Does the Declaration of Independence still matter?

A few weeks ago, a group of academics launched the Centre for the United States of America at Cambridge (CUSAC). This University is home to one of the largest communities of scholars working on the US outside of the country itself.

With ever-deepening political polarisation gripping the US, CUSAC’s founders say that Cambridge offers a place to “reflect from a distance without choosing sides”.   

Here, some of CUSAC’s founders take a closer look at one of the most influential documents in history, as it turns 250 years old.

Professor Nicholas Guyatt

^{Professor of North American History / Jesus College}

Why was the Declaration of Independence important in its own historical moment?

It’s been 211 years since Britain and the United States were last at war, and it’s easy to lose sight of the origins of the Declaration of Independence in a desperate struggle between American colonists and their colonial parent.

Ironically, that struggle was in some ways a contest over which side was more authentically British: the colonists insisted that first the Westminster parliament, and then the King himself, had perverted the meaning of British liberty and betrayed the birthright of Britons who happened to be living on the other side of the Atlantic.

The King and his ministers, in turn, found the American claims to political equality intemperate, if not preposterous; and after each side had spent decades loosely imagining it knew the other, a reckoning and then a rupture occurred at alarming speed.

The Declaration mattered for many reasons; here I’ll mention only two. First, it claimed a right for the colonists of British America to leave the political community in which they had grown up, and presented that right as both natural and universal. There were vanishingly few precedents for this kind of nation-making, and the principle that a new political community could emerge from another – without the consent of its parent – presented a radical new way of structuring the world.

As our guests at the launch of the Centre for the United States of America at Cambridge (CUSAC), David Armitage and Eliga Gould, have argued, the sudden appearance of the United States “among the powers of the earth” suggested a radical new global geography that was national, rather than imperial.

But the Declaration also seeded the most famous phrase in American history – “all men are created equal” – into the founding document of the new United States. Moreover, the Declaration presented that claim as “self-evident” when, in the late eighteenth century, it was anything but. It matters that the author of those words, Thomas Jefferson, did not mean them to include the half-million Black people who suddenly found themselves living in an independent republic (more than 90% of them were enslaved).

But it matters more that Black and white reformers, from within weeks of July 4^th, 1776, mobilised those words to argue against slavery, in favour of racial equality, and later in support of numerous rights struggles which became perhaps the most important strand in the American story.

The Declaration was the work of a few frantic weeks in 1776, but its influence would be measured in centuries.

Professor Mia Bay

^{Paul Mellon Professor of American History / Jesus College}

What were the legacies of the Declaration for the United States and for the world?

Before 1776 was out, the preamble to the Declaration of Independence entered African-American political thought, figuring on the front page of the most detailed African-American consideration of the conflict.

Entitled “Liberty Further Extended”  that document is a manuscript composed 1776 by Lemuel Haynes, a mixed race young man who grew up in indentured servitude and had only recently achieved his own liberty when he committed his thoughts to paper.

Although unpublished and unknown until it was discovered in a University archive in 1983 by scholar Ruth Bogin, Haynes’ work did address the public. Copied in a fair hand, and formatted for submission to a printer, it addressed Haynes’ fellow Americans in a way that underscores how powerfully the Declaration of Independence resonated even among Americans more interested in freedom than independence.

A black critique of the limits of American independence, “Liberty Further Extended” makes strategic use of the Declaration. Although Haynes seems to have composed his antislavery manuscript before Declaration was issued, he inscribed the following familiar words on the front page of manuscript, directly beneath his title and signature, writing "We hold these truths to be self-Evident, that all men are created Equal, that they are Endowed By their Creator with Ceartain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happyness".

Haynes, whose own writing was not as polished as Jefferson’s,  invoked these word in support his “main proposition:” “That an African or, in other terms, that a Negro may Justly Challenge, and has an undeniable right to his [‘free(dom)’ is blotted out] Liberty: Consequently, the practice of Slave-keeping which so much abounds in this land is illicit.”

Willing to fight for those goals, Haynes had served with both the Massachusetts Minutemen and the Continental Army during the first year of conflict, and composed his treatise shortly after an illness cut his military career short.

In writing his treatise, he clearly hoped to redefine the goals of the liberation to include black freedom, as would the Revolutionary-era bondsmen and women who petitioned for freedom with reference the Declaration’s stirring preamble.

For Haynes, and the many other discontented Americans, the Declaration introduced a range of political possibilities beyond the freedom that could be offered by a king and a new language of rights and liberties that could be mobilized to secure freedoms not yet realized. American democracy depends on the struggles it helped unleash.

Professor Kasia Boddy

^{Professor of American Literature / Fitzwilliam College}

The Declaration of Independence as a literary touchstone

Since 1776, the Declaration of Independence has proved a touchstone for US writers, both as a rhetorical act and as a totemic object. Philip Roth often mentioned the framed replica that his father Herman was given by his employer, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Hanging in the hallway, it announced Herman’s feeling that, although the child of immigrants, he was ‘entirely a part of’ the United States.

Feeling entirely a part of the nation means feeling entitled to adopt the Declaration’s rhetoric to one’s own purposes. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘The American Scholar’ (1837) was quickly described as an ‘intellectual declaration of independence’ while Henry David Thoreau began his deliberate experiment in ‘recovered innocence’ at Walden Pond on the Fourth of July 1845. 

Ten years later, and unconvinced that there was any innocence to recover, Herman Melville imagined Israel Potter, a hero of Bunker Hill, returning to Boston after ‘fifty years exile’. He arrives on Independence Day and the first thing that happens is that he is nearly run over by ‘a patriotic triumphal car…flying a broidered banner’ celebrating ‘the heroes that fought’. In John Dos Passos’s The 42^nd Parallel (1930), a young man reciting the Declaration only gets as far as ‘the pursuit of happiness’ before the police decide to help him ‘move on’. And in Rabbit at Rest (1990), John Updike’s eponymous hero, faced with the imminent failure of his ‘typical American heart’, is given his last hurrah in an Uncle Sam costume at a July 4th parade. When passers-by ask him for directions, ‘he has to keep telling them he doesn’t know anything’. 

Each of these novelists is making a different point, but for all of them mentioning the Declaration – or the Fourth of July – is a quick way to evoke well-loved but temporarily forgotten American values. For those excluded from the start, however, another story emerges: that of the nation’s failure to redeem what Martin Luther King once called its ‘promissory note’. King was speaking in 1963 – by which time, he said, it was ‘obvious’ that, when it came to African Americans, the nation had ‘defaulted’ on that revolutionary promise. It had been obvious for a long time; indeed, as Mia Bay has noted, since the eighteenth century, the Declaration provided ‘a powerful and commonly accepted lingua franca’ for discussing the ‘Love of Freedom’ that made enslaved people so ‘impatient of Oppression’ (in Phillis Wheatley’s phrase).

In the decades that followed, this impatience only grew. In 1845, Frederick Douglass described his Narrative as having been written by ‘an American slave’, terms which, according to the Declaration, should be understood as contradictory. That contradiction was made even clearer in the powerful oration Douglass gave on July fifth, 1852, decrying ‘your’ holiday as one whose ‘jubilee shouts’ only rendered the chains of the enslaved ‘more intolerable’.  Hypocrisy was a theme which many pursued. Ten years earlier, Charles Dickens described a Congress which forbade discussion of slavery, enforcing a ‘brazen muzzle’ on former president John Quincy Adams, while proudly exhibiting the Declaration, ‘gilded, framed and glazed…for general admiration’.  Dickens thought it should be turned to the wall in shame.

But what about more recent African American takes on the Declaration and its commemoration?  Ralph Ellison never failed to insist that Declaration was a ‘sacred’ document whose ideals simply needed to be ‘inspirited’ into ‘our own reality’.  But for Harpo, a character in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983), July 4th would always be a day for white people. And while they thought about their ‘independence from England’, at least ‘black folks’ had a day off to spend ‘celebrating each other’. 

I end with Tracy K. Smith, the 22^nd US Poet Laureate, who in 2017 decided to read the Declaration of Independence as a kind of poem, one in which she might find ‘some scrap of Jefferson’s voice.’  That listening led to her own ‘Declaration’. It’s an ‘erasure’ poem: that is, a poem that takes an existing text and erases many of its words to reveal a meaning that has been lurking within all along. The lines that Smith retains from the 1776 documents are those explaining the colonists’ grievances against George III:

He has plundered our—

                                                  ravaged our—

                                                                                destroyed the lives of our—

taking away our—

                                     abolishing our most valuable—


and altering fundamentally the Forms of our— 

By removing the original objects of these sentences – what has been plundered, ravaged, destroyed, taken away, abolished and altered fundamentally – Smith invites her readers to imagine other objects. Preserving phrases such as ‘the circumstances of our emigration / and settlement here’ and ‘taken Captive / on the high Seas / to bear’, she submits new ‘facts’ to a ‘candid world’. Smith thanks the text for ‘lending’ its language to her and her ‘entire race’. ‘This is what you seek, Jefferson seemed to say. Or, This is what you need to see.’

Dr Caroline Johnston

^{Mellon Research Fellow in American History / Christ's College}

Does the Declaration of Independence still matter?

The Declaration of Independence matters, in history, as a document that sets out a democratic goal for a people. It mattered to rights movements who resisted injustice, deploying it in the pursuit of equality. It matters to American institutions who use it to signal and command authority. The words are revolutionary, yet the stone they are etched upon insists that the revolution is over, that equality has arrived, or, if it has not, that it must be sought through the government that is.

Whether the Declaration matters today is not an easy question to answer. A broad swath of Americans seemingly reject its central claim–that all men are created equal–once the prevailing definition of “men” extends beyond limits they deem acceptable. Or, if they do believe in peoples’ equal worth, they do not pursue equality in turn.

Inequality of all stripes thrives in America today. The richest class continues to amass evermore staggering wealth while life grows more unaffordable for the rest. Monopolies and corruption go unchecked, since the government “has refused [its] Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” Measures of democracy, like journalistic freedom, academic freedom, civil liberties, and free and fair elections, are under attack as the federal government “[abolishes] our most valuable Laws, and [alters] fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.” ICE has rounded up and imprisoned a record number of immigrants in a growing network of unchecked detention sites. This armed paramilitary is “kept among us, in times of peace” while detainees have been “[deprived] in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.”

If the Declaration matters only insofar as Americans feel pressure to pursue a government with its principles in mind, then perhaps it is no longer significant by that metric. It remains, however, one example, among many, that a government can be rejected, that a revolution can succeed, and that new visions of freedom are possible.