To me, nothing’s quite so tedious as group wordsmithing, multiple minds inserting, deleting, changing, and reordering words. The end result usually feels forced, which is what it is. Our Declaration of Independence is usually credited to Jefferson, but there were five hashing things out. Jefferson originally wrote “We hold these truths to be sacred…” (which doesn’t sound like Jefferson, the least pious of the five). Benjamin Franklin nixed “sacred” and substituted “self-evident.” As Walter Isaacson explains, “The declaration they were writing was intended to herald a new type of nation, one in which our rights are based on reason, not the dictates or dogma of religion.” Fascinating.
Feelings and positions had to be intense in the room. Some wanted God in there – and so they landed on a compromise, not the lowest common denominator kind of compromise, but the “higher ground” kind. Isaacson perceives they were “balancing the role of divine providence and that of reason in determining our rights.” And so they devised what he calls “the greatest sentence ever crafted by human hand.”
What a bold claim! It’s remarkable and worth pondering: “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.”
Our five writers chose the right first word: “We.” Not “I, the king,” or “We the elite” (which they were, but they made space for others), but “We,” the people. It took them and later generations to cut loose from their noble but narrow view of who “We” the people would and wouldn’t be. Not women, not Native Americans, and not slaves. I love the way a word is set in stone, we don’t fully understand it yet, but because it’s set in stone, we’re stuck with it, and over time our discernment about that word deepens. People. Like so many words in the Bible, which are like holy magnets, drawing more people and circumstances and meanings in over centuries.
Franklin had visited Scotland and became close friends there with the philosopher David Hume, who taught the clear difference between “synthetic” truth, based on evidence you’ve gathered, and “self-evident” truth, discoverable by thought/reason alone, true by definition, not dependent on evidence. We aren’t asked to look around at many kinds of people and determine whether they are in fact equal. They don’t look alike, they aren’t treated equally, they have wildly divergent chances in life.
But beneath what we might observe or even foolishly infer about people, all are indeed equal. Such a biblical notion! Scripture doesn’t speak of equality, but insists that all are created in “the image of God.” Did the more religious among the five try to get “image of God” in there?
All are “endowed.” Perfect word. An endowment pays dividends forever. The corpus cannot be touched or frittered away. And with “unalienable rights.” Jefferson wrote inalienable. John Adams, in the final copy, switched to unalienable. The two were used interchangeably back then! The Bill of Rights would come later. Here at the genesis of the country, three rights led the way: Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of happiness. We will say more about the “right to life” in a later episode, and much more about “liberty,” “freedom,” which Americans prize above all else and yet we are so muddled and silly in thinking about and living into such freedom.
What of “the Pursuit of happiness”? Sometimes I feel they were inflicting an impossible burden on us. What is happiness anyhow? Is it fun, comfort, possessing, smiling and feeling good? If there is such a thing, it’s a byproduct, not the goal. I greatly admire historian David McCullough’s wisdom on that greatest of sentences:
“When our founders spoke of the ‘pursuit of happiness,’ they did not mean long vacations or the piling up of things. Happiness was in the enlargement of one’s being through the life of the mind and of the spirit.” Happiness was, for them, hard work, reading literature and history, and for most of them the spiritual life. Jesus would nod, and remind us of all he said about who’s “blessed” (Matthew 5:1-11) and how he came to give us peace (John 14:27) and to be one with Him and with one another (John 17) – and we might ponder another contender for the greatest sentence ever crafted: “I came that you might have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).
{By the way, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston rounded out the five, largely unknown and forgotten – which I like: good championed not only by the noteworthy luminaries, but some other guys too, like us, the people.}