The Declaration of Independence

Description:

If the most important words in the United States Constitution are the first three, “We the People,” we can thank the Declaration of Independence for giving birth to them, for she was the mother of that People, and being of great resource, she acted as her own midwife.    

The magna charta of the United States has gotten away from us, even as its phrases run through our heads unbidden and half-meaning, perhaps a little like the lyrics of a song which you’re tired of hearing, but which won’t stop singing itself in your head.  

To be tired of hearing of the ground of one’s own being is not likely to be a healthy condition.  

In the 250 years since the Declaration was written, a great deal of water has passed under the national bridge.  The river has often been flooded, and the water mostly  turbid and muddy, but when the Declaration was written there was no bridge to “o’erleap the time to come,” no bridge to a possible future beyond the Revolution.  There was at the time of the writing only the dangerous gamble of the Revolution itself, on the doubtful chance of the success of which depended the completion of a loopy dream-span over a “course of events,” which left unbridged, likely would have left the Declaration yet another entry in a litter of lost causes – in the tide of human misery, another one that got away.  For the bridge begun by 13 of the 26 British colonies in North America and the Caribbean, to clash metaphors, had cut a new road, soon to be a National Road – and what is such a road but a symbol of the nation itself, which exists when it might not have?  To draw another likeness, consider, if you will, a newborn of doubtful vitality worrying its parents, who at long last in the fullness of time, see the baby arrive at healthy maturity, bestriding the narrow world in which her days had once seemed savagely numbered, living to reflect to those same parents, out of the mirror of her own full-grown eyes, the pride they feel in knowing that the leaden tears against which they once strained in fear of an anticipated grief have been transmuted through the miraculous glass of those shining eyes into golden drops.  The infant lived, grew, thrived, when it seemed doomed.  By the very meaning of the word, an infant does not speak.  The Declaration of Independence, both mother and midwife, somehow spoke – wrote -- the infant United States into existence.  By an act of verbal self-generation, the all-generous word made the all-living flesh, and it fueled the Revolution that kept the flesh alive.  And the flesh grew into a full body and came into a full voice.  And somehow we who have come after it are the lengthened articulation of its utterance.  

We think we know the Declaration of Independence, but it contains multitudes.  If we are to recover it, we could turn to those who understood it as well as anyone: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.  But Lincoln and Douglass cannot read the Declaration for us.  They read it for themselves, and we must do the same for ourselves.  How do we recover such a text, so brief yet so seemingly elusive?  Read it slowly.  Read it slowly without making any assumptions or as few as we can manage.  Which is what we aim to do in this short series: try to read with fresh eyes what 250 years have intermittently beclouded.  The baby’s jaundice cleared, but in her weariness it has come back to afflict her as a thoughtful but jaded adult.  Her eyes have grown bloodshot with reading the bad news.  If there are no royal roads for discovering the truth about the most humanly important things, there is also nothing in the modesty of nature that a little cheerful slow reading can’t begin to clarify, just a little bit.  The Declaration is about 1330 words, and it can be read aloud at a comfortable, steady pace in about ten minutes.  And after that, it demands – and repays -- to be read word by word, line by line, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, with the care one would bring to the reading of a close argument, rhetorical, poetic, legal, philosophic.  It is a generous text; it generated us.

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footnotes

1. Nor is it clear that the indispensable aid given to the Revolution’s cause would have been forthcoming without the words of the Declaration, for the Declaration justified the aid that made its words come true.  To cite an example, more than ancient enmity against an archrival and a desire to avenge the death of a father killed by that archrival in the last war fought against it inspired the young Marquis at age 19 or 20, still at the time speaking almost no English, to risk life and fortune to traverse the waters to put himself in the hands of the very man who (fighting on the British side) had begun the war in which his father had been killed.  For indeed Lafayette’s father had been killed in the French and Indian (Seven Years’) War when the young Marquis was scarcely of an age to remember him, and it is a stunning fact that George Washington touched off that war in the backwoods of Pennsylvania as a 22-year-old colonial officer in the late spring of 1754, at which point he was only a little older than the fatherless French son who now came to put himself under Washington’s command.  If Lafayette’s was but the best-known French face to brave the hazards of aiding the upstarts, and is thought only coincidentally (even conveniently) motivated by the lofty sounds skipping over the waves from unknown Americans who had made an enemy of his enemy, we nonetheless have no reason to conclude his was the only face to set itself against l’Angleterre for more reasons than merely because it was l’Angleterre. 

2. About ten days before taking office at the hour of the nation’s gravest peril, Abraham Lincoln, standing on the spot, said that every political sentiment he had ever felt in his soul had come from Independence Hall, because it was from there that the Declaration of Independence had been broadcast to the ears of “a candid world.”  In an unpublished meditation likely written some weeks earlier in that most awful winter of discontent, he compared the Declaration to the apples of gold in the famous Proverb; the Constitution was the pictures of silver: the frame, the pictures of silver, were for the sake of the apples, not the apples for the frame.  But perhaps the most devastating criticism ever made of America's failure to live up to the Declaration of Independence was written by Frederick Douglass, whose 1852 speech, “What is July 4th to the Negro?,” which by the very depth and power of its criticism reveals itself as one of the most ringing endorsements of the Declaration’s ideals ever made.  Douglass did not condemn the Declaration; he condemned the betrayal of it.  The betrayal was written in the scars on his back; the condemnation of that betrayal was written with hands once so cracked with the winter’s cold, thanks to a rich master’s savage neglect, that the gashes caused by the cracking were deep enough to hold the pen with which he wrote the condemnation in his Narrative.  No paper patriot: paper was as flesh to Douglass.