Founding Myths (19 page)

Thomas Jefferson was one of many scribes, not the sole muse, of the American independence movement.

A SLOW START

Because the proceedings of the Continental Congress were kept secret, Americans at the time had no way of ascertaining who was on the
committee to prepare the Declaration of Independence, who among the committee penned the draft, or who edited the final version. This information, even if available, would have been deemed irrelevant. People didn't care to quibble about authorship or craft. All that really counted was the document's conclusion: the United States was declaring its independence.

During the war, even at Fourth of July celebrations, the Declaration itself was rarely quoted. On the first anniversary of independence in 1777, when William Gordon delivered the oration for the festivities in Boston, he used as his text the Old Testament. When David Ramsay delivered the oration in Charleston on the second anniversary, he used a phrase more common to the times: “life, liberty, and property,” not “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the phrase used in the Declaration of Independence. In 1783, after the war had ended, Ezra Stiles mentioned Jefferson by name—but he did not celebrate the author's unique genius. Stiles said only that Jefferson had “poured the soul of the continent into the monumental act of independence.”
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In fact, during the Revolutionary Era, George Mason's draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights was copied or imitated far more often than the Declaration of Independence. None of the seven other states that drafted their own declarations of rights borrowed phrasing from the congressional Declaration, but Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire (in addition to Vermont, which was not yet a state) lifted exact portions of Mason's text, including “all men are born equally free and independent.”
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In part this is because the state declarations of rights borrowed from each other, but Mason's wording is also more precise. What does “created equal” really mean? Years later, Stephen A. Douglas, when debating Abraham Lincoln, protested that Negroes were not the “equal” of whites, leading Lincoln to retreat by admitting they were “not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment.”
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Had Jefferson stayed with Mason's phraseology, Lincoln could have cited the Declaration of Independence with greater authority and less apology. “Born equally free and independent” establishes clearly the nature of
equality among men: it lies in their rights, not in their attributes, abilities, or achievements.

Surprisingly, the Declaration of Independence was not often cited during the drafting of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 or in the subsequent debates over ratification. Notes from the Constitutional Convention make only two references to the Declaration, while the eighty-five essays in
The Federalist
contain but one. When Patrick Henry addressed the Virginia Convention during the ratification debate, he asked rhetorically, “What, sir, is the genius of democracy?” He then proceeded to read from the Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted by Mason, not from Jefferson's adaptation in the Declaration of Independence:

That Government is or ought to be instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community: Of all the various modes and forms of Government, that is best which is capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety, and is most effectually secured against the danger of mal-administration, and
that whenever any Government shall be found inadequate, or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community hath an undubitable, unalienable and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.

“This, sir, is the language of democracy,” Henry concluded.
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Both David Ramsay and William Gordon, in their eighteenth-century histories, focused on the political impact of the Declaration of Independence, not the philosophy contained in its preamble. Ramsay failed to mention Jefferson as the author, while Gordon referred to him only as a member of the five-man committee that prepared the draft.
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During the 1790s, Jefferson's standing was determined by partisan politics. Since Federalists vilified Jefferson, they ignored his authorship and regarded the Declaration itself as suspect. Republicans,
meanwhile, celebrated Jefferson's authorship in order to promote the leading figure of their own political party. Not until Republicans staged separate Fourth of July festivities in the late 1790s was Jefferson's name linked to the Declaration of Independence in public discourse.
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Two turn-of-the-century historians reflected these divergent stances. John Marshall, a staunch Federalist, mentioned Jefferson only in a footnote: a committee of five was appointed to prepare the document, he wrote flatly, “and the draft, reported by the committee, has been generally attributed to Mr. Jefferson.”
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Rather than focus on Jefferson, Marshall mentioned several of the other declarations of independence, and he quoted extensively from two of them.
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Mercy Otis Warren, on the other side of the political spectrum, waxed effusive:

[T]he instrument which announced the final separation of the American Colonies from Great Britain was drawn by the elegant and energetic pen of Jefferson, with that correct judgment, precision, and dignity, which have ever marked his character. The declaration of independence, which has done so much honor to the then existing congress, to the inhabitants of the United States, and to the genius and heart of the gentleman who drew it . . . ought to be frequently read by the rising youth of the American states, as a palladium of which they should never lose sight, so long as they wish to continue a free and independent people.
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Warren and other supporters of Jefferson enshrined the Declaration's author in the early nineteenth century, when memories of the Revolution were revived and put in the service of a growing nationalism. Jefferson's party, the Republicans (referred to later as the Democrat-Republicans), would remain in power for a quarter century, during which the document and its principal author were increasingly celebrated and indelibly linked.

In 1817 Congress commissioned John Trumbull to paint a large canvas commemorating the approval of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Trumbull's masterpiece was displayed to large crowds in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington.
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With the mood set, two engraved copies of the Declaration competed for public attention in 1818 and 1819. In 1823 Congress distributed an official facsimile far and wide.
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Jefferson fed this frenzy. As far back as 1786, he had talked of an artistic commemoration of the Declaration with John Trumbull and had provided a rough sketch.
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He approved the distribution of the facsimile edition, hoping it would inspire greater “reverence” for the principles it espoused.
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He even applauded the gathering of artifacts he had used while drafting the document: “Small things may, perhaps, like the relics of saints, help to nourish our devotion to this holy bond of Union, and keep it longer alive and warm in our affections,” he wrote to a promoter—and he then indicated where some of these “relics” might be found.
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All this rankled John Adams, the only other member of the drafting committee still alive during the Declaration's revival. According to Adams, writing thirty-five years after independence, the hard-earned
achievement
of independence should be the object of celebration, not the simple act of
writing
about it, and he was the one who had successfully pushed the motion for independence through Congress. “The Declaration of Independence I always considered as a theatrical show. Jefferson ran away with all the stage effect of that,” he wrote—and, he added grudgingly, “all the glory of it” as well.
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Adams also noted that Jefferson's draft was discussed, revised, and approved by a five-member committee, then discussed, revised, and approved by the body of Congress.
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Jefferson countered: “Mr. Adams' memory has led him to unquestionable error.” In particular, Jefferson objected to Adams's claim that the two men had constituted a “sub-committee” charged with writing the document.
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Despite a paucity of direct sources and the differences in memory, we do know that a five-member committee was appointed to produce
a draft for Congress to consider, and we can safely conjecture that the committee discussed the issues and provided some direction before sending Jefferson on his way with quill and ink. Then, when the draft reached the floor of Congress, others certainly had their say. According to Jeffersonian scholar Julian Boyd, “In all there were eighty-six alterations, made at various stages by Jefferson, by Adams and Franklin, by the Committee of Five, and by Congress.
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The major thrust of Adams's argument—that the Declaration of Independence was more than a one-man affair—seems correct. Even so, Jefferson won the debate. The telling of history, if not history itself, was on his side. Before he died, he proposed that “Author of the Declaration of American Independence” be inscribed on his tomb. Although he accepted and even sought credit for penning the words, however, never did Jefferson seek credit for dreaming up the ideas.
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That unsolicited honor would be bestowed upon him by others, much later.

THE LINCOLN REVIVAL

During the Abraham Lincoln–Stephen A. Douglas debates of 1858, both participants based their arguments on the alleged authority of the Declaration of Independence. According to Lincoln, the Declaration had stated in “plain, unmistakable language” that “all men are created equal.” Douglas countered that these words were never intended to apply to “the Negro or . . . savage Indians, or the Feejee, or the Malay, or any other inferior or degraded race,” and he noted that many of the state and local declarations, which had preceded the congressional Declaration, had insisted that the states retain all authority over their own internal affairs.
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Although Douglas was probably correct on the first count, and certainly correct on the second, Lincoln rebutted both arguments. The second point was easy: Lincoln noted that his quarrel was only with the
expansion
of slavery, and this involved no violation of states' rights.

But what about those slaveholding Founding Fathers? How could
Lincoln seriously maintain that they had believed in the equality of
all
men, including those they were holding in bondage?

Lincoln argued that Jefferson had included the phrase “all men are created equal” for no immediate and practical purpose, but as a “promise” for the future. The “sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence” was to give “hope to all the world . . . that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”
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Since slavery was too firmly embedded at the time to permit practical opposition, Jefferson could do no more than issue this blanket pronouncement in favor of equality—“the father of all moral principles,” Lincoln called it—for the use of future generations.
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Lincoln's line of reasoning had, and still has, great appeal. Because of their alleged “promise” to the future, the signers of the Declaration of Independence can be released from any charge of moral culpability or hypocrisy.

Historically, however, this is a difficult argument to sustain. Antislavery elements in the North made no mention of “equality” in instructing their delegates to state or federal conventions in 1776. Only in the slave-dependent South did the term “equality” appear. When the grand jury of the Cheraws District of South Carolina declared itself in favor of independence on May 20, 1776, it praised the new Constitution because it was “founded on the strictest principles of justice and humanity, where the rights and happiness of the whole, the poor and the rich, are equally secured,” yet in Revolutionary South Carolina, slaves were not seen as part of that “whole,” even though they constituted approximately half the population.
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The grand jury of Georgetown, South Carolina, also praised the new Constitution as “the most equitable and desirable that human imagination could invent”:

The present Constitution of Government, formed by the late Congress of this Colony, promises to its inhabitants every happy effect which can arise from society. Equal and just in its
principles, wise and virtuous in its ends; we now see every hope of future liberty, safety, and happiness confirmed to ourselves and our posterity.
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Not even Lincoln would have dared to suggest that back in 1776 the white citizens of Georgetown, South Carolina, intended that “promise” to extend to their slaves.

When Lincoln tried to portray the notion of “equality” as the “sentiment” of the nation's founders, he gave full credit to Thomas Jefferson, the author of the words he cherished:

All honor to Jefferson, to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.
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