The Declaration of Independence and the American Constitutional Conversation, 1776-1861

By Joseph Opp

Every year, more than one million visitors queue for over an hour to enter the rotunda at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Under its imposing dome and two brilliant murals — flanked by columns, flags, and uniformed security — are the ‘Charters of Freedom’: The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Taken in order, they are a tour through the intellectual history of the Early American Republic. Taken together with their surroundings and the manner of their display, they are a reminder that the visitor is standing at the altar in the cathedral of American liberty. These documents are the composite expression of a coherent theory of man’s nature, as well as the form of his political society. And they are the beating heart of a vast and powerful nation.

To contemporary Americans, the display of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights in the same ornate chamber makes intuitive sense. Each document expresses bedrock principles of American political society, and each plays a starring role in the dazzling history of the foundation of the American Republic. The Founding Generation, however, would have questioned the historical logic. The Declaration and the Constitution share only six signatures. While both documents were framed in the same room, eleven years apart, the Constitution was drafted under extraordinarily different political and intellectual circumstances. The Constitution creates a political order that rests on tested assumptions about how men behave and act in political society; the Declaration expresses the uniqueness of ‘the American Mind’ and proclaims the self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ Abraham Lincoln wrote shortly before his Inauguration in 1861 that the Declaration was the expression of ‘the principle of liberty to all.”’ Lincoln likened that principle to an ‘apple of gold,’ framed by the ‘picture of silver’ that was the Constitution. He argued that the ‘picture was made for the apple — not the apple for the picture.’ The development of the Declaration from a plain ‘statement of the American mind’ to a supra-constitutional, nation-defining document is the history of the United States between Independence and Civil War.

The synergy between the Declaration and the Constitution, ably articulated by Lincoln, was not obvious in 1787. The Declaration was viewed as a political artefact. Jefferson considered his draft a statement of basic principles, in essence already approved by Americans by 1776, deployed to the task of justifying the American Revolution. In 1783, that Revolution ended, and the exigencies of practical governance placed new demands on the Early Republic. The first attempt at a loose, confederal constitution for the United States was cripplied by its inability to corral the States into any sort of an effective compact and collapsed for want of centralized authority. In 1787, the Constitutional Convention was convened in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation. It emerged with a draft for an entirely new Constitution.

When Jefferson returned from France in 1789 to a newly constituted United States, two factors prevented his Declaration from receiving the plaudits it would later earn. Jefferson was immediately made the leader of a political faction, the Democratic-Republicans, formed out of distrust for Hamilton’s Federalist programme of expansive, centralised state power. These two factions split Washington’s Cabinet and the nation. Jefferson’s association with partisan politics made universal appreciation for his Declaration politically awkward. Compounding the difficulty, the Republic of France applied pressure on the new United States to materially support their regicidal (and eventually homicidal) revolution. The French Revolutionaries had justified a great deal of their mayhem (and much of their brilliance) in universalist sentiments about the equality of all mankind, natural right, and the justice of revolution against arbitrary government that had found their first felicitous expression in Jefferson’s Declaration. Federalists who proposed neutrality in France’s Revolutionary Wars in Europe downplayed the ideological overlap between the sister republics.

A more mature and considered audulation for the Declaration arrived in the early decades of the 19th Century, after Jefferson left the Executive Mansion in 1809 and peace on the American continent was restored with the Treaty of Ghent in 1814. The death of Jeffersonian partisanship and the collapse of the Federalist Party put distance between the Declaration of national imagination and the immediacy of early American politics. July 4 celebrations began to feature readings of the Declaration. In 1826, the fiftieth anniversary, John Trumbull’s famous painting The Declaration of Independence, toured the country and was installed in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol. That same year, on July 4, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died just hours apart. Jefferson’s final letter expressed his pride and honor that the Fourth of July had become a national holiday in earnest. He was confident that the Declaration had ignited a long historical process driving human political association toward universal freedom. ‘All eyes are opened or opening, to the rights of man.’

The rest of the 19th Century would test that assumption as the new United States began its long quarrel with the demon of slavery. On the road to the Civil War, the Declaration of Independence would serve as the battlefield of American moral argument in much the same way that the United States Constitution did for American legal argument. Advocates for abolition initially derided and rejected the Declaration as a basic hypocrisy. Advocates for slavery and Southern agrarianism rejected the Declaration’s universalism in equally blistering tones. John Calhoun called the proposition that all men are created equal a ‘dangerous error,’ a ‘self-evident lie,’ and an ‘illegitimate and misguided principle.’

Abolitionists — Lysander Spooner and Frederick Douglass, prominent among them – found firmer ground for their cause in arguing for the unconstitutionality of slavery on the basis that the universal egalitarianism of the Declaration functioned as an inviolable, moral bedrock of American law. The South contended that the Declaration had granted it a legitimate recourse — indeed, a right — to revolution. In Dred Scott v Sanford, Chief Justice Taney of the United States Supreme Court would rule that the Declaration of Independence’s ‘embrace of the whole human family’ could not reasonably have included enslaved Americans, as the Founders must have ‘perfectly understood the meaning of the language they used, […] they knew that it would not in any part of the civilized world, be supposed to embrace the negro race, which, by common consent, had been excluded from civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery.’ The forces of Union and Abolition contended that the Declaration demanded as a Constitutional question the establishment of a true universal equality in every American state. The South asserted that the Declaration superseded the Constitution and provided them recourse to violent revolution.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President without a single Southern ballot. He had campaigned on the promise of the Declaration. Lincoln made the Declaration central to his political cosmos. When he spoke of the Declaration, his rhetoric soared, ‘[…] something in that Declaration [gives] liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time […] [the] promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.’ He proclaimed ‘All Honor to Jefferson!” while strategically recasting the Declaration as a unionist document, removing any license the South may have found in the Declaration for a ‘right to revolution.’ Lincoln gave the Declaration its lustre of immortality at Gettysburg. In one of the finest uses of the English language in the history of rhetoric, Lincoln intoned the principles of the American founding, ‘‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal […] we here highly resolve […] that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’

Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox in 1865 was the deliverance of Lincoln’s America, where the principles of the Declaration are threaded into the fabric of the Constitutional order. When FDR inaugurated the Jefferson Memorial in 1943, he spoke of Jefferson, gesturing to the purpose of the Sage of Monticello in a world at war, ‘[Jefferson] proved that the seeming eclipse of liberty can well become the dawn of more liberty. Those who fight the tyranny of our own time will come to learn that old lesson.’ That lesson, borne of Revolution and tested, refined by America’s own violent trial of its founding principles on the battlefields of the Civil War, is a useful one for a nation and a world grappling with insecurities about the legitimacy of its ancient principles, with its sense of mission and decency, and with tyrannical adversaries who worship power and plan fiendishly to reverse the three hundred year advance of justice and liberty launched by the Declaration and its Constitution. We would do well to return now to our ‘self-evident truths’ and commit once again to defending our inheritance so that we can proclaim in our own time that ‘government by the people, for the people’ did not perish from the earth while in our trust.

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