American Scripture

1. “Spreading the News”

John Hancock was responsible for informing residents of every state that Congress had chosen Independence. In a letter to George Washington, Hancock requested that the general tell his troops about the Declaration of Independence in any way he saw fit. Hancock said much the same thing in letters to every state government. Most Americans received the Declaration’s text through public recitations—the method Washington chose. The Declaration liberated the armed forces from their loyalty to George III and motivated them to fight the British.

Americans in major cities expressed their joy at being free of King George with celebrations and rituals including firing guns and cannons, lighting bonfires, and destroying signs and images of the King. State governments ordered public readings of the Declaration in rural areas, where the recipients reacted similarly to the city-dwellers. Newspapers and printers disseminated the document as well, sometimes upon the orders of a government authority.

2. “An All-But-Forgotten Testament”

While Independence was cause for celebration, the Declaration itself was not—to Americans during and immediately after the war, it was simply a document whose function was consistent with English political history. There was some confusion about which date would be Independence Day: July 2, the day Congress approved Independence, or July 4, when Congress signed the Declaration. The following year, July 4 was chosen as the official Independence Day.

Independence Day celebrations weren’t widespread during the war or for decades after. Americans didn’t read the Declaration publicly on Independence Day between 1776 and the late 1780s. The Declaration was seen as a political document, not an artifact; it fulfilled its function in 1776, after which it had no further use. No one praised the document for its eloquence or Thomas Jefferson for drafting it. The one contemporary opinion Maier found was a speech delivered by a Member of Parliament, John Wilkes, in the House of Commons. Wilkes supported the Americans’ cause, and in his speech, he defended the Declaration after an anti-American MP criticized its syntax. Wilkes admired the Declaration’s unpolished style because it showed Americans’ indifference to elevated prose, which exemplified their forthright character (162).

The Declaration of Independence acquired a constitutional function after the first anniversary of its signing because it marked the end of an old regime and, according to John Hancock, laid “‘the Ground and Foundation of a future Government’” (162-63). Individual states drafted and adopted constitutions that included their own declarations, which sometimes partially repeated Congress’s Declaration. However, even this influence was limited. Historian Philip F. Detweiler studied the Declaration’s reputation during the 50 years following its signing, and he found that the document did not influence the language of eight states’ constitutions and bills of rights. The Declaration of Independence wasn’t a bill of rights because it didn’t enumerate the rights that the government must uphold. Instead, it adapted the first part of the English Declaration of Rights, which stated specific reasons for overturning a king’s regime. The Declaration of Independence has been confused with a bill of rights because it refers to “unalienable rights,” an idea that Jefferson borrowed from a draft of Virginia’s Declaration of Rights. George Mason authored the draft, and a Virginia convention committee revised it; their draft contained an adaptation of the second part of the English Declaration of Rights (165-66).

Many state bills of rights show that the Mason/Virginia committee draft was more influential than either the Declaration of Independence or Virginia’s adopted Declaration of Rights. The state bills of rights that descended from the Mason/committee draft included some variation on the draft’s claim “‘that all men are born equally free and independant [sic], and have certain inherent natural rights […]’ [Italics added]” (165). Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, for instance, were drafters of state bills of rights—Pennsylvania and Massachusetts respectively—and they both adapted the Mason/Virginia committee draft’s language about equal rights and what those rights entailed. Maier inserts a diagram entitled, “The Declaration of Independence: A Family Tree,” which places the English Declaration of Rights of 1689 at the top, then shows which American documents descend from the first part of the English Declaration and which from the second part (166).

The tree includes the French National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, which didn’t borrow from Congress’s document, although the French thought highly of the Declaration of Independence. The French Declaration of Rights was more akin to the state-level declarations and bills of rights, except in one respect: The National Assembly didn’t want to end France’s regime and replace it, or to encourage citizens to overthrow the government—the country was already experiencing unrest, and France, unlike England and the States, didn’t have a political history of placing the people’s rights above those of the government. The National Assembly therefore named a limited number of rights and included a list of the citizens’ duties—this attempt at incorporating some American political principles into the existing government would eventually fail. There were parts of the text that mirrored the Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights because while he resided in France, Benjamin Franklin promoted the document he drafted for his state more than the document he helped Thomas Jefferson draft for Congress.

The Declaration began to take on greater public significance as its authorship came into dispute. For the first 15 years after Congress adopted and signed the Declaration of Independence, the document was neither essential to American politics nor the histories of the American Revolution or the new Republic. Thomas Jefferson wasn’t lauded for drafting the document, and his correspondence contained few references to it between 1776 and 1791, except for two letters Maier designates as important. In the first letter, on August 29, 1787, Jefferson wrote to the editor of a Parisian journal that credited John Dickinson with Congress’s adoption of Independence. Jefferson wished to correct the error, but he never sent the letter. In the second letter, dated July 4, 1789, Americans visiting Paris wrote to Jefferson recognizing him as the author of the Declaration and praising his writing style as elegant and powerful. The praise, so different from that of John Wilkes, foreshadows the next phase in the Declaration’s reputation.

3. “A Partisan Document”

In the last decade of the 18th century, as the new Republic’s two political parties—the Federalists and the Republicans—squabbled over America’s relationship with Great Britain, “[t]he modern reputation of the Declaration of Independence was born” (170). The Federalist Party, which included John Adams, sought an economically beneficial relationship with Great Britain, and they tried to suppress any mention of the Declaration for fear of damaging that relationship.

Republicans, by contrast, continued to distrust Great Britain and wanted Americans to remember the cause for Independence. They were the first Americans to praise the Declaration not just for what it accomplished but for its rhetoric: They believed it expressed the country’s founding ideals and identified what the government’s responsibilities to citizens should be. Republicans printed the Declaration and wrote accolades to Jefferson—a leader of the Republican Party—for specific passages, even though the passages they cited were the ones Jefferson took from George Mason. Federalists criticized Republicans’ praise of Jefferson by pointing out that the Declaration was a collaborative work and that Jefferson’s contributions weren’t original.

The Federalist Party diminished after the War of 1812 ended; a new party system emerged in the 1820s and 1830s: the Whigs and the Jacksonians. Both parties’ members claimed to be political descendants of Jefferson’s party, thus perpetuating Republican reverence for the Declaration and for Jefferson as its primary author. Federalist skepticism still existed, but it didn’t end the ritual readings of the Declaration on the Fourth of July every year.

Jefferson’s Republican position triumphed over Adams’s Federalist view concerning the Declaration’s function in American culture and politics; by 1819, the Declaration’s language was beloved enough for Americans to argue about who wrote its phrases first. Concerns about the Declaration’s authorship coincided with a growing cultural interest in authorship more broadly. European and American culture in the early 19th century began to prize individual creativity over “imitation and adaptation” (174). Younger generations heroized revolutionaries and started to canonize the Declaration. Their enthusiasm reached a peak on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of Congress signing the Declaration.

4. “Sacred Text”

In January 1817, John Adams lamented the public’s indifference to the Revolution in a letter to the painter John Trumbull. One month later, Congress offered Trumbull a commission: a series of four paintings depicting major events from the Revolution, which would hang in the Capitol Rotunda. The most popular painting was The Declaration of Independence (1818).

Copies of the document itself sold well around this time. Between 1819 and 1826, there were a slew of books about revolutionaries, the Declaration, and events from the Revolutionary War. Before this period, Americans were busy fighting wars, forming the government, and making the country safe and stable. When the War of 1812 ended, they found themselves free, for the first time, to contemplate the recent history of the country’s founding with their full attention. With the revolutionary generation aging and relevant documents deteriorating, American archivists and historians had catching up to do.

The heroization of the revolutionaries became commonplace as the country’s population grew and prospered. Americans believed their good fortune was a direct consequence of Independence, so they felt the need to record and “perpetuate the values of the Revolution” (178). President James Monroe and Congress honored a specific revolutionary—they invited the Marquis de Lafayette to tour the United States in 1824. There were souvenirs commemorating his visit and displays of artifacts from the Revolution. Revolutionary War veterans participated in parades regularly until the 1850s. As the population of revolutionaries steadily diminished, Americans worried that future generations wouldn’t feel a connection with the Revolution and its heroes, which meant that historical records, locations, and artifacts from the Revolution became essential reminders of the war for Independence.

Those two opposing forces of the Revolution, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, disagreed about how Americans should recall the war. Jefferson promoted the public’s glorification of their revolutionary past, whereas Adams balked at it—he associated the worship of revolutionary figures with Roman Catholicism, which he, a descendant of Puritans, abhorred. Despite their political differences, Adams and Jefferson corresponded regularly from 1812 until their deaths. They shared memories and discussed news about their former colleagues from the Second Continental Congress. Jefferson understood the desire of younger Americans to meet the nation’s heroes—although his celebrity status caused him many annoyances—and he chose to influence the Declaration’s reputation. In fact, Jefferson had been influencing the document’s reputation for decades; he was the person who gave John Trumbull the idea to paint the Declaration’s signing during a meeting in Paris in the late 1780s. He also influenced a printing of the document when the printer requested his advice. A notable piece of Jefferson’s advice was his recommendation to make John Adams a prominent figure in the engravings since Adams was a fierce promoter and defender of the Declaration.

There are other examples of Jefferson disseminating his memories of the Revolution, the most prominent of which was his account of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s recollections were full of inaccuracies, but Maier excuses this by claiming he got details wrong because his memories were “sharpened and shaped by the contexts in which they [were] awakened” (183). Jefferson didn’t intentionally seek all the credit for drafting the Declaration, though he did receive it. John Adams resented Jefferson’s fame since it was based on half-truths. Jefferson received widespread praise for the document’s style, while its substance—for which Adams should have been credited—went largely ignored. Adams looked to the future and worried there would be social consequences to the mythologizing of the revolutionaries; he concluded that “[p]atriotic mythology would more likely prevail and undercut the self-confidence of young Americans who had, in fact, far more talent than the generation of 1776” (184).

Jefferson’s pride in the Declaration comforted him late in his life, as the young nation became more fractious. He worried about his legacy, and whether his existence had benefited the country. He accomplished a great deal after the Revolution, but by 1826 he narrowed his legacy to three achievements he wanted on his tomb: He was the author of the Declaration and Virginia’s statute for religious freedom, and he was the founder of the University of Virginia (186). Maier notes that Jefferson now uses the word “author” rather than “drafter” to describe his role, and that he thought the Declaration was his highest achievement. Jefferson claimed it was an instrument Americans should cherish, and the republication of its facsimile in 1824 was evidence “‘of reverence for that instrument, and […] a pledge of adhesion to its principles and of a sacred determination to maintain and perpetuate them,’ which he described as a ‘holy purpose’” (186). The religious terminology in Jefferson’s statement is unusual, for he had never mixed religion with politics, yet he wanted to endow religious significance onto the Declaration and all the people, objects, and locations associated with it. He thought the preservation of objects and places from the Revolution would keep the revolutionaries’ principles fresh in Americans’ minds.

There was evidence in the 1820s that the American Revolution inspired revolutions in Europe and Latin America, but most attempted republics were short-lived. John Adams blamed Roman Catholicism, which was the dominant religion in those countries; he believed there couldn’t be free government where people adhere to Roman Catholicism. In a letter to Adams, Jefferson expressed his belief that the struggle for liberty around the world would eventually end in success and that the United States would continue to lead by example. He anticipated the triumph of science, reason, and freedom over tyranny. On July 4, 1826, Jefferson died on Independence Day—a day that by then had become a celebration of his legacy.

5. “Equality and Rights”

In the decades after Jefferson’s death, the Declaration became a quasi-sacred document, and Americans used its language to argue for the expansion of rights to disenfranchised citizens. The most prominent political figure to cite the Declaration in debates was Abraham Lincoln, whose interpretation of the document’s statement “that all men are created equal” transformed the Civil War into a moral fight to uphold the revolutionaries’ vision for the country.

Maier’s story of this era begins with the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration. Their simultaneous deaths on that particular day convinced eulogists that God had a special interest in the United States’s future. Commentators discussed the country’s past in language that Maier describes as reminiscent of Catholic rites, even though these commentators were Protestants who admired Jefferson’s many critiques of the Catholic religion. Maier argues that Protestant theology offered no language with which to elevate people and documents to quasi-divine status, and that 19th-century commentators thus fell back on the language of Catholicism despite their Protestant beliefs.

Revolutionaries became saints, and their homes became shrines—Americans would make pilgrimages to visit the hallowed houses. John Adams became the great defender and advocate for Thomas Jefferson’s inspired Declaration, the holy document that “embodied the principles of liberty” (190). Those principles included the statement that “all men are created equal,” followed by the principles of self-government and a government’s responsibilities to the governed. The principle of equality, as outlined in the Declaration, became the focus of post-Revolution generations; some of them believed the principle should apply to everyone. The principle of the people’s right to revolution was overshadowed by American society’s interest in the issue of human equality.

Maier emphasizes that equality as a social and political issue didn’t begin with interpretations of the Declaration of Independence in the 1820s. While state and local declarations defined equality differently, the underlying understanding was that equality applied primarily only to white men.

It was unusual in the 19th century to use the Declaration to support the pursuit of equality, since the document’s original function was to announce that the United States was separating from Britain. Declarations of rights or bills of rights were the usual documents in which Americans could find the principles the government must uphold; additionally, these documents had legal authority in the courts. Some state and local documents adapted George Mason’s words about equality from his draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, just like the Declaration of Independence, and advocates for human equality cited those documents in state-level debates. During the Virginia Convention in June 1776, Mason’s description of equality in his draft Declaration of Rights made Convention members uneasy, since Virginia’s economy relied on enslaved labor. A committee’s revised version of Mason’s draft made it possible for them to claim equality, but only for white Virginians.

In the early 1780s, enslaved people in Massachusetts won their freedom by arguing that the state’s bill of rights, which asserts that “all men were born free and equal,” made enslavement illegal. A Massachusetts justice in the 1836 case Commonwealth v. Aves ruled that the principle should end enslavement in the state altogether (193). Still, Maier points out that “not all states had bills of rights, and those that existed did not always assert the natural equality of men or mention their inalienable rights”; furthermore, “the federal Bill of Rights was a sorry specimen, […] with no assertion of fundamental revolutionary principles” (194). Citizens who wanted to effect policy changes based on revolutionary principles couldn’t look to the Constitution or the Bill of Rights for textual support, not if they were going to make those changes at the national level. They only had the revolutionary Declaration of Independence to support their arguments.

The sanctification of the Declaration after 1815 proved useful to activists of all kinds because it gave their arguments greater moral weight than those of their political opponents. Emancipation advocates found the Declaration’s language helpful in political debates, but the complete ending of enslavement took many decades to achieve, no matter how much authority the sacred document seemed to possess.

The Declaration provided a solid foundation for positions on equality. William Lloyd Garrison, a hardline Abolitionist, condemned the hypocrisy of Americans reading the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July, recalling British tyranny, when enslaved people were enduring worse at the hands of those same Americans. He, along with other “radical Abolitionists did not, however cite the Declaration as a would-be bill of rights—the ‘unalienable rights’ it affirmed were universal, they said, and needed no documentary embodiment […]” (198-99). Later in his life, Garrison and a colleague proclaimed they wanted to live by the ideals expressed in the Declaration, and that could only happen after the people destroyed the current iteration of the United States.

Other anti-slavery activists and politicians proclaimed that the Declaration of Independence supported their position, while pro-slavery Southern politicians either repudiated the document or promoted their interpretations of what the revolutionary authors really meant. Maier posits that the debaters’ arguments about the Declaration’s meaning “served to reinforce the Declaration’s status as a national icon” even as they disagreed about what this icon signified (199).

Maier focuses on a battle of ideas between Abraham Lincoln and Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. In 1854, Douglas proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would allow states to decide whether they would permit enslavement; Lincoln criticized the Act and attacked Douglas over it. Lincoln ran for Douglas’s senate seat in 1858 as a member of the new Republican Party, and the two rivals formally debated over whether the continuance of enslavement was consistent with the values of the revolutionaries and the Declaration of Independence. Douglas argued that the Declaration’s signers hadn’t meant to include any group other than European men in the statement on equality. Douglas reasoned that the signers would have freed their enslaved people if they truly believed all men were equal, so the assertion that the signers saw enslaved Black people as their equals made them look like hypocrites.

In his rebuttal, Lincoln noted the Declaration’s claim that “no man could govern another without his consent” (204). To deny the truth of human equality was, by extension, to deny the signers’ faith in republicanism. Lincoln argued, à la William Lloyd Garrison, that pro-slavery Americans were to enslaved people what the British monarchy had been to the revolutionaries. He chided Douglas for dismissing the Declaration’s significance, thus denying the connections Americans felt with the revolutionaries’ principles. Lincoln insisted that the Declaration was a promise of what could be possible for all Americans and, indeed, for all humanity, whereas Douglas preferred to limit the document’s usefulness to the past. Lincoln also picked at Douglas’s logic: If he was correct about the signers’ maintenance of enslavement in their own states, it didn’t follow that new states had to allow it. To Lincoln, the Declaration was a guide for future generations, an expression of universal truths (205-06).

In Maier’s view, Douglas described the Revolution’s history more accurately than Lincoln did, “[b]ut Lincoln was the greater statesman” (206). While a new kind of revolution threatened to divide the Union, Lincoln characterized the Declaration of Independence as “a living document for an established society, a set of goals to be realized over time, and so an explanation […] of their victory in the War for Independence” (207). The document provided Lincoln with his sense of purpose during the Civil War: He was fighting not only to save the Union but to fulfill the Declaration’s promise of equal rights and opportunities. When the Union won victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, Americans believed, as they did upon the Fourth of July deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, that God was invested in the country’s future. President Lincoln marked the victories as confirmation of the truth in the Declaration’s statement on man’s equality—that November he expressed this view in his Gettysburg Address.

The Gettysburg Address became a sacred text in itself. Lincoln’s speech, like Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, expressed the thoughts of most Americans. He and his like-minded contemporaries didn’t try to redefine the Union’s history, but what they did with the Declaration was similar to what the revolutionaries did with the English Declaration of Rights, which was to take the document as it was and apply it to a new purpose. Maier concludes by reiterating her thesis—that the Declaration was and remains a collaborative effort given meaning through ongoing political debate: “The Declaration of Independence Lincoln left posterity […] was not and could not have been his solitary creation” (208). The Declaration is what Americans decide it should be: It expresses the revolutionaries’ ideas, yet it also expresses the values of new Americans who have different issues to address, thus “binding one generation after another in a continuing act of national self-definition” (208).