Jefferson’s words left lasting legacy
In the history of the United States, five words have made all the difference: “All men are created equal.”
These words, contained in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, whose 239th anniversary we celebrate Friday, defined not only our war for independence against the British, but the expansion of American democracy throughout the 19th century, women’s suffrage in the early years of the 20th century, and the civil rights movement at mid-century.
Last week, the phrase helped to birth the Supreme Court decision making marriage legal for all in the country.
It was quite a week for Thomas Jefferson and the gang of 1776.
These five words, likely polished to an enduring gleam by the incomparable Benjamin Franklin, resonate not only for Americans but for citizens of the world.
As the late, great Jeffersonian scholar Edward Dumbauld wrote in 1955, “Jefferson gave to America what America is giving to the world.”
Dumbauld, writing before Vietnam and well ahead of 9/11 and the ill-advised invasion of Iraq and efforts to spread democracy to the Middle East, certainly overstated the matter, but the spirit was right.
Like Lincoln after him, Jefferson thought and acted with the idea in mind that peoples far from these shores might someday embrace what he saw as “self-evident” — that ordinary people were capable of governing themselves.
“Throughout his life,” wrote Dumbauld, a longtime federal judge and resident of Uniontown, “(Jefferson) remained true to this political faith which had animated the American Revolution and which received its noblest formulation … in the Declaration of Independence.
“That document gave to the world not only a breathless presentation of Jefferson’s own political opinions but a true ‘expression of the American mind.'”
“All honor to Jefferson,” Lincoln proclaimed, “- to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence … had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men at all time.”
The man from Monticello was hardly perfect. At the moment he wrote his immortal words he was the owner of about 200 slaves. Both contemporaries of Jefferson and later historians have accused him of fathering children with slave Sally Hemings.
Yet, the Declaration of Independence, as drafted, contained a stinging rebuke of the slave trade. Its deletion by delegates North and South wounded Jefferson.
Our third president was certain slavery would not last long in the country he helped so much to bring about.
Alexander Stephens, a congressman from Georgia and eventually the vice president of the Confederacy, just weeks before shots rang out over Charleston harbor signaling the start of the Civil War, said that the “common sentiment” in 1776 was that slavery was doomed.
This notion, Stephens wrote, was “fundamentally wrong”, as it “rested upon the assumption of (the) equality of (the) races.”
Lincoln leaned heavily on the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming at one point his every political belief was based on the words Jefferson authored. His remarks were uttered on the steps of Independence Hall in Philadelphia in February 1861. He said he would rather be assassinated than give up those beliefs.
Lincoln, women’s rights advocates such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Martin Luther King Jr. each invoked Jefferson in the centuries — old march to equality — a march that remains short of the goal line even today.
Jefferson was large. In the years since his death in 1826 — on July 4th, within hours of the passing of fellow revolutionary John Adams — he has come to epitomize the standards prized most by our two major parties.
Republicans have embraced Jefferson’s preference for a small, limited federal government. Democrats have latched onto the part of his philosophy that emphasizes, yet again, equality, in this instance, economic equality.
In fact, Jefferson’s words might usefully be invoked in the struggle to end the corruption of our politics by fat cat money and the obscene income gap between between the very rich and the rest of us.
Jefferson would look with horror at the spectacle of big money and enormously inflated incomes crowding out the voices of everyday citizens in the direction of their government.
Rule by the few is hardly in the Jeffersonian tradition.
As Judge Dumbauld noted, “Jefferson regarded a government as republican only to the degree that ‘every member composing it has its equal voice in its concerns.'”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” Robbins can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.