“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one 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 that impel them to such a course. We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.”
So begins the 1848 “Declaration of Sentiments,” the culminating statement of the Women’s Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, N.Y. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the brilliant 32-year-old author, gamely echoed the Declaration of Independence.
Stanton submitted a “long train of abuses” to “a candid world.” Having refused woman a voice in government, she explained, man “oppressed her on all sides.” Man oppressed woman legally, economically, socially, educationally, morally, professionally and religiously. “He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.” Stanton and her co-signatories (68 women and 32 men) demanded a simple, audacious remedy. They demanded the vote.
The founders are justly celebrated for what they built, but they must also be remembered for the inequalities they perpetuated. They initially restricted the franchise to white men of property, and barred women from institutional politics. New Jersey, the sole, brief exception, restricted the vote to white men in 1807.
Most painfully, given everything they professed and dared to change, the founders embraced the British Empire’s commitment to prosperity through exploitation. They preserved and even accelerated an economic and political system designed to strip Indigenous people of their homelands on a continental scale and to rob most African Americans (a fifth of the U.S. population in 1776) of their labor, their bodies and their children. The Declaration’s notorious invocation of “merciless Indian savages” and its more circumspect reference to “domestic insurrections” (that is, slave rebellions) reflect these brutal commitments. This was more than subordination or exclusion. This was organized predation.
But America’s unwilling outsiders fought their way in. Starting with the campaign for universal white male suffrage soon after the American Revolution, marginalized and exploited people fought for equal rights. Honoring them isn’t about replacing the polluted with the pure. Like their counterparts in the founding generation, most 19th century reformers had their own prejudices and their own ideas about whose liberation mattered most. Over generations of struggle, though, their collective triumphs made this country more equal and inclusive — which is to say they made it vastly stronger. Their triumphs also made it more righteous.
Like members of the Women’s Rights Convention, these outsiders often invoked the Declaration of Independence as a discursive weapon. None wielded that weapon more skillfully than the victims and enemies of slavery. Charles Walker, Henry Highland Garnet and Frederick Douglass (one of Stanton’s male co-signatories) were among the most well known. They all used the Declaration to expose the hideous chasm between the nation’s professed ideals and its enslavement of millions. In the most brilliant political speeches in U.S. history, Abraham Lincoln made the Declaration’s premise that “all men are created equal” the foundation of his moral and rhetorical assault against slavery.
But for enraged clarity, nothing matched John Swanson Jacobs’ “The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots.” Jacobs escaped slavery in his early 20s. He went on to become a student, whaler, abolitionist, lecturer, miner and sailor. In 1855 he delivered his earthquake of a manuscript to a newspaper publisher in Sydney, Australia. Although excerpts were published internationally, the full memoir was only rediscovered by historian Jonathan Schroeder in 2016.
Jacobs collapses the distance between the nation’s lofty ideals and its depraved slave regime. He does this by letting the language of pro-slavery lawmaking slither alongside the music of the Declaration. After the famous line about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” for example, he quotes the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause. To the line about governments deriving their “just powers from the consent of the governed” he adds its unspoken qualification: “excluding Indians and free negroes.” The Declaration champions the right to alter or abolish government destructive of life, liberty, and happiness. He exposes the country’s selective commitment to that right by quoting a law that pardoned “any person maliciously killing or dismembering a slave” so long as the killing or dismemberment happened “by accident in giving such slave moderate correction.”
Jacobs sees the founding era as a betrayal of principle. “It was then slavery struggled for its existence,” he furiously insists. “Had not the friends of liberty compromised principle for power this would have been numbered among the things that were.” The indictment was Jacob’ challenge to his own times, arguing that slavery should already have been a thing of the past. It would fall to his contemporaries to finally make slavery “among the things that were.”
In 1776 the Declaration of Independence was for the few. Today it belongs to the many. But that noble, happy arc wasn’t inevitable. It took words and work and sacrifice from outsiders and from allies on the inside. As we’ve all been reminded over the last year and a half, many in this country are determined to see equality’s triumphs reversed. Never in my lifetime has pathetic nostalgia for the white man’s republic been closer to the center of power. So, as we celebrate this 250th anniversary, let’s take inspiration from the generations of Americans who decided to honor the founding’s accomplishments through improvement rather than veneration.
Brian DeLay, a professor of history at UC Berkeley, is the author of “War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War.”
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