The Dichotomy of Liberty

Over the past month, we have looked at the Declaration of Independence from many different angles.

Part 1 dealt with the mechanics of its creation. It showed how a group of men came together to produce a clear statement calling for independence. Through debate, compromise, and finally agreement, they put their case onto parchment and sent it into the world.

Part 2 looked at the counter-argument. The loyalist response was a rebuttal of the Declaration, but where the Declaration was clear and direct, its opponents buried their case in legal language and overwrought argument. They may have had valid points. Their approach ensured few would hear them.

Part 3 dealt with those who were left behind. They heard the words. They read the words. They noticed something others either failed to see or chose to ignore: the document did not apply to them. They were dismissed, and in some cases ridiculed, for believing the Declaration’s promise extended to their lives. Their independence was an afterthought, a byproduct of the independence the document actually called for.

Now we come to Part 4, the conclusion. The conception, birth, and growth of the Declaration is a story that does not end in 1776. The document has withstood challenges, survived arguments, been judged, been weaponized, and been used in ways the founders never imagined. For some, it remains the product of wealthy white men who wanted power for themselves. That is not the whole picture.

The Declaration is not an aspiration.

It is an inspiration.

The words still carry weight, and there are those who have always understood the intent behind them, who have used that intent as a model to remind us what the document’s core belief actually is: freedom. Strip away the hypocrisy. The intent remains. And many have spent their lives using that intent to give the document the meaning it was always capable of holding.

The men who created the Declaration of Independence could be both sincere believers in liberty and beneficiaries of systems that denied liberty to others.

That is the dichotomy at the center of the Declaration. It is also the reason the document remains so difficult to dismiss.

The Declaration of Independence is one of the most powerful political statements ever written. Its language has inspired revolutions, reform movements, abolitionists, suffragists, civil rights leaders, and generations of ordinary people who looked at the promises contained within its words and asked a simple question:

What about us?

But the men who wrote and adopted the Declaration were not detached philosophers writing from some morally perfect position outside the world they inhabited. They were politicians, lawyers, planters, merchants, landowners, diplomats, revolutionaries, and men with interests of their own. They believed in liberty. They also benefited from systems that denied liberty to others. They could sincerely oppose political tyranny while accepting social hierarchy. They could speak of natural rights while enslaving people. They could declare that governments derived their just powers from the consent of the governed while living in a society where most people had no meaningful political voice.

The temptation is to resolve that contradiction by deciding that one side must have been false. Either the ideals were sincere, or the men who proclaimed them were hypocrites. History rarely offers such clean choices. The same person can believe in an ideal and still fail to live up to it. A political movement can be motivated by genuine conviction and self-interest at the same time. A document can be created for immediate political purposes and still contain ideas that ultimately outgrow those purposes.

The Declaration of Independence was all of those things. But it was also something the men who wrote it may not have fully understood.

It was a call.

Not just a call for independence from Britain. A call for independence of thought, of belief, of action. A floor that every generation since 1776 has had to fight to raise. A promise that kept getting claimed by people it was never written for, who understood it better than the men who put their names to it.

That is what this series has been building toward.

The Declaration did not emerge from a quiet philosophical seminar.

By 1776, the colonies were at war with Great Britain. The Continental Army was struggling. Colonial governments were being reorganized. The possibility of reconciliation was rapidly disappearing. The question before Congress was not simply whether independence was philosophically desirable. It was whether the colonies could survive as an independent power.

John Adams understood this clearly. In May 1776, he described independence as part of a series of connected political necessities. The colonies needed to establish governments, form a confederation, seek foreign alliances, and then make a public declaration. He explicitly wrote that a declaration might be necessary in order to obtain a foreign alliance.1 A month later, Adams wrote that a declaration could “arouse and unite” the friends of liberty while answering objections that independence would simply strengthen Britain’s resolve.2 On July 3, 1776, the day before Congress adopted the Declaration, Adams wrote to Abigail that had independence been declared seven months earlier, the colonies might already have formed foreign alliances and made greater progress in the war.3

There is no reason to read these words as proof that Adams did not believe in independence. But they reveal something important: Adams was thinking about independence as a practical political act. The Declaration needed to persuade. It needed to rally. It needed to establish legitimacy. It needed to help transform thirteen rebellious colonies into a potential nation. The National Archives describes the Declaration as addressing multiple audiences: the king, the colonists, and the wider world. Its purposes included rallying support, seeking foreign allies, and announcing the creation of a new country.4

The Declaration was not merely an expression of political philosophy. It was also a weapon. The men who created it needed to convince the world that their rebellion was legitimate. That does not make its ideals false. It does mean that idealism and political calculation were operating together. Principle and self-interest are not always opposites. A person can believe deeply in liberty and also understand how liberty can serve his political interests.

The difficult question is what happens when the ideals become broader than the interests that helped create them. The Declaration answers that question. Just not in the way its authors intended.

Benjamin Franklin offers a useful example of how complicated the road to independence actually was.

Franklin did not begin as an inevitable revolutionary. Before independence became the goal, he spent years trying to define a constitutional relationship between Britain and the American colonies. In 1774, he argued that the colonies were connected to the Crown but possessed their own legislative authority, that the colonies had not simply carried the full authority of Parliament across the Atlantic with them.5 In late 1774, he even outlined terms for a durable union between Britain and the colonies. His proposals envisioned continued commercial connections and a relationship with the British Crown, while rejecting Parliament’s authority to legislate internally for the colonies.6

Franklin was not waiting for an opportunity to destroy the British Empire. He was looking for a way to preserve a relationship he believed could still be reformed. It couldn’t. Reconciliation became increasingly difficult to imagine. British policy hardened. The political relationship deteriorated. The possibility of remaining within the empire while preserving colonial self-government became less realistic. Franklin arrived at independence through conviction, frustration, political necessity, and the failure of alternatives.

Many of the men who eventually created a new nation did not begin by seeking one. That does not make the Revolution less sincere. It makes it more human.

No figure embodies the central contradiction of the Declaration more clearly than Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson drafted the document’s most famous language. He wrote that all men were created equal and possessed inherent and inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He argued that governments derived their just powers from the consent of the governed and that people had the right to alter or abolish governments that became destructive of those ends.7

But Jefferson’s draft also contained a passage that Congress removed. He accused George III of waging “a cruel war against human nature itself” by violating “the most sacred rights of life & liberty” through the enslavement and transportation of Africans. He condemned the existence of a market in which human beings were bought and sold.8 The passage was deleted. The final Declaration retained its universal language about equality and liberty while losing its most direct condemnation of slavery. The reasons were political. Congress was attempting to maintain unity among colonies whose economic and social systems were deeply connected to slavery, and the final document was shaped by that compromise.9 Little did they know that compromise would have to be reached again, this time with the writing of a Constitution for the newly born country.

The contradiction is impossible to miss. Thomas Jefferson wrote a condemnation of slavery into the first draft of the Declaration while enslaving people himself. The passage was removed by a Congress whose members represented colonies and interests deeply entangled with slavery. The words “all men are created equal” remained. The explicit condemnation of slavery did not. We should not pretend that this contradiction disappears because Jefferson wrote beautiful words. Nor should we pretend that the existence of the contradiction proves the words themselves were meaningless.

Both things are true. Jefferson could write a sentence about universal liberty and still participate in a system that denied liberty to enslaved people. The Declaration could proclaim principles its authors failed to apply consistently. That is hypocrisy. But it is also something more complicated. The men who created the Declaration were products of their time, but they were not merely prisoners of it. They were capable of imagining principles that reached beyond their own society even while remaining trapped within that society’s boundaries.

That is precisely what makes the Declaration so uncomfortable. And so powerful.

It is also important to remember that the Declaration was not simply Thomas Jefferson speaking for himself. Jefferson drafted the document, but the text was revised by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams and then substantially edited by Congress. The Library of Congress preserves the draft’s evolution, showing changes made by the committee and by Congress before the final document was adopted.10

The famous phrase itself changed. Jefferson’s original draft referred to truths as “sacred & undeniable.” The final text called them “self-evident.” Sacred things require faith. Self-evident things require only the capacity to reason. The change turns a religious assertion into a logical one. And a logical claim can be picked up by anyone with the capacity to reason. That matters more than it might seem.

The Declaration that emerged on July 4 was not the private philosophy of one man. It was the product of a political body. It was negotiated, edited, compromised, made public, and then put to work. That matters because the Declaration’s contradictions were not simply Jefferson’s contradictions. They were American contradictions. The document was created by a society that wanted political liberty while preserving social hierarchies, by men who objected to arbitrary power while exercising authority over wives, children, servants, and enslaved people, by colonists who spoke of natural rights while claiming land and political authority in a continent inhabited by Native peoples.

The Declaration did not resolve those contradictions. It exposed them.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable responses to the revolutionary moment came not from a man in Congress, but from Abigail Adams.

On March 31, 1776, she wrote to her husband John: “I long to hear that you have declared an independency.” But her letter did not end there. “Remember the Ladies,” she continued. She warned that women would not consider themselves bound by laws in which they had no voice or representation. Then she made an observation that cuts to the core of the entire series: she wondered whether the passion for liberty could be equally strong in those accustomed to depriving others of theirs.11

That last line is the whole argument in one sentence. A people could passionately demand liberty for themselves while failing to extend the same principle to others. The Revolution did not invent that contradiction. But it made the contradiction impossible to ignore. The language of liberty had become too powerful to remain confined to the men who first used it.

This is the greatest irony of the Declaration. The men who created it did not fully live up to it. But the words they created did not remain under their control. The Declaration became a standard by which later generations judged the nation, claimed by people who were never meant to be included, turned into a demand that the country become what it claimed to be.

They did not reject the document. They claimed it. They used it as the call to independence it always should have been.

On November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech of 272 words. He did not begin with the Constitution. He began with the Declaration.

“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.”12

That opening is not nostalgia. It is a political act. By counting back eighty-seven years, Lincoln points to 1776, not 1787. He is choosing the Declaration over the Constitution as the true founding document of the United States. He is saying the nation was not founded on a legal framework for governance. It was founded on a proposition. A claim about human equality that the Civil War was now forcing the country to either honor or abandon.

Then he closed with the most consequential sentence in American political oratory: “...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.”13

A new birth of freedom. Not a restoration. Not a return. A birth. Lincoln did not merely cite the Declaration. He reframed the entire nation around it, redefining what the country was, what the war was, and what the promise had always required. The Declaration in Lincoln’s hands is no longer a justification for breaking from Britain. It is the origin story of an unfinished nation still deciding whether it means what it says.

Nearly a century after Gettysburg, on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and drew a direct line from Jefferson to the present.

He called the Declaration a promissory note. “In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” he told the crowd. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”14 The check, he said, had come back marked “insufficient funds.”

King did not dismiss the Declaration. He held it up as evidence of a debt. The founders had made a promise. The promise had not been kept. And the people to whom it was owed had come to collect. Then, in the speech’s closing, he did something Jefferson never managed. He wrote his own version of what the Declaration should have been: “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.’”15

He quoted Jefferson. Then he named it a dream, not a reality, not a legacy, not a gift. A dream the country had not yet earned. King took the original call to independence and composed something new from it, a vision of independence that included everyone Jefferson’s document had left behind.

Two years before King stood at the Lincoln Memorial, John F. Kennedy took the oath of office on January 20, 1961, and delivered an inaugural address that did something different from both Lincoln and King. He did not reframe the Declaration. He did not compose a new version of it. He accepted it as written and dared the country to carry it.

“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, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage.”16

The torch. The ancient heritage. The promise standing exactly as written, passed forward to people who had not made it but were now responsible for keeping it. Kennedy’s relationship to the Declaration is the steward’s relationship. He does not interpret. He does not compose. He receives an inheritance and announces that the obligation comes with it. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” he told the nation, “ask what you can do for your country.”17 That is not a new idea. It is Jefferson’s idea, carried forward by someone who understood that the call to independence is not a historical event. It is a permanent demand.

It would be easy to end by declaring the founders hypocrites and moving on. They were hypocritical in important ways. Some of their contradictions were profound. Some of their self-interest was obvious. Some of their ideals were applied selectively. The Declaration was shaped by political necessity and compromise. Its authors were not saints. But neither were they simply frauds.

The men who created the Declaration could believe in liberty and benefit from systems that denied liberty to others. They could sincerely oppose tyranny while failing to recognize the tyranny within their own society. They could write universal principles while imagining a limited political community. That is the dichotomy. And perhaps the Declaration’s greatest achievement is that its words eventually became more powerful than the limitations of the men who wrote them.

The Declaration began as a justification for independence from Britain. It helped transform a rebellion into a revolution. It rallied supporters, announced a new nation, and sought legitimacy in the eyes of the world. And then it became something more. Not a finished document. Not a settled argument.

A call.

A call to independence of thought, of belief, of action. A floor that each generation has had to fight to raise, claimed by people the founders never intended to include, used to demand what the founders were never willing to give. Abigail Adams heard it and told her husband the ladies would not be bound by laws that excluded them. Enslaved petitioners in Massachusetts turned Jefferson’s phrases into a freedom petition the legislature refused to grant. Frederick Douglass stood before an audience on July 5, 1852 and asked what the Fourth of July meant to a man in chains, then answered his own question by insisting the principles of the Declaration applied to him.18 Lincoln reframed the nation around it. King composed his own version. Kennedy passed the torch.

Across generations, the same pattern: the Declaration said one thing, the nation often did another, and those who suffered from that gap repeatedly returned to the words.

You wrote this. Now live by it.

The men of 1776 may not have intended to create a document that would eventually be used to judge them. But they did. They had written a declaration of what liberty could be. And ever since, Americans have been arguing over whether they were willing to make it true.

The document is imperfect. It is imperfect in ways many of the Founders could not see. But the document still inspired many to use it as a call for their own independence, their own belief that the path the Founders put us on was still intact, even though many portions remained unfinished. The Declaration still endures. That endurance is a testament to the fact that the Founders gave us the path to follow.

And it is up to us to follow it.