Jefferson’s centuries-old Declaration has held up well

This column appeared on the July 4, 1968, combined Editorial page of The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson was a writer, not a speaker. The Virginian had been silent in Congress but in committee his “prompt, frank, explicit and decisive” qualities attracted the attention of John Adams. And the power of his pen had been noted. So he and Adams were appointed to draft a Declaration of Independence. Adams insisted Jefferson do it alone.

“You can write 10 times better than I can,” Adams said. Jefferson’s draft, on the whole, pleased Adams. He especially liked the vehement philippic against Negro slavery which Jefferson had written into the Declaration.

“I know his Southern brethren would never suffer (it) to pass Congress,” Adams said. They didn’t. One of the most brutal civil wars in history would have to settle that issue a century later because Jefferson’s fellow Southerners lacked his foresight.

In all, Congress chopped off about a quarter of the Declaration Jefferson had written before passing it on July 4, 1776. With a heavy hand, congressmen changed such graceful words as “inalienable” to the prosaic “unalienable.”

“They obliterated some of the best of it,” Adams noted, “and left all that was exceptionable, if anything in it was.”

One thing in it that Adams didn’t like was Jefferson’s characterization of King George III as a tyrant. “I thought this too personal ... too much like scolding,” Adams said. To him, the king had seemed “only cruel.”

“There is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before,” Adams said.

The document, in truth, was a statement more of old truths than of novel theories. Much of it was drawn from the writings of John Locke.

But Jefferson’s passion, idealism and gift of expression brought a flame of new life to the old verities and made this Declaration the prime document of American nationhood and a guiding lamp for world revolutions to this day:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.”

Jefferson’s unheeded warning against Negro enslavement still haunts the republic. The issue led within one century to an effort to abolish the government he proclaimed, and now nearly two centuries later it still is the principal — and worsening — point of stress in the national structure. A Southerner’s words gave a great nation its title deed. Better if Congress had adopted all of them.

It still can.