American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 5
Part 5 of a Series
Philadelphia, 1776
“We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
- Thomas Jefferson
A century and a half after the Puritans had set foot on what is now Boston, Thomas Jefferson set out to write the Declaration of Independence. The America in which he lived bore little resemblance to John Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay Colony. Almost everything Winthrop feared had come to reality, and the result was a diverse, prosperous, and freethinking land. It was made up of 13 colonies, populated by a variety of peoples. Although English Protestants (of many flavors) predominated in numbers, language, and culture, there were Catholics in Maryland and Quakers in Pennsylvania, ex-convicts in Georgia and enslaved Blacks almost everywhere, but primarily in the South where they comprised 20% of the population. There was unimagined affluence and harsh poverty, liberty and bondage, hopeful immigrants and dispossessed natives, merchants and farmers. And as Ron DeSantis has recently pointed out, there were blacksmiths. Clearly, this was going to be a difficult coalition to hold together in war and later in peace.
So much had changed. Where Winthrop stressed communal obligations (“For this end, we must be knit together . . . as one man”), Jefferson stressed individual rights. Winthrop’s government came from God; Jefferson’s “from the consent of the governed.” Winthrop celebrated inequality; Jefferson extolled equality. Winthrop harked back to the Reformation; Jefferson personified the Enlightenment. Winthrop glorified God; Jefferson exalted Reason.
From its conception, the Declaration was a tortured document; its soaring rhetoric belied the facts on the ground: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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.”
But the truths were self-evident to almost no one, including the 56 signers at Independence Hall – the merchants, property owners, and slaveholders who represented a tiny percentage of the colonies’ population and yet who pledged “to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” They knew that they could lose all three, and yet they signed anyway, setting up an aspiration that would inspire and plague America ever after. A nation founded on unalienable rights was coming into being on land cleared through genocide and cultivated by slave labor. In a declaration whose first truth was equality, only one in five adults could vote. And, this time, the eyes of the world – or at least, of Europe – really were upon them.
Yet, as much as America had changed, the dream of Winthrop’s city on a hill persisted. It was a dream constantly at war with its own reality, a nightmare for enslaved Africans and native peoples hounded from their ancestral lands – “One kind of rebellion was celebrated,” writes Jill Lepore in These Truths, “the other suppressed” – and yet it produced a declaration that would stir millions around the world.
How is that even possible? Is the Declaration of Independence an exercise in hypocrisy? Were Jefferson’s words simply propaganda or even lies? The document was not a portrait of life in America; it was an argument meant for consumption in the colonies and in England – and beyond. It was a call to action. All these years later, its words endure.