How the Declaration of Independence Transforms the United States

The Declaration of Independence changed the United States in many ways - some obvious, others less so.

One misconception that many people hold about the American Revolution is that it was always, at heart, about freedom and liberty. I’m not convinced that the facts bear this conclusion out, however. At least, not in the way our collective memory recalls and justifies the American Revolution.

Let me explain what I mean. When people study the causes of the American Revolution, nearly every event we focus on is about money. The Proclamation Line of 1763 tried to prevent colonists from moving to the west. This frustrated wealthy land speculators and poorer colonists looking for cheaper land alike. The various taxes that Britain tried to impose on its American colonists? All about money. You could argue, maybe, that the Americans also tried to assert their political rights in contesting these taxes. But the famous phrase “no taxation without representation” is, at heart, about the right of the colonists to decide for themselves who gets taxed and how much. That’s still about money. Tea smugglers organized the Boston Tea Party.

They did? Those “selfless” patriots dumping tea into Boston’s harbor were actually self-interested “patriots?” Read about it here.

You get the idea. Money and taxation lay at the heart of our list of main causes of the American Revolution. Those are not, historically speaking, radical, unusual, or particularly inspiring things to base a rebellion upon. Lots of people have risen up to contest those things over the centuries.

Why, then, do so many people claim the American Revolution was about world-historical concepts like freedom and democracy?

That’s where the Declaration of Independence comes in. The Declaration helped transform a dispute with Britain over taxation, a constitutional quarrel about the rights of Americans within the British Empire, into something greater, historically speaking—a revolution in the name of natural rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those ideas have inspired countless people across the world in the years since 1776.

One example—Mexico’s independence movement from Spain. Consider this passage from the 1821 Declaration of Independence of the Mexican Empire:

“Restored then this part of the North to the exercise of all the rights given by the Author of Nature and recognized as unalienable and sacred by the civilized nations of the Earth, in liberty to constitute itself in the manner which best suits its happiness and through representatives who can manifest its will and plans, it begins to make use of such precious gifts and solemnly declares by means of the Supreme Junta of the Empire that it is a Sovereign nation and independent of old Spain . . .”

The Declaration of Independence was not the only document assisting in the transformation of the goals of the American Revolution, however. Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet Common Sense gets a major assist. Its emotional language and searing indictment of the flaws of monarchy played a role, too. Together, they helped convince Americans that something greater was at stake than tax collectors reaching into their collective wallets.

But we Americans can, and often do, take this praise and self-congratulation too far. The Declaration of Independence also contains its share of hypocrisy, and we should not ignore that fact in our rush to pat ourselves on the back for this contribution to history.

Consider this famous section: “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.”

Taken at face value, this statement of principle sounds awesome. And if the United States had ever made a sustained, good-faith, and uninterrupted attempt at carrying these words into practice, it really would be awesome.

Alas, this has not happened, the willing self-deception of Mike Pence, Tim Scott, and six Supreme Court justices to the contrary. Our national efforts in this direction have, instead, been sporadic, halfhearted, and incomplete. At times, the present included, the United States has gone into reverse on making good this statement of principle.

Things were even worse in 1776 when Thomas Jefferson penned the words quoted above, granted. At the time only a small fraction of Americans could claim they legitimately possessed life, liberty, and the ability to pursue happiness. I’ll name four major groups that lacked these natural rights. Before reading onward, see how many you can predict.

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1 – Slaves. Typically, slaves come to mind first as a group deprived of their natural rights—and for good reason. Their oppression was the harshest, most brutal, and most obvious. They didn’t control their own lives, by definition had no liberty, and had little opportunity to pursue happiness on their own terms.

2 – Women. An even larger group than slaves, even if their lack of natural rights was not as obvious and publicly humiliating. But women possessed far fewer legal rights than men, thus limiting their liberty and ability to pursue happiness.

3 – Native Americans. This group did not gain American citizenship until 1924, and in 1776 Americans generally considered them hostile outsiders even when they lived within the boundaries of the United States.

4 – White men with limited or no property. It’s easy to forget this group, but property qualifications for voting hampered their ability to secure equal rights and treatment, too.

After subtracting these four groups, that doesn’t leave much, does it? Generally speaking, full life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness belonged to men with light skin who owned a minimum amount of property.

Clearly, then, Jefferson’s ideals fell short of reality in 1776. Well short.

Does that make him a hypocrite? Someone who wrote things that sounded inspiring but who had no vision, and maybe even no clear intent, of how to make the inspiring words into reality? Next time we’ll take up this question and bring our discussion of the Declaration of Independence to an end. But in the meantime, please chime in with your thoughts on this question!

Thanks for reading, and I welcome constructive and polite comments.

Author’s Note: I do not use any AI when writing my Substack pieces.