On July 4, 1776 a group of Americans approved a document declaring the United States of America free from English rule. This document was the Declaration of Independence, the nation’s birth certificate. The Declaration is currently being attacked as a racist document. Is this true?
Thomas Jefferson, the author of this document, laid out the reasons the American colonies were declaring themselves independent. One of the grievances he included in his original draft of the Declaration said:
He [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere….Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.
This grievance was not included the final copy of the Declaration because of the objection of two states, but its inclusion by Thomas Jefferson shows how serious the issue of slavery was taken by our Founding Fathers.
For many generations the Declaration of Independence was recognized as being a document that brought “freedom to the slave [and] liberty to the captives” (John Quincy Adams). For example, Abraham Lincoln spoke about the importance of the Declaration as an equality document:
In their [the Founders] enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity…[I]f you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence…if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to…come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence.
(To learn more about the views of our nation’s Founders and heroes relating to the Declaration of Independence, see this WallBuilders video!)
In honor of the lasting truths set forth in the Declaration of Indepence, let’s celebrate this Independence Day in a way that was recommended by John Adams:
It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.
