The course I’m teaching traces the history of arguments about the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. A core theme is that Thomas Jefferson’s preamble, which states that “all men are created equal,” far exceeded his own complex intentions as a slave owner who refused to advocate abolition, and indeed inspired political radicalism in the 19th century and beyond. We have discussed how Elizabeth Cady Stanton, David Walker, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Douglass and many other American abolitionists drew explicitly on the language of the preamble to denounce inequality and support demands for women’s rights, the abolition of slavery and egalitarian citizenship. We’ve lately been discussing Ida B. Wells, W.E.B Du Bois and Eugene Debs, whose famous 1895 “Liberty” speech, given after his release from imprisonment for his leadership of the 1894 Pullman strike, begins with the proud declaration that “Manifestly the spirit of ’76 survives” — invoking the idea of liberty’s triumph over despotism to support a campaign for unionization and greater workers’ rights.
As these important texts indicate, it is correct, in a way, to say that Jefferson’s words planted “the seed” of further liberation. But, as I explained to my students, if we are serious about this metaphor, we need to fully explore its logic. When we do, we can see how much false comfort it provides and how flawed it is, for two questions immediately arise.
First, how much work — extraordinary, life-threatening, self-sacrificing work, work that involved no guarantee of success (Martin Luther King Jr.’s image of the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice notwithstanding) — was necessary to get that seed to “blossom” in liberatory ways? Something that takes almost a century, and requires enormous blood, sweat and tears — including a civil war — hardly seems “automatic.”
Second, if some part of the declaration planted the “seed” of abolition and emancipation, is it not also true that other parts of the declaration itself — though not the preamble’s opening lines — implanted the seed of resistance to abolition and emancipation, and further strengthened and embedded the institution of slavery, and of reaction more generally?
I reminded my students that if Douglass and Garrison drew on the declaration, so too did Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, and the authors of the declarations of secession by every Confederate state, who cited the Declaration of Independence as a blueprint for secession and claimed that if the rights of the (white) people of the Southern states were attacked — as they believed abolition threatened to do — it was their right and duty “to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” (See especially the “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina From the Federal Union” issued by the Confederate States of America on Dec. 24, 1860.)