Our founding fathers wrote countless letters, essays, and diary entries, so we have a pretty good idea what they were thinking 250 years ago. And it was the work of Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke which, step by step, led to the self-evident truths articulated in our Declaration of Independence. With acknowledgment to Bradley Thompson’s America’s Revolutionary Mind. A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It, some necessary background.

To begin with, it was Hobbes who was among the first to contemplate how and why governments originated. In doing so he postulated that, in the beginning, humans were born into a primordial wilderness which he referred to as a “state of nature.” As the population increased, the people had to form some kind of social compact in order to prevent the bad from harming the good. Otherwise, as Hobbes famously explained, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But what kind of compact, I.e., government, should be formed, and by what means could such a government be devised?

The answer to the latter question came from a parliamentarian by the name of Francis Bacon. Bacon believed, as did most, that God had created an orderly world. As such, the world could be best understood by using human reason to study nature, and thereby uncover, through the process of induction, the laws that governed it. In short, Bacon formulated the scientific method that is used to this day.

Isaac Newton relied upon Bacon’s methodology to formulate his three laws of motion and his law of universal gravitation. But to the educated class of his day, Newton discovered something almost as important: that human reason could be used to uncover, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” 

And then came the political hero of this epic, John Locke. Locke believed that if Newton could use the scientific method to formulate the physical laws of nature, he could use the same method to discover the moral laws of nature. And in the process, he could discern the best form of government to which humanity should aspire.

Locke’s thoughtful answer can be summarized in four words: freedom, rights, consent, and revolution. And these, of course, are shorthand for the four self-evident truths articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

After its long, one-sentence introduction, the Declaration states: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.” 

But, taken literally, all men are not “created equal.” Some are born bigger or smaller, etc. So obviously, these words, beautiful sounding as they are, meant something more to the people who wrote them. And what they meant was: in the Hobbesian state of nature, every human was born equally free.

The remaining three self-evident truths follow more or less deductively. So, if in the Hobbesian state of nature you were born free, it is self-evident that you have certain rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” According to Lockean logic, governments were formed to secure these rights, but only with the consent of the governed. Finally, if governments fail to secure these rights it logically follows that the people have the right to alter or abolish it, I.e., the right of revolution.

These inspiring words regarding freedom and rights were, of course, sadly inconsistent with the truth that chattel slavery then existed throughout much of the land. We know from their own letters and essays that the founders were well aware of this hypocrisy, detested it, but were unable to agree on a solution. That, they left to later generations. It is to them, or at least some of them, to whom we must now turn our attention.

Abraham Lincoln’s understanding of the Declaration’s first self-evident truth was pretty much in line with that of the founders. To quote (somewhat imprecisely) from an 1857 speech he gave in the aftermath of the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln explained that the founders: “did not mean to say that all were equal in all respects such as color, size, and intellect. Rather, the founders defined in what respects they did consider all men to be created equal -- and that was equal in certain specified unalienable rights. This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality or that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to do so. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”

But due to the glaring inconsistency between the inspirational language of the Declaration on the one hand, and the increase in chattel slavery on the other, southern slaveholders (and their northern allies) felt a need to criticize, not the “peculiar institution” of slavery, but the self-evident truths recited in America’s founding document. For example, in 1854, John Petit, a Democrat Senator from Indiana, argued that the Declaration’s self-evident truths were really self-evident lies. Other northern members of Congress agreed. And Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, in supporting legislation that would enable slavery to be extended to the west, contended that the rights recited in the Declaration were never intended to apply to Negroes.

But the real work of undermining the Declaration’s self-evident truths, and the Union they birthed, fell on John C. Calhoun. In essence, Calhoun argued that, since slavery had existed throughout human history, it was slavery, not freedom, that was in accord with the law of nature and of nature’s God. As such, the self-evident truths of the Declaration were fallacious because they were derived from a false understanding of natural law.

For whatever reasons, many of America’s intellectual elites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were even more vitriolic in their criticisms of the Declaration and its self-evident truths. Perhaps most vociferous in their criticisms were the most respected political philosophers of their day, such as William James, John Dewey, and Woodrow Wilson.

In the ensuing decades we have witnessed frequent criticism, if not outright ridicule, of the Declaration by both academia and the mass media. More recently, NPR, as if making a startling discovery, told its audience that the Declaration of Independence: “famously declares ‘that all men are created equal’ even though women, enslaved people and Indigenous Americans were not held as equal at the time.”

Is NPR’s view of our founding document really that superficial… and is that what it thinks our founders meant when they wrote those immortal words? More importantly, is this what we can expect to hear from people of their ilk on the next Independence Day?

I’m afraid it is, because I think more than mere superficiality and ignorance are at play here. Rather, it is a dark disdain for America. And the best way to show your dislike for America, is to show your dislike for the “truth,” particularly the self-evident truths recited in our founding document.

Image: John Trumball