At the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia 250 years ago, 13 colonies declared they were a free and independent union. As the war against Britain raged on, the Declaration of Independence stood as a beacon of freedom. Since that day in July of 1776 — which John Adams described in writing to his wife Abigail, “Yesterday, the most memorable época in the history of America” — the document has played an influential role in our nation’s history.
Author Michael Auslin compiled the fascinating and dramatic history of the Declaration into his book, “National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America.” As part of our ongoing America 250 coverage, he joined Arun Rath, host of GBH’s All Things Considered, to dive into the history of its words, and discuss how the ideas expressed in July of 1776 live on globally today. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: Great to have you on, and so excited to talk about all of this. So first, take us back to the Continental Congress, the Second Continental Congress in 1776, which had been going on for years up until then. And the colonies were already at war with Britain. There was basically a government already, the Congress there. Why did we need a declaration?
Michael Auslin: Well, the question was one that they asked themselves. And in fact, what had taken them by surprise was the outbreak of war in April of 1775, at Lexington and Concord. They had already planned to meet later in 1775 during the summer, which was following the First Continental Congress, which had been held, of course, in Philadelphia in 1774. They wanted to give time to see if it was possible to come to a reconciliation with Britain. So they gave this cooling-off period of a year to say, well, let’s come back and see where we stand. But of course, Lexington and Concord broke out, so that when the Congress convened in 1775, they became a war Congress. And one of the first questions was, can we win this war? And to do so, can we remain as colonies? What would that mean? Some people said you have to become an independent nation, and others asked, well, what does that mean? And this was the debate that was going on throughout that entire year. It didn’t just pop up. So by the time they got to July, they had exhausted all of these other routes that they had hoped would bring about reconciliation with the king, with Great Britain.
They were committed to the war, but they were losing the war. And in order to win the war, they needed foreign aid, particularly from France, Great Britain’s enemy at the time. But in order to get the aid, you had to make clear what you were fighting for. And hence, it became almost inevitable that independence would be declared at some point and in some way. And that’s really the story of what was going on at the Continental Congress and why, by that fateful July 2nd, as you pointed out, they voted for independence. Now they had to tell the world what they had done and why they were legitimate in doing so.
Rath: So it was a message not just to the colonists or to Britain, but to France and the world.
Auslin: It was. The Declaration itself was really a legislative announcement. You needed it so you could move on to the more important business of making these treaties with France, Spain, Holland — whoever would come on board with you, and figuring out how these 13 sovereign independent states would act together. So the Declaration, this administrative announcement, actually was working at a couple of different levels. One you mentioned, and over time, I guess, the most important one, which was to tell Americans what had happened, to tell them that they were now citizens of a new nation, something that had never happened before. Nobody called into existence a nation, but suddenly the Americans were saying, “We are a nation, and we are a country.” So you needed this announcement to inspire the patriots, to sway the undecided, and maybe even to peel off some of the tens of thousands of loyalists. So the Declaration was aimed at them. Of course, it was aimed at Britain, though we never formally sent it to Britain, but it was, of course, the announcement of this step that had been taken two days before, and critically, the justifications for the step. Those were the 27 charges that today we really don’t read that much, but back then were the central part of the document. And then thirdly, the Declaration was, as you noted, aimed at the world.
Rath: It’s fascinating, you know, that Jefferson was threading multiple needles with this document. Again, the way you lay it out is just — it’s so fascinating. We don’t know about how the individual edits were made to Jefferson’s draft, but you write about we do actually have Jefferson’s original draft. What got cut out?
Auslin: We do. The draft, which is in Jefferson’s hand and with his edits, is — it may be the most fascinating and important piece of paper in American history. He was so upset by what Congress was doing to his draft that he very carefully noted the edits, or what he called the mutilations, of the draft. He also wrote out other copies and sent them to supporters and partisans because he felt, you know, his draft was the best version. The most galling changes to his draft came in two very long paragraphs that were taken out by the Congress. One was a rather intemperate and ad hominem attack on the British people, really blaming them for being stiff-necked and arrogant and not being sympathetic to the Americans. And again, that was taken out in part because there were tens of thousands of loyalists that were still in the colonies, and because some of the calmer members of Congress realized that if the Americans won the war, Britain was still going to be a major power and the power that the Americans had most affinity to, in terms of language, religion, culture, and the like. But the one that really cut to the bone for Jefferson was the excision of a long and impassioned condemnation of the slave trade.
Jefferson had tried to get the slave trade banned in Virginia. He, along with most of the Founding Fathers who held slaves — people like George Washington, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, and others — truly believed that slavery was going to disappear. They felt it was an immoral system. They felt it was an economically inefficient system. They didn’t know how to get rid of it, but they felt that over time it would disappear, and the best way to ensure that would be to cut off the slave trade. And so, Jefferson writes this very long condemnation of the trade, which is directed solely at the king, and fascinatingly, in this, he writes about the human rights and the liberty of those who are being enslaved in Africa and brought over. He does not deny their humanity. He does not deny that they have human rights where they live and that these are being taken away by the trade. Jefferson and his Confederates, whether Northern or Southern ... cannot figure out at that point how to get rid of it. But all of them, deep in their hearts, know the immorality of the system and know that it needs to go.
The compromise that they make in the Continental Congress in order to make sure that everyone gets on board, this was the first great deal with the devil, this compromise. Jefferson was bitterly disappointed in it, but he was also realistic enough to know that if this compromise wasn’t made, the entire project of independence very likely would not have gone forward.
Rath: The original, or at least the final version of the document, was signed, and right away it was recognized as a precious, sacred item. It was almost an instant relic. And you write about that there was a tradition of secrecy with these revolutionary documents.
Auslin: There was. Well, everything that Congress did was secret. First of all, it was treason, and they knew this. They were acting as an extralegal body. They had no authority other than themselves to actually convene, and so they all signed pledges of secrecy, and they kept secret journals. In the journals, often they did not write down everything. They didn’t want everything to be known, even though they would record the decisions that were made. They didn’t want all of the debates and discussions publicized to the world. And so, in fact, we have huge gaps in our knowledge of who said what, or what other alternatives might have been offered at the time. So they were operating under secrecy, and when they adopted the Declaration, of course, they made it public. They had to tell the world and tell Americans what had happened. But when they finally, over a month later, got around to signing this beautiful parchment — in fact, at first they didn’t even think they should write it down in any real formal fashion, but finally they did to make it sort of a permanent artifact— that was kept a state secret.
It was a paper of Congress. It was a paper of state. It was kept rolled up among the papers of state, and it was never shown to anyone. And in fact, most Americans didn’t even know that this parchment, the one that we go see and we venerate at the National Archives, most Americans didn’t even know that this parchment existed until after the War of 1812, when the story of its rescue from being burned at the hands of the British became known. And then suddenly, people started saying, well, what was saved? And that’s when the sort of modern fascination with the Declaration began, to actually see what did it look like, to stare at those signatures and look at the signatures of the actual men who signed it. That began a tradition that we continue to today of turning the Declaration, in essence, into a cultural object.
Rath: As you tell that story, it’s fascinating how it’s also the story of early mass media, how it was copied, printed, and published, that back in the days of early America, these colonies had a lot of people with printing presses.
Auslin: Absolutely, and it’s happening in different stages, in different ways over the decades. So in 1776, what happens on July 4th is, Congress adopts the Declaration. It’s certainly because there’s no printing press in the Congress premises; it’s handwritten, most likely Jefferson’s, what he called his “fair” copy. That just meant a clean copy of the Declaration with all the edits. So at that point, it wasn’t so clean. It was probably actually quite difficult to read, and it was carried over by hand a few blocks away to a printer named John Dunlap. And he received an order from Congress, the most important printing order in the history of the country, which was to print up about 200 of what they called broadsides. These were large sheets of paper, just one-sided, that contained the text of the Declaration. And by the way, Arun, with no signatures, except the names of John Hancock, who was president of Congress, and Charles Thomson, who was the very powerful Secretary of Congress. These were printed up very hurriedly on July 4th and July 5th and sent right back to Congress, maybe about 200 or so. And then they began sending them around the country by post horse, you know, riders along the road, so that they could be read publicly.
George Washington receives his in New York on July 9th and has it read to the troops immediately. It’s read in Boston the following week. Abigail Adams actually goes to the reading in Boston and hears the reading from the Old State House, and it makes its way up and down the colonies. It doesn’t reach Georgia, by the way, until well into August. They don’t know about independence until weeks after the fact. But it’s also picked up by the newspapers. It’s printed in a Philadelphia newspaper on July 6th, and then as those newspapers make their way along the seaboard and a little bit into the interior, it’s picked up by other newspapers and printed. And then when those broadsides reach these local areas, and, you know, each colony maybe, you know, got a handful of the broadsides, then as you point out, there’s a lot of printers and printing presses, and they take it up.
And so we have dozens and dozens of local copies of the Declaration, many of which, by the way, were sent to pastors and ministers because that’s where most people got their news from. They got it in church from the pulpit on Sunday, especially if you’re a farmer; you’re probably not coming into town to hear the one reading of the Declaration, but you will go to church. And so, you can actually see these locally printed broadsides of the Declaration addressed to different reverends around the colonies, saying, “Please read this on Sunday in church.” Today, by the way, there are only 26 known existing Dunlap broadsides. Again, those were the broadsides printed up on July 4th. So it’s one of the rarest artifacts. If you run across an original, you have something that’s worth millions of dollars, but, more importantly is a true time machine to the beginning of America. So please bring it to your local or state historical society for proper preservation.
But the story of how these things were disseminated in 1776 is fascinating. And then later, as you mentioned, as the copies of the more artistic reproductions of the Declaration or scenes from the Continental Congress are printed, most notably, of course, John Trumbull’s famous painting of the Declaration of Independence that hangs in the Capitol, these too are copied. They’re sold as subscriptions, and high-quality printings are made, and cheap knockoffs are made. And it really does help create a commoditized market both for information and for art.
For more of the discussion, including how the Declaration inspired other European colonies across the Americas to make their own declarations, click the button below the headline to listen to the interview.
