American Scripture

“How and why did the Declaration of Independence come to assume the role it has assumed in American society—a statement of values that more than any other expresses not why we separated from Britain, and not what we are or have been, but what we ought to be, an inscription of ideals that bind us as a people but have also been at the center of some of the most divisive controversies in our history?”

This is a question Maier will attempt to answer in the book. The final clause contains an antithesis through which Maier points to the complex, ambivalent role of the Declaration in US history: that it both binds Americans together and divides them.

“So confident were Britain’s leaders of their position that they were unable to take seriously the colonists’ efforts to devise a way of establishing traditional English liberties within an imperial context.”

Maier engages in narrative history here, telling the story of how a consensus gradually emerged in the colonies that revolution was necessary. Her sarcastic tone here suggests that the British leaders’ confidence was unjustified.

“Certainly much of Paine’s case against monarchy had been made in the colonial press or pulpits at one point or another over the previous six years. Common Sense, however, gathered those arguments together and used them not to persuade Congress, which was already moving apace toward Independence, but the people whose support Congress needed.”

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense is often credited with having almost single-handedly catalyzed popular sentiment around Independence. Here, Maier contextualizes the pamphlet in the same way that she does the Declaration itself: Far from a singular, unprecedented work of genius, it was a product of adaptation whose strength depended on its circumstances.

“[The English Declaration of Rights of 1689] became for the colonists a sacred text, a document which, although not celebrated with religious imagery, provided a statement of established, fundamental political and legal truths.”

In this passage, Maier suggests not only that the English Declaration of Rights is a precursor to the Declaration of Independence, but that the colonists treated it in the same way that later generations of Americans would treat the Declaration of Independence—as a sacred text containing undeniable truths.

“The timing of the effort to mobilize popular support was, in any case, more important than who promoted it. A similar attempt six months earlier would have failed since the ‘ripening’ of opinion on the Independence was, in the spring of 1776, a recent occurrence. On that the declarations themselves offer direct and powerful evidence.”

This statement makes clear that Independence was not a foregone conclusion. Instead, it depended on shifting public opinion and on circumstances that were beyond the delegates’ control. Those who wished to promote Independence had to choose their moment carefully.

“Common Sense helped provoke public debate on Independence, as did the news from England that arrived at the time of its publication. But thereafter the argument for separation from Britain among Americans turned, as it always had, on what the Mother Country did, who was responsible for its actions, and what implications those considerations carried for the American future.”

In telling the story of Independence, Maier emphasizes the heterogeneity of opinion and the importance of political circumstance. No single publication could turn the tide—instead, the most a pamphlet like Common Sense could do was to provoke debate.

“Achievement lay instead in the creative adaptation of preexisting models to different circumstances, and the highest praise of all went to imitations whose excellence exceeded that of the examples that inspired them.”

Here, Maier notes that the 20th-century understanding of the Declaration as a wholly original product of Jefferson’s singular genius reflects 20th-century expectations about innovation and creativity. The 18th century understood achievement as arising from adaptation and collaboration.

“By exercising their intelligence, political good sense, and a discerning sense of language, the delegates managed to make the Declaration at once more accurate and more consonant with the convictions of their constituents, and to enhance both its power and its eloquence.”

Maier’s story of the drafting of the Declaration emphasizes the collaborative editorial process over Jefferson’s solitary drafting work. Jefferson drew from the work of other writers in drafting the document, and then he and his colleagues worked to refine it, shaping it to the political needs of the moment.

“No less than its original creation, the redefinition of the Declaration was a collective work by Americans who struggled over several generations to establish policies consistent with the revolutionary heritage as they came to understand it in the only way open to them—through politics.”

Maier aims to remove the Declaration from the “shrine” in which public sentiment has placed it, returning it instead to the field of political debate. As such, she treats the “redefinition” of the Declaration as no less important than its drafting. Through politics, subsequent generations have expanded the Declaration’s meaning, expanding the definition of America in the process.

“In the course of recalling and recording events of the Revolution, Americans of the 1820s remembered the revolutionaries as mighty fathers whose greatness threw into relief the ordinariness of their descendants.”

It was not only the Declaration that came to be treated with quasi-religious reverence but its creators as well. In Maier’s telling, Jefferson welcomed this mythologization of his legacy, but his contemporary John Adams greeted it with disdain, fearing that by idolizing the Revolutionary generation, subsequent generations would limit their own potential.

“Thomas Jefferson actively fostered this newborn dedication to the past, while John Adams, true to his Puritan roots, played the iconoclast. Adams compared the idolization of Washington and other revolutionaries to the canonization of saints and other ‘corrupt’ practices of a superstitious, hierarchical past, and told young Americans that his generation was no better than theirs.”

Throughout the book, Maier draws parallels between the sanctification of the Declaration and its creators and the practices of the Roman Catholic Church. The United States was a predominantly Protestant country in its first decades, and some Protestants, like Adams, were suspicious of this sanctification as anathema to their theology, which rejected the interposition of any figures of worship between humanity and God.

“Jefferson played a particularly important role in rescuing the Declaration of Independence from its early obscurity and making it the defining event of a ‘Heroic’ age.”

At this stage in Maier’s biography of the Declaration, Jefferson and Adams have become foils to one another. While Adams rejects the younger generation’s tendency to idolize him and his contemporaries, Jefferson believes that this mythology can serve as an important, inspirational example to the young nation.

“Jefferson’s accounts were mistaken not from malevolence certainly, or from moral failure, or even for partisan reasons. The errors probably came from simple failures of memory, or, more exactly, from the way old memories are sharpened and shaped by the contexts in which they are awakened.”

Maier draws an implicit analogy between Jefferson’s personal memory and the collective memory that makes up the historical record. Like anyone, Jefferson remembers events differently as time passes and as new contexts inform his understanding of those events. Historical memory works in the same way: Present-day understandings of the Declaration and its history have been shaped by errors of memory and by shifting contexts.

“The words he chose—‘reverence,’ ‘sacred,’ ‘holy,’—were words of religion. This, mind you, was the same Thomas Jefferson whose draft Declaration of Independence made no appeal to God, and who took pride in having written a vigorous, precedent-setting statute that totally separated church and state in Virginia.”

Maier’s point here is not to accuse Jefferson of hypocrisy, but to show that his understanding of the Declaration and his role as its author shifted throughout his life. In his later life, Jefferson came to believe that reverence for the Declaration and the work of the “founding fathers” would serve as an important source of national identity and inspiration.

“In the eighteenth century, the republican form of government was commonly considered best suited to egalitarian societies, and Americans, conscious that they lacked the extremes of wealth characteristic of older European countries, generally accepted equality as a characteristic of their society and of the governments they were founding. The state and local declarations of Independence made that abundantly clear.”

Maier emphasizes the degree to which the language of the Declaration was rooted in the political context of its era. This observation supports the theme of The Declaration as a Product of Adaptation and Debate. Jefferson and his colleagues adapted language and ideas that were already prevalent in colonial political discourse.

“In Lincoln’s hands, the Declaration of Independence became first and foremost a living document for an established society, a set of goals to be realized over time, and so an explanation less of the colonists’ decision to separate from Britain than of their victory in the War for Independence.”

In the book, Maier argues that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address “remade” the Declaration of Independence into a foundational statement of national identity. Key to this transformation is the shift from a justification for rebellion to “a set of goals to be realized over time.” Lincoln brought the Declaration back into the present by arguing that its work was unfinished.

“The Declaration of Independence Lincoln left posterity, the ‘charter of our liberties,’ was not and could not have been his solitary creation. It was what the American people chose to make of it, at once a legacy and a new conception, a document that spoke both for the revolutionaries and for their descendants, who confronted issues the country’s fathers had never known or failed to resolve, binding one generation after another in a continuing act of self-definition.”

In moving the Declaration into the present, Lincoln also transferred its authorship not to himself, but to the public. Maier argues that a “vital document” is one that is continually reinterpreted through public debate and activism in changing contexts.

“The ultimate authority of the Declaration itself nonetheless rests, as it always has, less in the law than in the minds and hearts of the people, and its meaning changes as new groups and new causes claim its mantle, constantly reopening the issue of what the nation’s ‘founding principles’ demand.”

In the Epilogue, Maier argues for the Declaration as a “vital document”—one that remains alive because its meaning remains open to interpretation. Lincoln established the Declaration as an unfinished task; it remains up to subsequent generations to see that task through.