Embrace the Declaration’s bigger, radical theme

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, New York’s concealed-carry gun law and an Environmental Protection Agency plan to curb power-plant emissions, it defied both public opinion and its own precedents. But that’s not all the justices did. They also pulled us back into a debate, as old as the nation itself, about the meaning of the American Revolution.

For most people today, the heart of the Declaration of Independence, the true meaning of July Fourth, is “all men are created equal.” But the Continental Congress actually only used that Enlightenment truism as a bridge to its true purpose: justifying 13 parts of the British Empire breaking away from the rest.

Even the most ardently pro-independence members of Congress had little interest in disrupting the local power structures that ruled each colony. Why should they, when they had a comfy perch at the top? Even the low-born Alexander Hamilton urged the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to model the American government as close as possible on Britain’s limited monarchy. (Hamilton was a lot less hip back then.)

As Julian Boyd, the founding editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, noted, the Declaration of Independence “bore no necessary antagonism to the idea of kingship in general.”

In fact, the primary reason Congress finally cut ties with George III in July 1776, 14 months into the Revolutionary War, was so it could forge a new, anti-British alliance with another king, Louis XVI of France. American leaders hoped a French fleet — with an army on board — would appear in New York Harbor by late in the summer of 1776.

In this, its original objective, the Declaration of Independence failed. The first French troops and ships wouldn’t arrive for another two years, in 1778. If breaking up with Britain had been the Declaration’s only purpose, citizens of the new nation might well have viewed it as a nice try and forgotten all about it.

But enslaved Americans and their white allies found a different use for Jefferson’s masterpiece. Before the year 1776 was out, Lemuel Haynes, a free Black soldier serving in George Washington’s Continental Army, had written a pamphlet demanding the abolition of slavery. He called it “Liberty Further Extended,” and he opened it by quoting a phrase from the Declaration of Independence that most white Americans had ignored: “all men are created equal.”

In 1791, Benjamin Banneker, the African-American mathematician, quoted that same clause in an open letter seeking Jefferson’s help freeing the country’s slaves. Indeed, University of South Carolina student Riley Sutherland recently discovered that 70% of the Americans who quoted “all men are created equal” between 1776 and 1799 were whites (especially Quakers) and Blacks seeking to end slavery.

And so, what Congress had intended merely as a list of reasons for the colonies’ secession from Britain became a universal declaration of human rights.

In the 19th century, the abolitionists’ expanded vision of the nation’s founding document received a boost from another freedom movement, as the Declaration of Independence’s equality clause was quoted by numerous women’s rights campaigners. In July 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton famously affirmed in the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”

But many Americans still clung to the more conservative view of the Declaration and the Revolution. They said the Continental Congress had not initiated an experiment in equality but merely broken things off with Britain. And during the 1850s, these conservatives made their move. Most egregiously, the Supreme Court, in 1857 s Dred Scott v. Sandford, took away free Blacks’ citizenship, saying they possessed “no rights which a white man was bound to respect.”

But the enslavers’ capture of the federal government led to the creation of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860, southern secession, the Civil War, and finally the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, abolishing slavery and granting civil rights to African-Americans.

The Supreme Court took another giant leap backward in 1896, when it legalized segregation. But in the ensuing decades, civil rights groups tirelessly campaigned for the same egalitarian vision of the American Revolution that had animated Americans seeking to end slavery and establish women’s rights.

In 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously voted to end school segregation. Freedom fighters soon achieved other successes like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and, in 1972, Title IX.

These victories took far too long. But they inspire hope in a time of despair. The current Supreme Court reads the Constitution selectively, ignoring the Ninth and 10th Amendments, which say the rights enumerated in the Constitution are not the only ones we get. We have natural rights: to control our bodies, stay safe and breathe clean air. If Americans head back to the streets, the courts and the polls, they can once again pull the Supreme Court back toward Lemuel Haynes’ liberating vision of our nation and its Revolution.