A250: The Declaration’s Promise

-This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It also appears in the May/June issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

Following the trauma of the American Civil War, Walt Whitman published “Democratic Vistas,” a tough but ultimately optimistic appraisal of America’s democratic promise. In it, Whitman reminisced about the nation’s founding and the echoes of the past from his youth: “The old men, I remember as a boy, were always talking of American independence. What is independence?”

Throughout the work, Whitman explores this question as well as the social and political fissures that needed to be traversed after the war. Amidst that wreckage, Whitman held firm to his belief in the United States’ adherence to a democratic ideal and to the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration gathers the political thought borne of the Enlightenment and combines it with the activism of the American revolutionaries. It emphasizes ideas such as freedom of speech and religion and equality between people. Those principles redounded in surprising ways throughout the nation’s history from the 18th century to the 21st. This is the major theme of the LIbrary’s new exhibit, opening tomorrow, based on the language and ideals of the document itself: “The Declaration’s Promise: A Revolutionary Idea.”

The American Revolution served as the crucible and the Declaration the deliberate expression through which British colonists transformed themselves into American citizens. The Declaration was at once within the tradition of English subjects submitting petitions of grievance toward the British crown and Parliament and without it, since it went beyond demands for reform and instead declared independence.

The new nation’s government established its foundation upon John Locke’s ideas regarding political legitimacy: “consent of the governed” and “unalienable” natural rights, “life, liberty,” and in the American interpretation, “the pursuit of happiness” rather than “property,” which had rounded out Locke’s trio of liberties. Locke had borrowed, too, the idea of “pursuit of happiness” from the work of Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, “Natural liberty is the right nature gives to all mankind … most convenient to their happiness,” and others.

In addition to channeling Enlightenment philosophy through an American lens, some members of the Continental Congress conveyed the political ideas of their constituents and drew upon declarations passed by localities. As Danielle Allen has noted in her reading of the document, it took “rivers of talk for Jefferson’s words to become the ‘unanimous’ Declaration of the colonies.” Through the Declaration, the nation enacted a real political movement and the modern world’s first democracy, thereby serving as a collective expression, not simply a treatise by elites.

Moving from the crown’s subjects to the nation’s citizens, as demonstrated by Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration on display in the exhibit, marked only one aspect of the Declaration’s revolutionary nature.

The idea of religious freedom permeated debates for many Americans. Moses Seixas, writing in August 1790 on behalf of his Rhode Island Hebrew congregation, appealed to President George Washington to ensure a “Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance … .” Washington’s response, that all Americans possess “liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” furthered the nation’s devotion to religious liberty, emphasizing the need to move beyond “toleration … as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”

Jefferson’s copy of the Quran and an 1830 copy of the Book of Mormon, also on display, serve as further evidence of this American tradition established by the Declaration.

Yet promises made must be promises kept; the failure to uphold such agreements leads to disillusion and conflict. The nation’s failure to stamp out its most obvious violation of the Declaration’s ideals, the enslavement of Africans, stands as a stark example of this tension.

In their opposition to slavery, abolitionists vigorously adopted the Declaration’s ideals. Though not a radical abolitionist, former president and then congressman John Quincy Adams also opposed slavery. His argument before the Supreme Court in the 1841 Amistad case embodies the Declaration’s importance in abolitionism.

Over three dozen Mende people from what today is Sierra Leone mutinied against their Spanish enslavers aboard the ship Amistad, off the Connecticut coast. They appealed to U.S. officials for their freedom. In his oral arguments before the court, Adams wielded the document’s language and ideals as a rhetorical cudgel. He referenced the Declaration of Independence over a half dozen times and stopped at least twice to point to a copy of the Declaration displayed in the courtroom. The Declaration served as the North Star of the nation’s creed: “The moment you come, to the Declaration of Independence, that every man has a right to life and liberty, an inalienable right, this case is decided,” Adams told the court. The justices agreed, ruling 7-1 in favor of the captives.

The ways Americans used the Declaration as a framework for demanding rights and liberties is explored throughout the exhibit. In addition to abolitionism, this includes the push for women’s suffrage. The two movements were in dialogue in the 19th century — many suffragists worked in the abolitionist cause sharpening their rhetorical skills and organizing principles.

In her 1861 speech “What is American Slavery?” Susan B. Anthony cites the Declaration in her demand to abolish the “peculiar institution”: “It is the depriving four Million of native-born citizens of these United States, of their inalienable right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Abolitionists joined the suffrage cause as well, as demonstrated by Frederick Douglass, who campaigned for women’s right to the franchise and drew upon the language of the Declaration. In an 1886 speech, Douglass asserted that the “American doctrine of liberty is that governments derive their right to govern from the just consent of the governed; that taxation without representation is tyranny; and the founders of the Republic went so far as to say that resistance to tyrants is obedience to God. On these principles, woman, not less than man, has a right to vote.” Drawn from Anthony’s and Douglass’ papers, the speeches capture the pervasive nature of the Declaration’s ideals and those that sought to see them fulfilled.

Whitman also functions as a proverbial inflection and departure point in “The Declaration’s Promise.” Describing post-Civil War America as “canker’d,” Whitman reminds readers that the American people “of their own choice” fought and died for their own idea of a more just America. President Abraham Lincoln manifested a new vision of the Declaration’s promises of liberty and equality through his famous Gettysburg Address, given at the dedication of the military cemetery in Pennsylvania amidst the Civil War. The Nicolay copy of the speech also will be on view in the exhibit.

Lincoln’s oration served as philosophical inspiration, but it took the actions of abolitionists, freedmen and freedwomen, and all those who sacrificed their lives in the war to ensure a more just nation.

The Petition of Citizens of South Carolina, preserved in the Justin Morrell Papers and displayed in the exhibit, is a nearly 55-foot document signed in 1865 by over 3,000 Black South Carolinians, including many freedmen and freedwomen. They appealed to the U.S. Congress for voting rights to secure other fundamental liberties. Citing their loyalty during the war, they requested in writing that Congress not “sanction any state government which refused to grant the franchise to citizens otherwise qualified in common course of American law, without distinction of Color — Without this political privilege we will have no security for our personal rights and no means to secure the blessings of education to our children.”

While Lincoln’s message was transformative over time — aided by the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments —Reconstruction failed to ensure equality for African Americans. Jim Crow and Black Codes passed by Southern legislatures after Reconstruction descended upon them across the South while the North imposed less codified but nonetheless racially discriminatory policies.

What to make of such discrepancies? Turning to Whitman again, his poem “Song of Myself” from his classic work “Leaves of Grass,” unintentionally captures this tension, which he explored in greater detail in “Democratic Vistas:” “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” The Declaration and American history, though intertwined, remain as contradictory and multitudinous as Whitman.

Although the exhibit focuses primarily on the 18th and 19th centuries, it does explore aspects of the Declaration’s influence in the 20th, most notably during the Civil Rights Movement and the 1963 March on Washington. In speeches that day, John Lewis appealed to the crowd to “get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation … until the Revolution of 1776 is complete,” and Martin Luther King Jr. directly referenced the Declaration’s “creed:” “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

If the 19th-century abolitionist movement raised the consciousness of women toward their promised rights, the civil rights movement inspired feminist, Native American, environmental, disability rights and LGBTQ+ activists in the 20th. For example, beginning in 1964, homophile leader Frank Kameny began holding “Reminder Day” demonstrations in Philadelphia on July 4 to remind Americans that LGBT rights were included within the Declaration’s promise. Citizens, he wrote, were entitled to their own “pursuit of happiness” yet “upon pain of severe punishment by the criminal law and the harshest sanctions by society around him, the homosexual American citizen finds himself denied this ‘unalienable right.’”

Kameny’s demands seemed audacious at the time, perhaps even haughty to some, but today are largely acknowledged as just. The movement’s demands represent the influence the Declaration has projected throughout American history. Much as Whitman celebrated “the haughty defiance of ’76,” at the nation’s 250th anniversary, Americans still honor the Declaration’s spirited promises of liberty.

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