Stop Making Sense
Are the truths in the Declaration of Independence really self-evident?
I don’t think the Continental Congress that issued the Declaration of Independence brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, let alone a nation dedicated to a proposition, let alone to the proposition that all men are created equal. I don’t mean the Congress claimed to dedicate a nation to that proposition and then failed to live up to its ideals. I mean it had no intention of expressing any such ideals or, for that matter, bringing forth a nation at all.
Look at it my way, and we might finally be able to let the authors of the Declaration off the failure-of-ideals hook. But we'd also have to accept things' being even worse, in 1776, than we like to imagine. The signers didn’t fail their ideals; they didn’t have the ideals we wish they had, and they’d be startled, I think, by what we believe their preamble expressed (they might be startled that we think about the Declaration much at all).
This I believe, as they used to say, and I can explain why.
But it’s probably obvious from the way I’ve phrased the issue that I also believe the reason I actually do think the founders brought forth a new nation, and did dedicate it to just such a proposition—I can’t help thinking that, any more than you can, though I find it untrue—has to do with how Abraham Lincoln framed the national founding in his famous Gettysburg Address.
These ideas about the Declaration and Lincoln are by no means original with me. Many years ago, before I started reading much history, Garry Wills’s book Lincoln at Gettysburg made a big impression on me, and I’ve pursued the issues more deeply since then. My pursuit may take me places it doesn’t take you, but it’s pretty clear in basic scholarship of the history of the Declaration that the document the Congress passed on July 4, 1776, didn’t, for one thing, play the central role in the minds of its signers that we’ve assigned it in our public discussions (you can get this realism from, among others, both Wills and Pauline Maier, and they don’t agree on much else). The Declaration was a kind of press release, explaining to the rest of the world the basis for the Congress’s act of secession from the British Empire, a way of subtextually pitching foreign powers already hostile to Britain on providing the Congress with military and financial support for the ensuing war. It didn't make the United States independent: a resolution passed by the Congress on July 2 did that (hence John Adams's prediction that the Second of July would become the great American holiday). Nobody signing the document—an event that didn't happen until August—thought they were launching a new nation; few could have envisioned the document’s being taken as a bedrock set of principles on which a national government might rest. Many of the signers abhorred the idea of creating a national government, and eleven years later, when a group did gather to create one, the Declaration hardly came up.
Some today therefore see the 1787 convention and the Constitution it produced as a counterrevolution against the Declaration’s principles. But most of the framers didn’t seem to have the 1776 document in mind at all. Its benchmark historic importance was added later.
And the famous preamble wasn't even all that groundbreaking philosophically. It relied on existing ideas about legitimacy in government that would by no means have turned off the Enlightenment establishment types whose military aid was being sought. Quite the contrary. The rationale for breaking away was the supposed tyranny of George III, and the terms in which the document defines tyranny had already become, in philosophy of government, one of the advanced standards of the day. Jefferson, whom we put on a pedestal (literally) as the Declaration’s author, wasn’t its author—the Congress was—and he didn’t like the final document. That’s why he carried around his draft, which he felt the Congress had butchered, whipping it out and pressing it on people for the rest of his life. He hadn’t even wanted to do the drafting. There were far bigger fish to fry—.
But hang on. We’re already steering straight for the “ah, the glorious irony” obstacle which, no matter what I may say here, always scuttles any real consideration of the realities of the day. The particular irony about to expose itself, just below the waterline, and dump me out of the boat: the fact remains that out of those not-so-inspiring realities sprang the nation-making, world-changing document that not only attended the independence of the United States of America but has served as a beacon for freedom not only in the U.S., where abolitionist and civil-rights movements have drawn on the preamble’s principles, but also worldwide. Any dissent I express from the modern U.S. civics view of the preamble, the view so many of us grew up with, any fact that shows just how little its authors would have endorsed the modern view, only makes it all the more miraculous that the Declaration has became what it’s become: it did things they didn’t even consciously intend! so cool it, Bill! and join in the celebration! as we dance together along the grand road to equality, forever just around the corner, that the Declaration, for all its flaws, launched us on!
In a minute maybe. First, let’s take a jaundiced, mean-spirited, spoilsport look at the whole equality thing, as it really played in the preamble.
Pretty much right away—maybe even at times in the mercurial mind of Jefferson himself—the phrase “all men are created equal” came to mean not only that everybody has the same natural rights, but also something like “the legitimacy of a government is based on its carrying out a bottom-line responsibility for fostering the equality of its citizens with regard to exercising those rights.” It's that second thing the Congress didn’t mean and we want it to have meant.
That famous list of self-evident truths in the preamble was really a quick recap of one version of a popular origin story of the day. It might be called “How Government Arose to Replace the State of Nature” (like a Book of Genesis, Enlightenment-style). The story is told in the narrative present, blurring out the question of whether it’s supposed to have taken place once upon a time in the far-distant past or is always taking place or both,
and it goes . . .
a little something . . .
like this:
In the beginning, before government, people are equal and have natural rights—are equal, really, because they all have the same natural rights. Then, in order to secure those rights, people (not the creator of the rights, but actual people) institute governments, and because “government” refers, of course, to a stark inequality in power, where some people tell everybody else what to do, governments maintain legitimacy (“just powers”) only to the degree that they (not ensure equality but) exercise their powers by the consent of the governed.
See, there’s a kind of twist in the story, counterintuitive to modern civics but not to the signers. And now we’re off to the races, because in the thinking that influenced them, words like “consent,” “governed,” and “just,” as well as the mechanisms that men institute—I’ll just leave it at “men,” in the interest of historical accuracy—for gaining the consent of the governed, keep the majority of people, even the majority of men, out of participating in government equally or really at all. Yet those restrictions don’t necessarily reflect anything defined as injustice, in the line of thinking the signers were drawing on.
The principle was not to ensure or enforce political or social equality but to handle inequality of power justly, in the service of securing the natural rights that everybody has, and if that doesn’t sound super-believable, or even totally coherent, it’s not you. It’s Jefferson and the Congress. They were copping some cool-sounding stuff from far more detailed philosophical explorations, which some of the signers probably more or less believed, in order to make it sound legal, and even traditional, to declare thirteen of the British colonies in North America independent of the government that had formed them, when it wasn’t legal or traditional at all.
Even in its fullest, highest form, that origin-of-government story isn't necessarily true. Many competing versions tell different stories about the creation of government. Even the first of the supposed “truths”—all people are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights—is far from self-evident. The Congress held these truths to be self-evident, a priori, in order to give context for the ensuing list of grievances against George. And that list doesn't hold up perfectly either.
Enlightenment storytelling, like all other storytelling, involved fantasy. The fantasies are revealing, but seeking to make pure logic out of the Declaration of Independence is a mug’s game.
And yet in stark contradiction of the Congress’s real intentions, the clause “all men are created equal” became a clarion call to democracy. It just did.
Not all by itself. And it didn’t start with Lincoln. It was really African Americans who began the tradition, in which so many of us participate today, of hearing in the Declaration’s preamble an American national and governmental ideal of fostering human equality, they who first publicly noted the grim contradiction between that ideal and the real condition of so many people in America. That’s according to research presented by a number of historians, including Woody Holton, and recently discussed by Holton both in his new book Liberty Is Sweet and on his Twitter. Black people were living and laboring in North America thanks to the perpetuation of racial slavery in the very colonies that were so loudly proclaiming human liberty in 1776. Holton quotes Lemuel Haynes, a free black soldier in the War of Independence, later an ordained Protestant minister, who wrote and published an essay—also in 1776!—in which he cited the Congress’s preamble on equality and rights. Haynes argued for extending the concept to its logical conclusion, putting an end to the hideous violations of the ideal that are inherent in the institution of slavery.
As Holton and others show, Haynes was by no means alone. Abolitionists both black and white took up the idea that the Declaration, as a national founding document, demands a degree of social equality conspicuously absent from the life of the actual nation.
The idea became this: To the extent that political inequality exists, America is not fully, really, American. Women therefore looked to the Declaration too. In 1848, at the famous Seneca Falls convention, the Declaration of Sentiments renovated the famous preamble to include women, and it listed grievances against women’s oppressive legal status. (If you’re on Twitter, you can search #LemuelHaynesProject there and see Holton’s wealth of primary sources, for pre-Civil War appeals to the Declaration’s founding American principles, on behalf of oppressed Americans.)
Still. It’s not the writings of Lemuel Haynes or the Seneca Falls Declaration that got you and me to believe—regardless of my calling it untrue—that our nation was literally founded not in 1788, with the ratification of the Constitution that established the national government, or in 1789, when that government first sat, but in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. It wasn't those activists who gave us our vision of the men gathered in the assembly chamber of the State House in Philadelphia, deciding together, with a high, shared purpose, to create a new nation, and to dedicate that nation to a world-shaking proposition, thus giving the United States an exceptional historical purpose, and putting that purpose on paper: defining legitimacy in government as the promotion and protection of human equality.
We believe that story because Lincoln told it at Gettysburg. If we didn’t believe it, if we had to believe what’s true—that as far as the Congress of 1776 was concerned, it wasn’t bringing forth a nation, had no intention of making equality the basis of anything, and meant something quite different, in its preamble, from all that—we might feel a vertiginous sense of loss, not only of the ideal but also of the failure of the ideal.
This dynamic between the ideal and its failure have formed a comfort zone, a safe space, for our mainstream public discussions of the founding. A lot of the current debate devolves on a contest between those who call the founding ideal a lie and those who defend the founders for a least having an ideal, even if they failed to live up to it.
But what happens to that all-too-familiar dispute if there were no such ideal at all?
To me, Lincoln’s fiction—a fiction so powerful that it became a reality, changing a country, a world, and even, like Superman spinning the planet the wrong way on its axis, changing the past itself—is so outlandish, so dazzling, that I can’t effectively clarify my impressions. Thanks to Holton and others, I now know the underlying idea wasn’t original with Lincoln. From Lemuel Haynes to the signers at Seneca Falls and beyond, people had already been casting the equality proposition as philosophically nation-making. Yet it was Lincoln who had to stand up there and actually put a real nation back together, rescue it from literal dissolution, on this fictional basis, which I find I have to call not just fictional but poetic, epic, theatrical, even musical.
Logic isn't the thing here. Stop making sense, as the old song has it.
It’s true that via the constitutional amendments that Lincoln supported, his story did became a legal reality. So give credit to the radical Republicans too, of course, along with Haynes and so many others . . . But no, no, no. The thing I’m really on about today is why you and I believe the nation was founded in 1776 and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Another time, then, for how that new legal reality was almost immediately violated, and violated for at least a century, and goes on being violated. (W.E.B Du Bois even called the postwar amendments something of a consolation prize. Far better, to him, if the Freedmen’s Bank hadn’t been looted. By the Yankees, as Susie Taylor's grandmother put it.) What the war and then the postwar amendments did is shred the founders’ Constitution and totally rewrite founding relationships among the citizens and the state and federal governments. What Lincoln did is shift, in our collective consciousness, the founding of the national government back to 1776, make its basis not the Constitution but the Declaration, and deploy the Haynes and Seneca Falls idea that the Declaration put forth a goal of equality that still awaited accomplishment. Thus Lincoln transmuted a shredding of the founders’ purposes into the fulfillment of the founders’ purposes, and by making us unable to stop believing that those founding purposes were real, he gave us not just a potentially far better country, coming out of the carnage of the Civil War, than we had before, but a country whose potential for goodness was retrofitted into the very nature of its beginnings.
That’s not just a creative misreading of founding history, though it is that. It’s not just some impressive political sleight-of-hand, though it’s that, too. It’s not just an example of what Marx said about bourgeois revolutions' always casting themselves not as revolutions but as revivals (it’s that too). This was something way more: a Promethean feat of immense national and global consequence.
We might just lighten up, try to be happy about the accomplishment, and act on its basis. Maybe knowing something—like the actual intellectual context in which the Declaration was signed, or what Lincoln did at Gettysburg—doesn't require problematizing it all over the place. My fantasy is that if we stopped making sense, we could actually fix a lot of things.
But I don’t think we can even begin to be appropriately awestruck by the sheer power of Lincoln’s feat unless we take the jaundiced, mean-spirited, spoilsport view of how the concept of equality really figured in the Declaration’s preamble, and accept the fact that Lincoln's story about 1776, on which the feat relies, is contradicted by the reality of 1776. There’s no factual basis, in a way, for the country. It’s fabulous.