The remarkable fact about the American War for Independence is not that it involved a separation from Great Britain but that it was accompanied with a revolution in fundamental ideas about human self-governance. An equally remarkable fact is that this revolutionary aspect of the American Revolution received definitive and compelling expression at the very beginning of the struggle, in the famous preamble to the Declaration of Independence. The most remarkable part of the story, however, is that the Declaration retains its revolutionary power 250 years later — provided we understand it aright.
The Declaration announces a revolution of the mind, and that revolution in thought begins with its first sentence. In earlier history, documents of this sort typically opened with an invocation of some divine authority or a description of the distinguished ancestry of the issuing body. The first sentence of the Declaration, on the other hand, places itself firmly within “the course of human events” and promises to explain the American cause only out of “a decent respect for their opinions of mankind.”
In subsequent years, as the Declaration evolved into a kind of American scripture suitable for engraving in marble and reading aloud in the god-like voice of documentary film narrators, the human orientation of its opening lines faded from view. And yet it is a very earthly document, composed not by semi-deities for the ages but by human beings for humankind.
The human aspect of the Declaration is most evident in the least understood phrase of that first sentence. What does it mean to say that a people are entitled to take their place among the powers of the earth in virtue of “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”? Christian Nationalists down to the present regularly take the mention of a deity here as proof that the American republic was after all founded as a Christian nation. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
“Nature’s God” appears in American print for possibly the first time in a 1747 issue of the Maryland Gazette. A certain Polly Baker, the paper reports, has been charged with giving birth to her fifth “Bastard child.” In her defense, Ms. Baker argues that the continent needs to be peopled and that there just aren’t enough eligible “Batchelors” around to get the job done. Then she offers her Calvinist judges a master lesson in theology: “’Tis the duty and first great command of Nature, and of Nature’s God, increase and multiply.” One of the presiding judges finds her argument so persuasive that he casts off his religious scruples and marries her the next day.
Polly was one of Benjamin Franklin’s jokes, of course. But he was serious about peopling the continent; and he knew exactly what “Nature’s God” meant. As a young man in London, according to his highly entertaining Autobiography, he had devoured the works of “Collins & Shaftesbury” and other controversial philosophers of the time. The same writers, not coincidentally, line the section on “moral philosophy” in the library of Thomas Jefferson, who joined Franklin on the committee tasked with producing the Declaration of Independence.
From these philosophical sources on the radical side of the Enlightenment, America’s Founders absorbed the idea of a deity that performs no miracles, issues no holy writ, and sends no prophets. Theirs was a God that acts only through the laws of nature, reveals itself only in the language of science, and is as self-evident as the facts of life to people like Polly Baker. The seventeenth-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza called it “God, or Nature.” The eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope, in collaboration with the politician and philosopher Lord Bolingbroke, translated this as “Nature’s God.” Jefferson kept copies of all their works — many of them heavily annotated — in his personal library.
The revolution of the mind becomes explicit in the lengthy second sentence of the Declaration. The first of the self-evident truths — and the bedrock of the American political philosophy — is that “all men are created equal” and are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” This part of the Declaration, too, is as familiar as it is misunderstood. Christian Nationalists typically seize upon the appearance of “the Creator” as still more proof that the republic was founded by the faithful upon a command from on high. But this is the opposite of its meaning.
In the social contract theory of the Enlightenment philosophers on whom America’s Founders drew, equality is the result not of any inscrutable divine or moral command but of an observable law of nature. The imperative is not to treat the unequal as equal but to treat the equal as equal. Our unalienable rights, according to this line of thinking, are grounded not on faith but on what we see and experience in daily life.
In Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration, as it happens, there is no “Creator.” Our unalienable rights are derived simply “from that equal creation.” It was fellow committee-member John Adams, perhaps more alert to the religious politics of the moment, who rephrased the line by adding a Creator. For Jefferson and like-minded founders, however, the difference cannot have mattered much. In their thought-world, Creator and creation —God and Nature — refer to the same thing.
The human dimension of the Declaration is nowhere more evident than in its most popular phrase: “the pursuit of happiness.” These words have long been taken to stand for the selfish, materialistic proclivities that splash around at the shallow end of American consumer culture. But Jefferson’s phrase has a very specific preceding history, and it involves the pursuit not of thoughtless distractions but of self-realization through the accumulation of wisdom.
The English philosopher John Locke, largely borrowing from the ideas of Spinoza, defined “the pursuit of happiness” as “the highest perfection of intellectual nature” and the foundation of our genuine freedom. Both Locke and Spinoza drew on Epicurus, the most this-worldly of the ancient Greek philosophers. Not coincidentally, Jefferson announced late in life that “I too am an Epicurean.”
The climax of the American revolution of the mind arrives with the concluding clauses of that second sentence of the Declaration, which tell us that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and that it may be replaced when it fails to answer to the ends of the people. Essentially all the great states of earlier times had based their pretensions to power on a supernatural source. Kings and rulers had always claimed, as Adams sarcastically writes, that their authority was “brought down from Heaven by a dove” or in a “vial” of “holy oil.” According to the philosophy of the Declaration, however, the people alone are sovereign.
Although the political philosophy of the Declaration now seems as transparent and ubiquitous as water, it offers the glimpse of a concept of democracy much richer and more insightful than those that prevail today. Democracy does not happen merely when the momentary whims of ever-shifting majorities achieve the ephemeral satisfaction of a popular vote. As America’s philosophical revolutionaries grasped, self-governance in the absence of reason is a contradiction in terms. Societies, like individuals, are free only to the extent that they can explain what it is that they are doing.
Genuine democracy therefore means holding all public affairs to account before the bar of reason. The core meaning of the Declaration is that we govern ourselves not through acts of faith but through acts of understanding.
It is all too easy to lose track of just how radical these ideas were in their time. In many of our historical narratives today, the philosophy of the Declaration is celebrated as a kind of culmination of British and European philosophy and religion. But the thinkers upon whom America’s Founders relied were hardly representative of their own times. On the contrary, they were universally denounced as infidels, excommunicated from their religious associations, silenced, tortured, and even killed for their revolutionary beliefs. They were not passing along the glories of western civilization; they were rebelling against it.
This subversive, “anti-western” line within “western” thought stood little chance of achieving power in Europe. It could flourish only in a new space, relatively unencumbered with stifling hierarchies of the old world, benefiting from a teeming diversity of peoples of different origins and religions, and enriched through encounters with a native population that had grown up in a world apart. Only on the new continent could the radical philosophies of the old world breathe freely. The French Revolution of 1789 and the pan-European revolutions of 1848, by contrast, happened after the American one, were directly inspired by it, and failed in the face of the entrenched powers of the time.
The revolutionary aspect of the Declaration retained its power in America well after the revolution, too. Many progressives today tend to condemn the Declaration as an exercise in hypocrisy from the enslavers who wrote and signed it. But that is not how the leaders of the American antislavery movement interpreted America’s first document three quarters of a century later. Frederick Douglass is remembered today for, among other things, his searing 1852 speech, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?”, in which he denounces America’s celebration of itself as “a sham … hollow mockery … mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy.” Yet in that same speech he hails the Declaration as “the ring-bolt of … the nation’s destiny” and calls on Americans to abolish slavery in the name of the founding ideals articulated in the Declaration.
Abraham Lincoln, too, saw in the Declaration a path away from slavery. “All honor to Jefferson,” he wrote in 1859, “to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people” was able to express “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,” that would forever stand as “a stumbling-block to tyranny.” The radical Republicans who oversaw Reconstruction inserted a paraphrase of the Declaration into the U.S. Constitution in the Fourteenth Amendment. The so-called Civil War was in reality a war over slavery. It should be understood as a second American Revolution. And the new American republic it established was grounded in the same Declaration that announced the first revolution.
On the 250th anniversary of independence, it is this human, forward-looking aspect of the American Revolution that we should hold at the front of our minds. Our rights may be unalienable, but they should never be taken for granted. In a rapidly changing world, they must be constantly redefined and defended. The Declaration of Independence was never about celebrating the glories of the past. It is and always has been about our power to begin the world over again.
Matthew Stewart, a philosopher and historian, is the author of Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. (This article represents the personal views of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of Americans United.)