The Declaration’s most famous, and uplifting, passage: “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.”
That straightforward sentence’s timeless appeal remains, to borrow from it, self-evident. But Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration (with editing help from Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston), didn’t stop there.
While pointing out “that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes,” they affirmed that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Thus, the Declaration’s signers ended their “patient sufferance” by daring to reject the British crown’s “absolute Tyranny over these States.”
Those were, and are, extraordinarily powerful words. Yet the Declaration of Independence was much more than a profound and well-written argument. It was a daring action fraught with grave peril for its 56 signatories.
The Declaration is indeed a powerful document, but one sadly divorced today from the Constitution, particularly in its references to a supreme power. I think that the proper way to read the Constitution is with the Declaration in mind, just as the Bible needs to be read through the lens of the creeds.