In sum, America’s founding document contradicted the prevailing theory and practice in the rest of the world that prioritized government rights over individual rights. In America, the government was designed as the servant of the people, not their master.
AN APPLE OF GOLD AND A PICTURE OF SILVER
During the “Miracle in Philadelphia” in the summer of 1787, delegates to the Constitutional Convention translated the ideas of the Declaration of Independence into a supple, sophisticated, and unique expression of Enlightenment governing philosophy. Their work ultimately produced the United States Constitution, and shortly thereafter, its first ten amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights.
Two of the amendments, the ninth and tenth, state clearly where ultimate power lies—not with a dictatorial central power, but with the various states and their people. In the great debate leading up to the Constitution’s ratification, many states conditioned their acceptance of the Constitution on the promise that the first order of business after its ratification would be passing those amendments, a promise the Founders kept.
Abraham Lincoln employed a vivid analogy to explain the connection between the Declaration and the Constitution. He said the Declaration was like an “apple of gold,” and he likened the Constitution to a “picture of silver, subsequently framed around it.” He continued, “The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture. So let us act, that neither picture, or apple shall ever be blurred, or bruised or broken. That we may so act, we must study, and understand the points of danger.”
Undeniably, the Declaration’s commitment to unalienable rights had a profound impact on the drafting of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, resulting in the following features:• Religious liberty is the first liberty protected by our Bill of Rights, contributing to a free, flourishing religious life in the United States unlike that found in any other country.
• Private property is protected and contracts are upheld, so that people will be rewarded for their work and realize the fruits of their labor and their innovations.
• People can freely assemble and associate with whomever they want without interference from the government.
• People have a right to know the laws; these laws are followed by the government and are not applied arbitrarily; and people can petition to change the laws or government decisions.
• Government must protect the physical safety of the people in their homes and communities, and the safety and sovereignty of the nation itself—a precondition for securing all other rights.
The Constitution was not Americans’ first written commitment to these and other rights; as described below, the colonists had long been enacting their own written compacts and constitutions. But with the establishment of a new nation, distinctly American habits of liberty thrived in the new constitutional order and became the surest support for an individual’s rights and his ability to pursue happiness.
In a country of unique natural bounty, the protection of each of these rights through the rule of law led to extraordinary individual creativity and economic prosperity. These indisputably exceptional results originated from a unique set of historical and cultural circumstances. But exceptional results and exceptional circumstances should not be confused with the wellspring of American Exceptionalism expressed in the Declaration—the idea that the individual has unalienable rights from God that no government can abridge.
A HIGHER INSPIRATION
The Declaration’s writers understood there was a force in the universe greater than themselves, and they incorporated this humbling recognition in their work. One of the Declaration’s most famous passages proclaims, “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.” This assertion makes some key assumptions about the relationship between man and God:• It assumes that God created man.
• It assumes that God is sovereign over the universe.
• It assumes that man must obey an order of justice that God has instituted.
That order of justice requires all men and women to honor each other’s natural rights, because these rights are an unalienable endowment from the Almighty. When someone violates another’s rights, he is not merely breaking the law, he is violating God’s grant of protection.
This points to two additional assumptions underlying the Declaration: first, that if our rights are given by a divine Creator, then there is a divine plan for humanity; and second, that since all men are equal before God, they should be legally and politically equal as well. The equality of men was fundamental to the teachings of “New Light” preachers like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, which permeated all the colonies during the Great Awakening of the 1730s and ’40s.
The Declaration acknowledges that our Creator endows all men with unalienable rights, and that to secure those rights men organize governments. Thus the source of authority for both instituting government and deposing it lies with the people. Indeed, the Declaration’s opening paragraph asserts the people’s sovereign authority from God to determine their own government:When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. (Emphasis added)
With every individual receiving sovereign authority directly from God, the Founders argued that individuals then have the power to loan some of this sovereign authority to government to organize its powers in such a way as to advance their own safety and happiness.
Acceptance of this simple hierarchy—God, then the individual, then government—set America apart, an exception from all nations that came before it.
A NATION FORGED IN EQUALITY
The Declaration of Independence was clear on the issue of equality—“All men are created equal.” There would be no hereditary monarch ruling over his subjects, nor would the people be made subservient to a privileged aristocracy. First expressed in the Mayflower Compact more than 150 years earlier, the concept of legal equality was the only logical outcome of the Declaration’s proclamation of liberty, unalienable rights, and government being rooted in the consent of the governed. The perpetuation of slavery blatantly violated both the letter and the spirit of our founding document.
The great American nation that arose from our forefathers’ revolution was ripped asunder by the Civil War. The war initially centered around constitutional questions, but two years into that terrible conflict, on the field at Gettysburg, Lincoln fundamentally redefined the struggle by harkening back to the Declaration at the beginning of his historic address: “Four Score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Lincoln was saying the war was no longer being fought over a narrow disagreement over constitutional interpretation, but had become a far more fundamental dispute over the nature of human freedom and equality.
Indeed, America is perhaps the only nation on earth to fight a civil war over the nature of equality. Lincoln understood the wider ramifications of this struggle, repeatedly declaring that the United States was the “last best hope of earth,” and warning that the entire world would suffer if we failed to hold together a Union based on freedom.
During the twentieth century, America emerged triumphant from terrible struggles in which we spent trillions of dollars and lost hundreds of thousands of lives. Recall our various enemies: Germany under both the Kaiser and Hitler, Imperial Japan, worldwide Communism, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and currently, radical Islamism. Now consider this: did any of our foes engag
e in war to secure equality and individual rights? They might declare the superiority of their race or social class, or demand that all must submit to their religion. But never did one of our foes fight for the simple, self-evident truth that all men are created equal. It was for this principle that so many Americans made the ultimate sacrifice. And it is our duty to honor and remember them—and the ideals for which they fought.
AMERICAN CITIZENS OF BRITISH LIBERTY
The Declaration encapsulated the Founders’ ideas about politics, history, and philosophy, all of which were highly influenced by British thinkers. Most of the Founders were born in Britain’s North American colonies, though a few hailed from Britain itself or its other colonies. They considered themselves British, but emphasized their status as free and equal citizens and as beneficiaries of a British tradition of liberty, rather than as subjects of monarchical authority. As Bernard Bailyn writes, “The colonists’ attitude to the whole world of politics and government was fundamentally shaped by the root assumption that they, as Britishers, shared in a unique inheritance of liberty.”,2
This inheritance was a special source of pride for most Englishmen, as historian Gordon Wood observes:Englishmen everywhere of every social rank and of every political persuasion could not celebrate [the British Constitution] enough. Every cause, even repression itself, was wrapped in the language of English liberty. No people in the history of the world had ever made so much of it. Unlike the poor enslaved French, the English had no standing army, no lettres de cachet; they had their habeas corpus, their trials by jury, their freedom of speech and conscience, and their right to trade and travel; they were free from arbitrary arrest and punishment; their homes were their castles.3
The “liberties of Englishmen” were bedrock for the colonists, but they were keenly aware these rights were hard-won, unevenly applied, and if history was any guide, impermanent.
In Britain, natural rights were assumed to be an integral part of the unwritten English constitution. Beginning with the Magna Carta (Great Charter) in 1215, Britain had slowly and steadily limited the government’s powers and expanded the rights of its citizens. At Runnymede, in return for monetary payments from his barons, King John conceded that the barons had certain rights that he would not violate—an early step toward recognizing the principle of no taxation without representation. The Stuarts rolled back many of those ancient liberties, but the ensuing English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century, as well as the Glorious Revolution of 1688, revived Britain’s tradition of gradually limiting monarchical power.
By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a new doctrine was forming out of the British Common Law and the essays of political thinkers who chipped away at the legitimacy of absolute monarchs by proposing that citizens held permanent rights transcending those of governments. Though emerging in Britain, this new model reached full bloom first in the Scottish Enlightenment and then in the American colonies, where the reach of government was weaker and the lure of freedom was stronger. Americans increasingly believed they had the right to resist oppressive government, even if it was as powerful as the British Empire. This transformation from a government-centric model to a citizen-centric model was an intellectual revolution that formed the philosophical basis of the American Revolution that followed.
A NATION WITH THE SOUL OF A CHURCH
The Founders were undeniably religious, and their faith found expression in the Declaration’s assertion that man’s unalienable rights come from God. As John Adams declared in 1813, “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence, were . . . the general principles of Christianity, in which all those sects were united, and . . . that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God; and that those principles of liberty are as unalterable as human nature and our terrestrial, mundane system.”4
However, most of the Founders’ religiosity broke with the traditional bounds of Christian thought in Europe. They were particularly critical of the trappings of official, state-sponsored religion across the old continent and especially in England. Although the Glorious Revolution had resulted in a measure of tolerance for religious dissent in Britain, the Church of England remained a privileged, state-sponsored faith, and religious minorities faced various forms of official discrimination, causing hundreds of thousands of Scottish and Scotts-Irish Presbyterians to migrate to America.
By the time of America’s founding, by contrast, religious pluralism was flourishing in the colonies, which provided a welcome home for religious refugees. In America, citizens were free to select the church they attended without government interference. As a result of this “American voluntarism,” the colonies’ churches enjoyed much higher attendance rates and more committed congregations than was the case on the continent.
Freedom of religion, absent the stifling bureaucracy and hierarchy that characterized Europe’s official churches, democratized the practice of faith in the American colonies, giving rise to a vibrant, pluralistic religious community. A British bureaucrat observed that the colonies had “no distinctions of Bishops, Priests or Deacons, no Rule or Order, no Dean Chapters or Archdeacons. All were Priests and nothing more.”5 With God as the only recognized higher authority, the individual was made directly accountable to Him. America’s flourishing religious tradition stood in stark contrast to Europe’s rigid, conflict-ridden religious life, encouraging the Founders to believe that a country founded on liberty could not only survive, but thrive.
NATURAL LAW AND THE NATURAL RIGHTS OF MAN
Aside from its religious influences, the Declaration was impacted by European thinking on the issue of liberty. The document confirmed natural rights stemming from the identification of man as an inherently sovereign and dignified being—a proposition the Founders confirmed through both reason and experience.
These ideas had developed over centuries. Drawing on Greek classical thinkers, Thomas Aquinas and other medieval theologians identified man’s ability to reason and act autonomously as evidence of his personal sovereignty. Renaissance thinkers later stressed man’s self-awareness (Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”) as proof of personal sovereignty, which could be expressed outwardly in violence or benevolence, in horror or genius. Great individual accomplishments in arts and sciences reinforced this notion—from Da Vinci to Shakespeare, from Galileo to Newton, individuals demonstrated the power to remake the world around them.
Other thinkers developed a parallel belief in the inviolate dignity of man. Citing Judeo-Christian texts, medieval scholars identified the inherent dignity of man as a gift from God. Because the universality of God’s gift required the same responsibility of everyone, this reasoning implied all men were equal in God’s eyes—a revolutionary doctrine that inspired challenges to the authority of Church prelates and state officials alike.
Drawing on these currents, the English philosopher John Locke devised theories that would strongly influence America’s Founders. Locke argued against the ideas of fellow Englishman Thomas Hobbes, who insisted it was man’s natural instinct to reject the dignity of his fellow man. This instinct, Hobbes argued, reduced life to a brutish, anarchic “state of nature” that can only be avoided by ceding individual rights to an immensely powerful central authority—a so-called “Leviathan.” For Locke, however, individuals in the “state of nature” were sovereign and equal under God, and therefore dignified. Locke observes:People in this state do not have to ask permission to act or depend on the will of others to arrange matters on their behalf. The natural state is also one of equality in which all power and jurisdiction is reciprocal and no one has more than another. It is evident that all human beings—as creatures belonging to the same species and rank and born indiscriminately with all the same natural advantages and faculties—are equal amongst themselves. They have no relationship of subordination or subjection unless God (the lord and master of them all) had clearly set one person above another and conferred on him an un
doubted right to dominion and sovereignty.
Locke believed man’s inherent reason forestalled the onset of a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” yet he acknowledged that reason, by leaving man free to do good or ill, made an individual’s “life, liberty, and property” insecure. To correct for that insecurity, individuals can willingly band together to create a society that secures rights for mutual benefit.
According to Locke’s doctrine of consent, the transfer of power from individuals to a state or society is conditional and incomplete. Man’s natural freedom, and his right to life and liberty, are God-given and cannot be ceded even willingly because they are not his to give—in other words, these rights are “unalienable.” Locke argued,The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule. The liberty of man, in society, is to be under no other legislative power, but that established, by consent, in the commonwealth; nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact, according to the trust put in it.
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