Roots of American liberty

MORE PHOTOS

I don't know how true the stories are about what Fourth of July celebrations were like in the earlier days of the Republic. My memory stretches farther back than that of most people who will read this, and my family never went to the city park to listen to a city councilman, mayor, legislator or noted orator read the Declaration of Independence in full and then hold forth for 20 minutes or so on the profound meaning of the founding document.

I'm sure I read the Declaration during a high school history class, but it wasn't emphasized, and nobody even hinted to me that it just might have been the most profoundly revolutionary document in human history. I didn't start thinking about it seriously until I was finished with college and trying to figure out whether I wanted to be a politician or a writer.

I have, of course, come to appreciate what the Declaration of Independence means. It provided a philosophical foundation for the country in which I was fortunate enough to have been born – a country in which individual choice was not only respected, it was valued as the key to living a fully human, independent and dignified life.

It was not always thus. Most of the English and the smattering of other Europeans who settled this country during the colonial era had grown up in rigid and stratified societies. At the top was the hereditary monarch, with the mostly hereditary aristocracy just below.

Most people were landless peasants, dependent on wealthy landowners, and those who were craftsmen of various kinds generally adopted the same trade as their fathers before them, or joined guilds that required long apprenticeships and held down competition.

Underpinning this static, hierarchical way of life was a philosophy developed by medieval court philosophers touting the "divine right of kings." The king was said to hold his position as the result of God's will, and rebellion against the king was rebellion against God Himself. And with or without God's blessing, most societies through history, with a few fleeting exceptions, had adhered to this hierarchical form of governance. The welfare and survival of the tribe or feudal kingdom or duchy or nation was the be-all-end-all, and people were expected to assume their assigned role in the order of things and serve the group, even unto death in war or conflict if necessary.

By the time of the American Revolution, the intellectual landscape had changed somewhat in Great Britain and to some extent in the rest of Europe as well.

Oliver Cromwell overthrew the British monarch Charles I in 1653 and established a Puritan-oriented theocratic dictatorship. The Cromwell episode, which ended in 1659, weakened the authority of the king and increased the effective power of Parliament.

When James II seemed on the verge of establishing Catholicism as the state religion, he was overthrown by popular uprising and a conspiracy to put the Protestant Dutchman William of Orange on the throne. The "glorious revolution" of 1688 made William king, but with limited powers. The era of constitutional monarchy began.

The philosopher of the new order was John Locke, who posited a regime of natural rights to life, liberty and property, of government designed to protect those rights by consent of the governed, with the people empowered to overthrow a monarch legitimately and with God's approval if he became tyrannical.

Locke was well-known and highly respected in the colonies, as were the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, like David Hume, Andrew Ferguson and Adam Smith, who criticized the statist economics of mercantilism and laid the philosophical foundations of modern capitalism. When events created tension between the Colonies and Great Britain it was to these thinkers – and to some extent the classical philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome – that the colonists turned to justify their rebellion.

It was not only the philosophical stirrings of small-"r" republican sentiment that led to changes in the way Americans viewed the Mother Country. There was the openness of the frontier, where people could escape the cities and imperial oversight and learned to rely on one another rather than on hierarchical structures.

This increasingly independent group of colonists was therefore ripe to rebel when the British monarchy sought to finance the French and Indian War (ended in 1763) with a tax imposed on the colonists without consulting them. This "taxation without representation" was followed by the Sugar Act, the Currency Act, the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts and eventually the Intolerable Acts, all designed to reinforce British control and squeeze revenue from the Colonies. British troops occupied Boston beginning in 1768 to quell the mounting rebellion. The colonists began to organize more intensively, convening the First Continental Congress in 1774.

The Battle of Lexington and Concord in April 1775 led to other colonies raising militias and eventually driving the British out of Boston. Although they were in open rebellion and had deposed most British governors by early 1776, many Americans were still ready to be loyal subjects of King George if the king would only treat them right. But sentiment for independence was growing (helped along by Thomas Paine's anti-monarchical pamphlet "Common Sense"), and by mid-1776 the Second Continental Congress was ready to declare independence.

It was important to these colonists that they not see themselves as simply disgruntled rebels but as people in service of a noble cause. The Virginian Thomas Jefferson, probably helped by Ben Franklin and perhaps (a few historians believe) by Tom Paine, was deputed to write the declaration. Drawing on beliefs influenced by Locke and to a great extent put in writing by George Mason in Virginia's Bill of Rights, Jefferson came up with a masterful summation of the cause to which most Americans could give assent. In so doing he crystallized a new way of thinking about the relationship between citizens and government that, as we have seen, had been stirring for awhile but came to full flower with the Declaration.

America thus became the first country founded not on race, language, heredity or long occupation of a section of the Earth, but on a set of political principles.

The Declaration opens with a statement of personal dignity, an acknowledgment that "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation."

Then comes some of the most revolutionary language in history:

"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."

This reverses the usual order of things. It starts with all people being equal – not in intelligence, wisdom, wealth or other endowments, of course, but of equal dignity in the eyes of God and therefore before government. This natural equality denies the legitimacy of special privileges granted by government.

An "unalienable" right is one that cannot be taken away legitimately, and then not without doing damage to the very humanity of the person. Any institution that tries to deny or encroach upon these rights upsets nature and God's plan, for it is the Creator who grants these rights, not government or any other institution.

That's radical.

Jefferson departs from the Lockean formula of "life, liberty and property" to say much the same thing but with a broader approach to the meaning of life. The Virginia Bill of Rights refers to "inherent" rights to "the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." Jefferson understands that property is part of pursuing happiness. He also understands that the only thing that can be guaranteed is the right to pursue happiness; achieving it is contingent on any number of circumstances, including a person's individual psychology.

Here comes more revolutionary meat: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Government's job is to secure – to safeguard, to nail down, to make safe – the rights we already possess as creatures of God, not to feed us, clothe us, coddle us or make us moral. Just secure our rights, thank you very much.

The idea of deriving power from the consent of the governed was in the philosophical air, but this nails it down. And the Declaration speaks of "just" powers, which means that governments sometimes wield unjust powers that do not belong to them legitimately.

Finally, "whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

This is the right of revolution, which becomes legitimate whenever any government fails "to secure these rights." The person, the individual person, is supreme. Government is the servant, not the master. (Jefferson keeps open the option: "alter or abolish.")

The success of a revolution against the mightiest military power on Earth was by no means assured. But once it succeeded and a new government established that was designed to be limited in scope and respectful of not only the rights specified in the Bill of Rights but of "others retained by the people," the freest society yet known to history was poised to become the richest and eventually the most powerful country the world has known.

These great founding principles are utterly foreign to most current politicians of both parties. No wonder they're not stressed in government schools, for they are profoundly subversive of any and every established order. But they retain the power to inspire, as a future president would put it, a new birth of freedom.