The words that changed everthing
John Dickinson, a Philadelphia attorney and one of the most vociferous voices against American independence in the hot, stuffy (the windows were closed) room in which the breakup with Great Britain was debated, called the document Congress finally passed a mere “skiff of paper.”
And so it was. Without force of arms, much fighting, a lot of scrambling, some dying, and a great deal of superb leadership by one George Washington, the Declaration of Independence would have turned out to be one of the more curious footnotes in all of history.
Instead, as historian Richard Ketchum writes in The Winter Soldiers, “The momentous proclamation of July 4, 1776, meant that events would take a different course altogether, becoming in the final analysis a revolution, whose purpose was the actual casting off of the system of government by which Americans had been ruled.”
Almost as much as the letter of the Constitution, Americans have been governed by the spirit of the Declaration. It contains the most profound sentence ever put to paper in America, maybe the world: “All men are created equal.”
Five words: strung together, they are simple, concise, and, yes, revolutionary. We forget them at our peril, and to our shame.
Lincoln, for one, knew the importance of the words of the Declaration – their history-altering impact. A few days after speaking in New York City in the late winter of that most momentous of years, 1860, the prairie lawyer and politician spoke in New Haven, Connecticut.
Harold Holzer, in his Lincoln at Cooper Union book, appraises what the future president said to the townspeople and the Yale students in attendance:
“He held that slavery was a ‘great moral, social, and political evil,’ that slaves were ‘men, not property,’ and that both God and the Declaration of Independence required that slavery ‘ought to be treated as a wrong.’ He had taken his legalistically grounded New York speech a giant moral step forward.”
Of that earlier speech in the Great Hall at Cooper Union Institute in Manhattan (the building still stands and still serves the needs of Cooper Union College students), Holzer notes that Lincoln “offered” his extensively-research speech “as an anchor: the opportunity, perhaps the final opportunity, to save what the founders created … the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence.”
Eighty-four years before Lincoln’s appearance in New York City, Gen. George Washington was informed of the action by Congress in severing ties to Great Britain and in pronouncing the former British colonies hugging the Atlantic coast a new, independent nation.
As Rick Atkinson writes in his superb new book The British Are Coming, the Declaration of Independence promised “to transform a squalid family brawl into a cause as ambitious and righteous as any in human history.”
Washington ordered the 1,337 words of the Declaration read to his troops. After one such reading, the American army’s adjutant general, Thomas Mifflin, “climbed onto a cannon and shouted, ‘My lads, the Rubicon is crossed.'”
Atkinson, who is the best narrative historian now at work, tells us what happened next, when “the rambunctious crowd” pulled down the statue of King George III on Bowling Green in lower Manhattan. Weighing two-tons, the statue was ripped apart, the head “impaled on a spike outside the Blue Bell Tavern” and the rest “melted into 42,088 bullets.”
It was the hope, no less, of an army surgeon, Isaac Bangs, “that the emanations of the leadened George will make … deep impressions in the bodies of some of his red-coated and Tory subjects.”
The revolution which the Declaration proclaimed ended, of course, in triumph for Washington, his officers, and troops. But what if instead of revolution, Britain and America had settled their differences, with the colonies remaining in the empire?
True, it’s impossible to imagine, given the irrepressible nature of Americans and the growth in their numbers, that a breakup was anything but inevitable at some point.
And yet, “the haunting question” posed by Barbara Tuchman in her The March of Folly remains. Think of it: America the brightest and strongest jewel in the British crown.
What “if the ministers of George III,” Tuchman writes, “had been other than they were, some such status or form of union between Britain and American might have been attainable and in that case might have created a preponderance of trans-Atlantic power that would have deterred challengers and perhaps spared the world the Great War of 1914-18 and its unending squels…. a train of altered consequences reaching to the present. The hypothetical has charm, but the actuality of government makes history.”
The “actuality”, in this case, is that the Declaration was made manifest.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.