The Declaration of Independence announced to the world the American conviction that “all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” These principles of created equality and natural rights have since proved lethal to the system of chattel slavery, racial caste and other forms of tyranny.
As the free press proliferated copies of the Declaration in the summer of 1776, one found its way to an articulate young Continental soldier and aspiring preacher named Lemuel Haynes. Inspired, he penned a pamphlet, “Liberty Further Extended.” Observing that “Liberty is equally as precious to a black man, as it is to a white one,” Haynes applied the Declaration’s principles to the “intolerable yoke” of slavery. Natural rights having been “granted to us by the Divine Being, no one has the least right to take them from us without our consent; and there is not the least precept, or practice, in the sacred scriptures that constitutes a black man a slave, any more than a white one.”
Race-based slavery was not an academic question to Haynes, for he was a free man of mixed race and would become the country’s first African American to be ordained a minister. Twenty-five years later, in a widely-read Fourth of July sermon, he revisited the question from his own pulpit as pastor of the West Parish Church at Rutland, Vermont. For Haynes, as for other abolitionists, the Declaration’s pronouncement of created equality was simply a rearticulation of the Apostle Paul’s speech to the Athenians in Acts 17:26, that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” By contrast, slavery was an unnatural practice that accustomed a people to tyranny and undermined republican government.
That the Declaration’s principle of created equality posed a threat to slavery and racial caste was not lost on Americans at any time. The Founding generation — including Hamilton, Washington, Adams, Madison, Jefferson, Franklin and many others — regarded slavery as a violation of natural law, though some reconciled themselves to its continuance as an inherited evil not easily dispensed with. Jefferson spoke for many when he quipped that slavery was like holding a wolf by the ear: you “can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”
John C. Calhoun, slavery’s most ardent and eloquent apologist in the decades before the Civil War, denounced created equality as “the most false and dangerous of all political errors,” bemoaning Jefferson’s decision to include it in what should have been a sober-minded political statement. Moderates like Senator Stephen A. Douglas and Chief Justice Roger Taney sought to read the principle of created equality out of the Declaration, arguing that it was simply a statement of the rights of British citizens under the common law. Abraham Lincoln would have none of it, insisting that the Declaration was a statement of eternal truths, not man-made law. His account of American freedom would win out in a bloody contest that saw the end of slavery, but not racial caste.
Confronting segregation a century later, Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked the self-evident truths of the Declaration and the political rights of the Constitution as a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 he laid claim to the American Founding. “This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Some critics, Malcolm X foremost among them, called King naïve, arguing that black freedom could only be secured by a clean break from the American Founding. But for King — and he was following Frederick Douglass in this view — the best means of achieving justice for any oppressed people is to lay claim to the American constitutional tradition as their own inheritance.
This Independence Day, let us give thanks for the tradition of constitutional government and ordered liberty to which we fall heir. It is our inheritance to preserve and improve — or squander — for the generations of Americans that follow us.