“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
How many times have we heard those words?
In 2007, The Washington Post published an article by Gene Weingarten called “Pearls Before Breakfast.” In it, he chronicles an experiment by the newspaper, in which world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell put on a baseball cap and a T-shirt and entered the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station in Washington, D.C.
Once there, he removed his Stradivarius violin from its case and began to play. Keep in mind, this is an artist who has sold out opera houses and entertained heads of state, playing a $4 million violin. Of the approximately 1,000 people who walked past that day, only seven stopped to listen.
And so it is sometimes with our national identity as Americans. We are busy, we are desensitized, and it’s an act of will to stop, screen out the noise, and appreciate for a moment just how fundamentally unique and beautiful our country is.
The Declaration of Independence, the founding document of the United States of America, has its own special music.
In an effort to listen, I sat down with Brenda Hafera, assistant director of the Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation, on the latest episode of “Heritage Explains.”
A lightly edited transcript is below.
Mark Guiney: We want to talk about a paper that you wrote this past year all about a different paper that some other people wrote called the Declaration of Independence. What makes the Declaration of Independence unique? Why is it such an important thing?
Brenda Hafera: There’s this quote that Alexander Hamilton wrote in the first Federalist paper, which lays out that this is something new that has never happened in American history.
He says, “It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country by their conduct and example to inform the important questions whether societies of men are capable of establishing good government through reflection and choice or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political institutions on accident and force.”
This is a remarkable moment in human history where a people voluntarily have come together on the basis of agreement about fundamental principles, about what it means to be human, and they have voluntarily formed a new society based on those principles.
It’s through reflection and choice, because previously in human history, it had been accident and force.
These societies had existed often because of blood ties, because commonality of religion and force had governed the day because they were ruled by monarchs, they were ruled by aristocracies. The people didn’t have a fundamental say in the government.
America undoes this. It’s the first time in the history of the world that that has happened.
The Declaration of Independence has many, many functions. It’s a very rich document.
One of the things it sets out is the fundamental principles that define America. Then it establishes a new country because it announces, of course, our separation from Great Britain.
Guiney: What does the Declaration of Independence say about being an American?
Hafera: First, it says a great deal about being human.
The Declaration has a beautiful logic to it. It starts out with this idea that all men are created equal. And that principle means that no one has been born with the right to rule over others, absent their consent.
It’s very consistent with the notion that we’re all equal in the eyes of God. It’s a claim about what we have in common, rather than an emphasis on what we have that’s different in terms of intelligence, skin color, whatever. Those things aren’t fundamentally important.
What is fundamentally important is what it means to be human: things like conscience, things like reason that separate us from animals.
And because of that, then, flows all these other things that we have to have consent of the governed if human beings are equal. And then we’re going to establish a government based on these principles.
Of course, the Constitution does that later on, and there’s this beautiful relationship between the Declaration and the Constitution.
The Declaration lays out all these things about what it means to be human, and then it says, “This is what’s going to define America.”
And we know this intuitively. When people talk today about how they’re concerned that America won’t be here for their children, they’re not concerned about the physical territory breaking up, right?
But what they’re concerned is we’ll lose what it means to be who we are, the things that really define us. We can say the soul of America, the ethos of it. That’s what we’re afraid of losing. And that is what is laid out most fundamentally in our Declaration of Independence and then protected by the Constitution.
Guiney: A really interesting part of your paper on the declaration, reflected how different historical figures have chosen to look at it and how that has exemplified our conversation around declaration and being an American today. Can you talk about some of those people?
Hafera: These are really good stories and good documents that are beautifully written that are worth reading in their entirety.
But the overall lesson I think these stories and these people are conveying is that when we face disagreements as Americans or we’ve recognized that there’s an injustice, that we’re not actually living up to the principles that we have espoused in the Declaration of Independence.
Turning back to the Declaration is a way to move towards those principles, and it’s a way to reconcile our disagreements or people who are being unjustly treated.
They have this claim in America to say, “No, look, these are my rights as a human being, and this is what America is dedicated to.” And a couple examples, so I would say Seneca Falls and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
He calls the Declaration a promissory note. It hasn’t been cashed in and it needs to be because people aren’t being treated equally under the law. So, those were both appeals, the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls is modeled after the Declaration of Independence.
That was the first conference for women. And so both of those appeals, Seneca Falls and Martin Luther King, I think are legitimate appeals to the Declaration and Americans recognize that.
So, it helped us more fully move towards justice. Then there are other things where it’s an outright rejection of the declaration. The establishment of the Confederacy is, and that’s very clear in Alexander Stevens’ cornerstone speech. He’s the vice president of the Confederacy.
He says very directly that the founding fathers believed in all manner created equal. They believed in the equality of the races and they were wrong. The Confederacy is going to be established on a new cornerstone, a principle of racial supremacy.
He says this very outright. And that’s a very good thing to know to say that the Confederates understood that they were rejecting the founding idea.
And Lincoln understands that he is embracing it and he gives his electric chord speech. I think that it’s good to read these primary source documents because it arms you against historical distortions. Read what they actually said and believed.
Guiney: There are a lot of folks with a more progressive mindset who tend to view everything through the lens of identity. They say that every person who signed the Declaration of Independence was male, and they were all white, and many of them were slave owners at the time. How could we possibly derive anything of value from that situation?
Hafera: I think one answer to that is to recognize that we’re all sinners, and we have things to learn from all sorts of sinners, and they knew that it was wrong.
At the Constitutional Convention, not a single delegate stands up to argue in favor of the morality of slavery. They didn’t think it was right. They couldn’t see a way to eliminate it at that time, in part because of public opinion.
We sometimes lose sight that the founding fathers were great men, but they were not gods who were able to eliminate this institution by fiat, just as politicians today cannot do things themselves.
Public opinion has to be there. There has to be the will to do it. So, that’s part of the reason the institution was very well entrenched.
But they set it on the course of ultimate extinction. That’s what they set out to do, and they put into the Constitution the tools to do so. And they refuse to admit in the Constitution the principle that you could own property in men. That’s why the word “slave” or “slavery” never appears in the Constitution by Madison’s account.
In terms of the Progressive Project, I think the best answer to this is Calvin Coolidge’s speech on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of independence. He says there’s a finality about the declaration that it’s exceedingly restful.
This idea that we can progress beyond the Declaration of Independence, beyond 1776, is foolish because there’s no progress between the idea that all men are created equal. There’s no progress beyond inalienable rights. He says those things are final.
So, to reject those things, to reject inherent in human dignity is not an evolution, it’s a devolution. That’s not progress. That’s going back to an age of ignorance.
Guiney: Now that you’ve done this study and you go back and you read some of the texts of the Declaration, what is it that comes to your mind now when you read it?
Hafera: I think that the Declaration is one of those things, like all great texts, that we tend not to read anymore because we’ve read it so many times. But when you do actually go back and read it again, you see new things because it’s beautiful and because it’s so rich.
My mentor, Dr. Bill Allen, wrote a terrific piece pointing out that the grievances against the king, which everyone ignores because you all focus on the beautiful paragraphs before it— and you know, in my opinion, kind of rightly so—are the reverse of the Constitution.
He points out, for example, the general writs of assistance, which were search warrants that the British passed that were general search warrants so that they could go through ships and warehouses and see if the Americans were smuggling because we were doing that quite a lot.
So, the British issued these general rites of assistance, and James Otis stands up in court and says, “This is wrong. You cannot do this. This is the violation of principle.”
John Adams is there in the courthouse, and he says, “Then and there, the child independence was born.”
So, this was an important violation that they saw. And of course, the Fourth Amendment protects against that.
Many of the grievances that we identified that were violations of consent of the governed are then things that get written into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and become positive protections, which I think is quite cool.