Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘As Thomas Jefferson wrote it, the Declaration was less an affirmation of human equality than a pointed claim about the nature of political authority and a powerful assertion of the right of revolution, informed by the Enlightenment writings of John Locke and other social contract theorists. It was meant as an argument about the preconditions of government — an assertion of the purity of prelapsarian life — not a road map for emancipation…

In other words, Jefferson was channeling a common sentiment in Revolutionary-era America, “a political orthodoxy whose basic principles colonists could pick up from sermons or newspapers or even schoolbooks without ever reading a systematic work of political theory,” Maier wrote. Just look to Thomas Paine, who wrote in “Common Sense” — published about six months before the signing of the Declaration — that “all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever.”

Jefferson’s equality was a thought experiment. It did not extend to political society, nor was it meant for those placed beyond the political community. Men could be created equal and still be different; men could be created equal and still be subordinate.

This, for many of the Patriot leaders, was a given.

But then there were those outside the circle of belonging: women, Natives, landless laborers and, most starkly, Black Americans, both free and enslaved. They did not read — or, most likely, hear — the Declaration as an abstract claim about a prelapsarian past. They understood it as a radical statement of principle for the present. And they wielded this principle against a society that would not extend the Revolutionary promise of freedom and self-government to those held in bondage…

Jefferson, then serving under George Washington, had never understood himself as making a statement about political and social equality. But Black Americans absolutely did. And as we see, they did not hesitate to pressure the former American revolutionaries with their own words and commitments.

Many of them felt the contradiction in ways that put lie to the modern idea that such “men of their time” were innocent of moral fault, or that it is a distortion or corruption of history to tell the truth about their hypocrisy. And in the present, you should see the assault on Black history and Black studies by conservative reactionaries as an attempt to obscure the fact that the Black Americans of the early Republic were “men of their time” as well.

One consequence of this pressure was that, by the first decade of the 19th century, most Northern states had either abolished slavery or put it on the path to extinction. Even in the South, there was a burst of energy related to manumission: Virginia amended its laws in 1782 to make it easier for owners to free their slaves, and several men — including John Payne Jr., Dolley Madison’s father — did just that.

This emancipatory energy was short-lived. Technological developments like the cotton gin and the burgeoning Industrial Revolution in England would make enslaved Africans newly valuable, a lucrative asset that drove the production of vital commodities.

It was during this time that the Declaration faded from mainstream view as an object of veneration, to be supplanted by the Constitution in American political discourse. Except, that is, among Black Americans and their allies, who continued to wield it as a binding promise of freedom and equality against slavery, slaveholders and the government that served their interests…

As we mark, this year, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it is important to see that its meaning is dynamic. And that meaning, as we understand it, flows less from the men who signed it than from those who heard its words and took ownership of them as a standard for their freedom and independence — not from Britain, but from bondage.

It is this Declaration — the slaves’ Declaration, the abolitionists’ Declaration, Lincoln’s Declaration — that is the beating heart of the American project. It is this Declaration that still lives as a promise to the people who call this nation home, as a challenge to those people to live up to their ideals and aspirations, and as a bulwark against those among them who would sacrifice their freedom for the false comfort of tyranny.’ (from the New York Times)