Pauline Maier's American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997) is the best single book on the history of the Declaration of Independence. I say that because I have learned more about the Declaration from this book than from any other. Nevertheless, I disagree with some of her primary claims.
Here is her summary of her argument:
". . . The Declaration was at first forgotten almost entirely, then recalled and celebrated by Jeffersonian Republicans, and later elevated into something akin to holy writ, which made it a prize worth capturing on behalf of one cause after another. The politics that attended its creation never entirely left its side, such that the Declaration of Independence, which became a powerful statement of national identity, has also been at the center of some of the most intense conflicts in American history, including that over slavery which threatened the nation itself. In the course of those controversies, the document assumed a function altogether different from that of 1776: it became not a justification of revolution, but a moral standard by which the day-to-day policies and practices of the nation could be judged" (154).
Here and throughout her book, Maier was elaborating ideas first set forth in 1962 in an article by Philip Detweiler--"The Changing Reputation of the Declaration of Independence: The First Fifty Years." She was also developing the arguments from people like Willmoore Kendall, Mel Bradford, Garry Wills, and the young Harry Jaffa about Lincoln's "inventive" interpretation of the Declaration at Gettysburg.
Although I agree with much of this, I disagree with three points: her sneering scorn for the elevation of the Declaration "into something akin to holy writ," her claim that the Declaration was "at first forgotten," and her assertion that originally the Declaration did not provide a "moral standard" for government.
POLITICAL RELIGION
As suggested by her mocking title, Maier was disdainful of the religious language and rituals that treated the Declaration as "American Scripture." She began and ended her book describing her visit to the "Shrine" for the Declaration of Independence and the other "Charters of Freedom" in the Rotunda of the National Archives in Washington. This reminded her of "the awesome, gilded, pre-Vatican II altars of my Catholic girlhood," and she was disgusted by it all (xiv).
Well, of course, many of us--particularly, those who are academic scholars--will find this sacralization of American political documents a bit ridiculous. But what's the harm in doing this? Maier thought this really was harmful. Here's the last sentence of her book: "The vitality of the Declaration of Independence rests upon the readiness of the people and their leaders to discuss its implications and to make the crooked ways straight, not in the mummified paper curiosities lying in state at the Archives; in the ritual of politics, not in the worship of false gods who are at odds with our eighteenth-century origins and who war against our capacity, together, to define and realize right and justice in our time" (215).
But she offered no evidence to support this claim. And a few paragraphs before this passage, Maier praised Martin Luther King for his "I have a dream" speech in 1963--the centennial of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation--delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. King's quoting from the Declaration was part of a sermon filled with Biblical references and imagery. And so, he was promoting the religiosity of "American Scripture." But he did this to advocate political change to fulfill the Declaration's promise of equality of rights for all, which advanced the Civil Rights Movement, and thus expressed "our capacity, together, to define and realize right and justice in our time."
ALMOST FORGOTTEN?
Maier said the Declaration was "at first almost entirely forgotten." That "almost" is significant. I agree that from 1776 to 1790, there were few prominent references to the Declaration--particularly, the second paragraph (the self-evident truths). But even so, it was not entirely forgotten during this period.
In his critical review of Maier's book, Michael Zuckert pointed to two important references to the Declaration in the 1787 debate over the Constitution (Zuckert 1998:358-59). First, Zuckert cited Federalist Number 40, where James Madison quoted from the Declaration. Second, Zuckert quoted the Antifederalist writer Brutus as saying: "If we may collect the sentiments of the people of America, from their own most solemn declaration, they hold these truths as self-evident, that all men are by nature free. No one man, therefore, or any class of men have a right by the law of nature, or of god, to assume or exercise authority over their fellows. The origin of society then is to be sought, . . . in the united consent of those who associate."
I have a copy of a letter that Maier sent to Zuckert about his review (October 16, 1999), in which she said that this evidence actually supported her argument. She noted that Zuckert had not actually quoted the passage from Madison, which referred to "the transcendent and precious right of the people to 'abolish or alter their governments as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.'" She said that since this "imprecise quotation" referred to the Declaration's assertion of the right to revolution, this supported her argument that the Declaration was originally understood as declaring the Americans' right of revolution, but without giving any attention to the Declaration's assertion of equality and inherent rights and the government's duty to secure those rights.
Maier said that the passage from Brutus also sustained her book's argument. Although Brutus's reference to "self-evident" truths echoes the Declaration of Independence, his statement "that all men are by nature free" sounds more like Virginia's Declaration of Rights adopted in June 1776 after revising George Mason's draft--"all men are by nature equally free and independent."
In her book, Maier did indeed argue that Mason's draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights had much more influence on the other revolutionary state bills of rights than did the Declaration of Independence. But it's hard to see the point of this argument given that she had written that Jefferson's "rewriting of Mason produced a more memorable statement of the same content" (134). If Jefferson's Declaration had "the same content" as Mason's Declaration, then it would seem that the two declarations were in agreement in their principles.
In her article in the Washington and Lee Law Review, Maier rightly noted that Zuckert had misquoted the passage from Brutus. Brutus had not referred to the Americans' "most solemn declaration" but to their "most solemn declarations" (Storing 1981, 2:372). Brutus was surely referring not just to the Declaration of Independence but to the state declarations of rights, such as the Virginia Declaration of Rights. But if these state declarations of rights have "the same content" as the Declaration of Independence in their statement of principles, it's hard to see Maier's point here.
Moreover, there were other clear examples of the Declaration of Independence being cited in the constitutional ratification debates that Zuckert did not mention. An Antifederalist--"A Georgian"--referred to "our glorious Declaration of Independence" as a model for "the principles of republican liberty and independence" that should be the model for a federal constitution (Storing 1981, 5:129, 135). In the Pennsylvanian Ratification Convention, John Smilie complained about the lack of a bill of rights in the proposed Constitution, and insisted: "Let us recur to the memorable declaration of the 4th of July, 1776." He then quoted in full the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence (Bailyn 1993, 1:805).
Clearly, the Declaration of Independence was not "completely forgotten" during this period from 1776 to 1790.
A MORAL STANDARD FOR GOVERNMENT
Maier's most fundamental argument in her book is that the Declaration of Independence as written in 1776 had only one function--to declare and justify revolution--and that it was only many years later that it was transformed so that it had a second function: to provide "a moral standard by which the day-to-day policies and practices of the nation could be judged," with the most prominent principle of that moral standard being the Declaration's assertion that "all men are created equal" and endowed with equal rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (154-55).
That "moral standard" was stated in the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence. But Maier claimed that from 1776 to 1790, almost no one thought that opening section of the Declaration was important. It was only later, after the Jeffersonian Republicans had transformed the interpretation of the Declaration, that the "self-evident truths" of the second paragraph became the most important part of the Declaration.
Elaborating the story first told by Detweiler, Maier said that in the early years after 1776, the Declaration was celebrated as a practical event--the effective declaration of America's independence from Great Britain--but not as a statement of theoretical principles ("We hold these truths to be self-evident"). In the annual Fourth of July celebrations, almost nothing was said about those principles.
That began to change in the 1790's. One early sign of the change was an article in a Philadelphia newspaper published on July 7, 1792, where the writer said that the Declaration was "not to be celebrated, merely as affecting the separation of one country from the jurisdiction of another; but as being the result of a rational discussion and definition of the rights of man, and the end of civil government" (Detweiler 1962, 565).
But in 1792, talk about "the rights of man" conjured up images of the French Revolution, which was politically polarizing for Americans. The Federalists and the Republicans had become the two major parties, and while the Federalists were anti-French and pro-British, the Republicans were pro-French and anti-British. The Federalists were not inclined to celebrate the Declaration of Independence because it was associated with the French revolutionary spirit, and it was critical of Great Britain. And since the Federalists were opposed to Jefferson, they could not revere Jefferson's Declaration.
Once Jefferson became President in 1801, his party gained political dominance, and the Jeffersonian Republicans began to create the new image of the Declaration of Independence as the statement of the distinctively American credo of the natural equality of man and government as securing the natural rights of man. After the War of 1812, the Federalist Party disintegrated, and the Jeffersonian Republican view of the Declaration became pervasive.
As the American debate over slavery intensified during this period, many abolitionists invoked the Declaration's principle of human equality as a moral standard for condemning slavery as naturally unjust. while many proslavery Southern leaders denounced that assertion of equality as a dangerous falsehood. Although Lincoln did not agree with the abolitionist demand for the immediate abolition of slavery, he did agree that the Declaration's principle of equality was morally right, and that this justified prohibiting the introduction of slavery into the western territories.
Against this, Stephen Douglas argued that the principle of popular sovereignty should allow the people of the western territories to decide by majority vote whether they wanted slavery or not, and that the Declaration was never intended to assert a principle of human equality by which slavery could be morally condemned. For Douglas, the Declaration had only one purpose--to explain and justify American Independence from Great Britain.
According to Maier, Douglas was right about the original meaning of the Declaration: it was only a Declaration of Independence, and it was not intended to assert the moral standards for a free society, as Lincoln believed (203-206). What Lincoln did in the Gettysburg Address--finding the national identity of America in the Declaration's principles of equality and liberty--was morally inspiring but historically false.
What Maier failed to see, however, is how the actual text of the Declaration explained and justified the Revolution through a general theory of just government (in the first two paragraphs) that also set the moral standards for judging the conduct of any government. Michael Zuckert has made the best case for this in his essay on "Locke in America: The Philosophy of the Declaration of Independence" (Zuckert 2002, 203-234). But as I have said in a previous post, I disagree with Zuckert on one point: while he says that the Declaration assumes a "mythic history" of human politics beginning in the state of nature, I see that history as an empirically true evolutionary history from the state of nature of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
When the Jeffersonian Republicans directed public attention to the high moral standards for politics set in the first two paragraphs of the Declaration, they were not creating a fictional "myth," as Maier claimed, but making a true discovery of what was really there in the text of the Declaration. As one historian of the American Revolution has described it, this was "The Discovery of the Declaration of Independence by the People of the United States" (Fitzpatrick 1924, 9-20).
REFERENCES
Bailyn, Bernard, ed. 1993. The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification. 2 volumes. New York: The Library of America.
Detweiler, Philip F. 1962. "The Changing Reputation of the Declaration of Independence: The First Fifty Years." William and Mary Quarterly 19: 557-574.
Fitzpatrick, John C. 1924. The Spirit of the Revolution: New Light from Some of the Original Sources of American History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Maier, Pauline. 1997. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Maier, Pauline. 1999. "The Strange History of 'All Men Are Created Equal'". Washington and Lee Law Review 56: 873-888.
Storing, Herbert J., ed. 1981. The Complete Anti-Federalist. 7 volumes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Zuckert, Michael. 1998. "A Work of Our Own Hands." Review of Politics 60: 355-360.
Zuckert, Michael. 2002. Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.
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