood. But Jaffa knew as well that this ghastly error on Becker’s part did not render his work valueless; Jaffa, in 2000, called Becker’s 1922 book “in most respects, the finest scholarly work ever written on the subject.” 

I do not think that, a quarter century later, that can be said any longer. But like the more recent books discussed above, Becker’s work still repays the reader with much insight into the document that announced the birth of the United States. 

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