What We’re Celebrating
People we’ve never met or known because they lived so long before us wrote the greatest literature in our language, or any language. We go around every day talking about liberty and equality but are indifferent to those who long ago struggled and improvised and persevered to assure we might have the luxury of taking those historic principles for granted.
Two things are essential to know about our history: it is human, and it is about imperfect people. Just as we don’t know how things are going to evolve, neither did those people who voted for American independence on July 2, 1776 and approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 to explain to the world and for all time what they were doing, and why.
In 2026, Americans and people around the world will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In a time of contention and uncertainty, we may profit from a new look at what inspired our founders, how their principles sustained later generations here and abroad, and what meaning we can still draw from a rich history of a people with boundless creative energy, fundamental decency, and an inspired confidence in meeting challenges that threaten to rob us of our dignity and purpose.
Knowing Who We Are
“All honor to Jefferson” wrote Abraham Lincoln on the eve of the American Civil War in 1858. All honor to the man “who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.”
Like the other men who approved and signed their names to the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson was no superhuman. Every one of them had flaws and weaknesses. They were young and idealistic and none had any experience in revolution or nation building. The oldest—George Washington—was 44; Jefferson was 33 when he wrote the first draft of the Declaration; John Adams was 40; and Benjamin Rush was 30. They had no money, no navy, no trained army and there was no bank in the entire country. It was a country of 2.5 million including 500,000 black men, women and children who were enslaved and considered chattel, to be bought and sold without regard to their persons much less any civil rights. In fact, black slavery was an accepted part of life in all 13 original colonies. In Virginia alone, there were 200,000 black slaves. A third of all the members of the Continental Congress that approved the Declaration owned or had owned slaves. Jefferson owned an estimated 200 slaves in 1776; Washington owned approximately the same number. John Dickinson of Philadelphia owned eleven slaves; even Benjamin Franklin had personally traded in slaves. The president of the Congress, John Hancock, had only recently freed the last of his slaves. But Benjamin Rush, John Adams, Sam Adams, and others had long taken aggressive stands against slavery and the slave trade. None were particularly solicitous about the welfare of Native Americans.
Despite these sins and flaws, particularly egregious from our distance in time, the most emotional and eloquent lines of the Declaration that would stand through the centuries and endure today were written by Jefferson:
“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.”
Down the years from July 1776, those words would impact the human spirit and nearly every national movement for independence, including the French, Mexican, Hungarian, Italian, Indian, Vietnamese, and Chinese. At the heart of the appeal is the notion derived from seventeenth century English theorists (especially Thomas Hobbes and John Locke) that there is a social compact or contract uniting all people, regardless of race, religion or social rank. This notion was expanded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to include women, and in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, to persons of diverse sexual persuasion. Liberty in this political and ethical understanding is not based on divine or natural causes, but in the “ownership” of one’s person. A fundamental equality is derived from this unique definition of liberty, for where it is codified every person is fundamentally more equal to others, than all the respects in which they may differ. Up to July 4, 1776, every human who had ever lived was a “subject” of some lord, priest, or potentate. In a steadily evolving manner, since July 4, 1776, human beings have increasingly become “citizens” with equality in their franchise and legal rights.
However, just as a theoretical cohesion has evolved based upon political and legal liberties more equally administered, individual liberty survives in market economies only when there is equal opportunity. Governments at all levels across the planet today struggle to support such opportunities without recourse to exclusion or war. Avoiding an “equality of insecurity” is the order of the day.
The Mystic Chords
In a speech in Chicago in July, 1858, Abraham Lincoln tried to explain the enduring significance of the Declaration of Independence. He stated that the Declaration’s assertion of the “self-evident” truth that all are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” gave the nation a goal to seek and an ideal to realize. He and most of his Northern political contemporaries did not believe the enforcement of equal rights should follow as fast as the articulation of those rights, but they did believe the Declaration encouraged the “progressive improvement in the condition of all men everywhere.”
Lincoln knew that by the middle of the nineteenth century, barely half of all Americans could claim to be descendants of the Founders or the generation they originally inspired. Still, he argued, those who had come from Europe, from the West Indies, from Africa and from South America and settled in this country were still part of us and shared in the essential right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This was “a standard maxim for free society” in his eyes. “It should be familiar to all, and revered by all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, . . . and therefore constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors.” If we apply the principles the founders pronounced in 1776 to all, Lincoln reasoned, then every person could claim to be “blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote the Declaration. That is 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.”
When the Civil War erupted after Southern secession in 1861, Lincoln was aware that the “job” was no longer to preserve and hand down what the revolutionary founders in 1776 had created. In his Gettysburg Address in November 1863, delivered at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery, he was aware that they had not accomplished the political equality they professed. The “new birth of freedom” at the end of his address was the “great task remaining.” It was the same work, always being done, and making all its proponents the inheritors of the nation’s permanent ideal. But, more important, it was the new work of intentionally swelling the chorus of union with people who had never been accorded a path to equal justice before the law.
On New Year’s Day, 1942, in the wake of the Pearl Harbor catastrophe, as America joined the allies fighting the tyrannies that had engulfed the entire world, President Franklin Roosevelt and his important visitor, Winston Churchill, drove from Washington through the countryside of Virginia to lay a wreath on Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon. On their journey, the two world leaders talked about forming an alliance to meet the problems of the world at war as well as a future peace. There were no recordings of their full conversation, but the reported theme was that “all people who believe in democracy” should be included in whatever organization presided over the hoped-for peace. Their talk followed a declaration of unity and purpose that they and representatives of twenty-six nations at war with Germany, Japan and Italy had crafted in the last week of December, 1941. The freedoms the latter-day declaration espoused were explained to the American people in Roosevelt’s State of the Union speech on January 6, 1941: freedom of speech and expression; freedom of worship; freedom from want; and freedom from fear.
Only twenty years later, another representative of that “greatest generation” that fought the Second World War, John F. Kennedy, stood at a rostrum in Washington and delivered his first inaugural address. He began by stating that “we dare not forget today that we are the heirs of (the) first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans . . . unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.” In that address, he famously challenged all Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
We ask today, after the “greatest generation” is fast being lost to our families and our nation, what is our duty? How do we serve the cause of freedom and equality?
The Way Ahead
Ten days before Jefferson died, he penned some notes on the approaching 50th anniversary of his Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1826. He wrote: “May it be to the world what I believe it will be . . .the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government . . . The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them.” On July 4, 1826, Jefferson died. On the same day, John Adams died.
In the last decade of their lives, Jefferson and Adams carried on a remarkable correspondence that supplanted an estrangement fueled by harsh political disagreements from the early 1800s until they were both long in retirement. In that correspondence, the two old revolutionaries—"the North and South Poles of the American Revolution” in Benjamin Rush’s view—worried that no one who had not been present in the tumultuous 1770s could appreciate what had been at stake, and the momentous meaning behind their words.
“Who can write the history of the American Revolution?” Adams asked. “Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?”
“Nobody,” Jefferson answered, “except perhaps its external facts.”
We know from Adams’s foremost biographer, David McCullough, that he did reveal a way to appreciate and understand the enduring meaning of the Declaration and the age that bore it: “We can deserve it,” he said.
How? First, we can be known by being capable of rising to the occasion with the courage of our convictions. Second, in our resolve, we should resist the hubris of the present which assumes that everything we think and do is the ultimate or best. We should beware of looking down on our forebears for failing to see errors and omissions that subsequent years have revealed to us all. People in our future will almost certainly think we should have known and done better.
Third, we should read and discuss our history in this time and every era. There is no secret to making history interesting. It’s our story; we need to tell the remarkable stories of our past. And encourage teachers of history with enthusiasm for the subjects they cover. History isn’t something that ought to be read and taught as a body of knowledge, but because it will make us more thoughtful and understanding human beings. History should not be, as one sage opined, “one damn thing after another.”
In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. defined an America that “guaranteed unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to its citizens.
Though the nation had “defaulted on this promissory note insofar as its citizens of color are concerned,” King said, the declaration still offered him hope: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.”
In his second inaugural address in 2013, President Barack Obama put a finer point on this dream. “What binds this nation together,” he said, “is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional -- what makes us American -- is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:
“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.”
“Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.”