Americans will celebrate our 250th birthday this year on July 4, as we should. But such celebrations, perhaps unintentionally, have also drawn attention to our nation’s darkest failures—and raised new questions about how we can contend with the paradoxes of our painful past.
Take Thomas Jefferson. Although a slaveholder himself, he is rightly venerated for making an indelible case for the “inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It is less well known that Jefferson twice unsuccessfully introduced legislation in the Virginia House of Burgesses to abolish the heinous institution of slavery that made his life comfortable. In Jefferson’s 1774 pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, he wrote that “the abolition of slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.” In the one book Jefferson wrote, Notes on the State of Virginia, he denounced the practice even though he never freed his own slaves. Should his hypocrisy erase the grandeur of the Declaration? No, because the principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence were always more important than a single man.
Jefferson always denied that he showed much creativity in writing the Declaration. He claimed merely to “place before mankind the common sense of the subject” of self-government. But what was that “common sense”? And where did it come from?
Some might say it came from Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, which swept across the colonies like a tidal wave in early 1776. Having immigrated from England to Philadelphia in 1774, the audacious Paine claimed that Americans, for the first time since Noah’s Ark, could begin the world over again. Tens of thousands of readers were thrilled by Paine’s rousing call to shed British rule.
Or take the irascible John Adams, now maligned for dismissing his wife Abigail’s demand for women’s rights and for silencing his opponents during his presidency. Even so, he might have contributed as much to shaping Americans’ thinking during these crucial years as the more celebrated Jefferson. The Continental Congress named Adams, one of the few lifelong opponents of slavery among the founders, to serve with Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin on the committee charged with making the case for independence. The usually egocentric Adams insisted that Jefferson, the better writer, should draft the Declaration. Adams and Franklin, thinking strategically, realized that Americans would unite behind the firebrands of Boston and Pennsylvania only if more conservative Virginia signed on.
Writing to Jeffers in 1815, Adams accurately observed that the Revolution occurred “in the minds of the people,” from 1760 to 1775, before the first shots were fired in Lexington and Concord. Adams played a crucial, seldom acknowledged role in that intellectual revolution. Starting in the 1760s, this shoemaker’s son established his prominence with a string of stinging polemical attacks on British rule. Adams skewered all British attempts to extend their authority over the colonies. He pointed out that Americans had been governing themselves, under their own charters and through their own legislative assemblies, for decades, in some instances for more than a century.
These Americans, who excluded women, enslaved Africans, and destroyed indigenous peoples, do not fit our mold of democracy-loving leaders. Recent scholarship and Ken Burns’s fine The American Revolution series rightly stress the limits of self-government from today’s perspective.
But Adams insisted the experience of self-rule had convinced his generation that neither Parliament nor the king could legitimately exercise authority over them. Adams drew on many earlier European, British, and colonial writers, but he also emphasized existing practices of government in Britain’s North American colonies. In striking contrast to England, where only around 17% of the king’s male subjects could vote, more than 66% of white male colonists enjoyed the franchise because property ownership was so widespread. Adams hammered home the essential point: his fellow Americans had long lived under democratic governments, without English interference, thanks to what Edmund Burke called “salutary neglect.”
Adams brought his ideas together just before Paine and Jefferson wrote. In response to pleas from several colonies after Congress instructed the new states to write or update their constitutions, Adams penned one of the most influential documents in U.S. history, his Thoughts on Government. Adams encouraged his correspondents to adapt the framework of self-government he proposed to suit the existing institutions and expectations of different states. His model quickly became the template for state constitutions in North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, and other states in the sprawling new nation. All forged forms of government that limited executive and judicial authority and empowered popularly elected assemblies. When Adams himself was later invited to write a constitution for his home state of Massachusetts, he began with the phrase “We the People,” and emphasized the foundation of government in town meetings. He stressed that every power, jurisdiction, and right begins and ends with the people—citizens committed not merely to their individual liberties but to the common good.
Although more than 90 declarations of independence poured forth from the town, county, and colonial governments in the year before July 4, 1776, Adams’s Thoughts on Government might have been as influential as any other single text. Newspapers and magazines echoed the language of the colonies’ earliest founding documents, some of which had declared the new governments “democracies” from the start. Hundreds of pamphlets condemned Britain’s efforts to rein in the legislatures that had effectively governed the colonies since the 17th century. All these declarations stressed community and responsibility as well as individual rights.
Paine, Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams agreed that self-government requires the rough economic equality of all citizens, and all denounced Britain’s vast disparities of wealth and power. Both the monarchy and the hereditary property and privileges of the House of Lords were antithetical to the spirit and the laws of the state governments being created in the new nation. Jefferson savaged Britain’s aristocracy of wealth in a draft constitution for Virginia submitted just weeks before writing the Declaration. He proposed appropriating 50 acres to each citizen to ensure self-sufficiency, and he attacked the practices of primogeniture and entail that perpetuated estates such as his own. Adams urged making land acquisition easy for every member of society so that small landowners could “ensure equal liberty and public virtue.” Paine and Franklin’s Pennsylvania was widely hailed among Europeans as “the best poor-man’s country.”
The widespread commitment to white male supremacy makes these Americans’ professions of faith in democracy ring hollow today. Yet when they proclaimed their devotion not only to liberty but also to the twin principles of equality and self-government, they enshrined ideals that later inspired the voices that helped address American hypocrisy, from Pequot leader William Apess and Frederick Douglass to the women of Seneca Falls.
So was Jefferson right? Was he simply expressing the common sense of the people? Two hundred fifty years later, Americans should remember that the Revolution was fought not merely to secure independence from British rule. It was fought by people who, despite all their regional, racial, religious, and gender-based animosities, agreed to reject the power of kings and the privileges of aristocrats. They fought on behalf of ordinary citizens, empowered, for the first time in modern history, to act on the idea that all authority in a democracy comes from, and remains in the hands of, the people.