On July 4, 1776, the signers of the Declaration of Independence affirmed, “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.” What is meant here by “all men”? Does this mean “all human beings”?
In his book Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, Jon Meacham asserted that Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the first draft of the Declaration, “basically meant all white men, especially propertied ones.” Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law, holds a similar view. In his book America Declares Independence, Dershowitz endorses the exclusive interpretation:
If the equality of “all Men” had any relevance to their rights, as Jefferson suggested they did, then these words could only have included white, Protestant, landowning males—since blacks, non-Protestants, non-landowners, and women were denied some of the most basic rights we take for granted today. Some or all could not vote, serve on juries, hold public office, appear as witnesses, make contracts, or live freely.
Are Meacham and Derschowitz right? Does the Declaration mean to exclude most human beings from its ambit?
Sed contra, the original meaning of the Declaration of Independence includes all human beings, despite the reality of a lack of fundamental legal rights for Blacks, non-Protestants, non-landowners, and women in 1776. This is made clear by considering other declarations made at the time of the American founding. In his essay, “The Universal Principles of the American Founding,” Thomas G. West points out:
“Men,” in this document as in all leading statements of principle in the founding era, refers to all human beings, not just to males. One can see this in other pronouncements of Congress from the same period, in which parallel phrases were used, such as “humanity,” “mankind,” “inhabitants.” For example, Congress’s 1774 Declarations and Resolves states that “the inhabitants [i.e., not only the males] of the English colonies in North-America, by the immutable laws of nature, . . . have the following RIGHTS: . . . life, liberty, and property.”
The leading statements of principle at the time of the founding mean to include all human beings, not just male human beings within its scope.
“In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.”
The inclusive understanding of the Declaration is also bolstered by considering its first draft. In her book Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, Danielle Allen points out that the original draft of the Declaration contains a paragraph about the violation of the natural rights of slaves. The first draft reads that King George
has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.
Allen argues that “Jefferson talks about markets where ‘MEN,’ which he capitalizes, are bought and sold. In other words, he is calling the slaves ‘men.’ And when he does this, he can’t mean males only, because those markets were for men, women, and children. So when, in the second sentence, he writes that all men are created equal, he must mean all people—whatever their color, sex, age, or status.” Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration includes Black men, women, and children within its scope.
Precisely for this reason, the Southern state constitutions adopted after the Declaration distance themselves from the inclusive meaning of the Declaration. As Carl Becker notes, the state constitutions in slave states did not speak of “all men” but of “all freemen.” Becker writes, “in the constitutions of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky (1799), Mississippi, and Texas (1845), the phrase ‘All men, when they form a social compact, are equal’ was changed to read ‘All freemen, when they form a social compact, are equal.’”
Advocates of slavery often rejected the Declaration precisely because they understood it to include Black human beings. For example, in 1826, Thomas Jefferson’s cousin, the Virginian slave owner John Randolph, defended slavery by calling human equality “a falsehood, a most pernicious falsehood, even though I find it in the Declaration of Independence.” In 1837, Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina rejected the “false and dangerous notion” that all men are created equal.
If the American founders meant to include all human beings within the scope of the Declaration, how are we to explain that some of them, like Jefferson, actually owned slaves? Jefferson knew slavery was wrong, but could not bring himself to do what he knew was right. There was a gap, a Grand Canyon, between the principles he espoused and the way he lived. His soaring rhetoric of liberty as a patriot was soiled by the sordid reality of life as a slave owner.
Despite his terrible deeds of injustice, Jefferson would have agreed with the judgment of Abraham Lincoln:
There never had been a man, so far as I knew or believed in the whole world, who had said that the Declaration of Independence did not include negroes in the term “all men.” I reassert it today. . . . [The Declaration applied] to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began—so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.
Great principles undergird the founding of our nation, despite Jefferson’s and our own failures to live up to them.