Pondering the ‘Declaration’

Terre Haute Tribune Star, July 10,2021

Pondering the ‘Declaration’

Thomas Jefferson’s Fourth of July in 1776 was not an unblemished celebration.

We rightfully link the Declaration of Independence with his name but in actuality this famous and influential document was closely edited by his peers in the Continental Congress. Their alterations made Jefferson miserable. He would later report that Benjamin Franklin, sitting near him as words and sections to his draft were changed and deleted, “perceived that I was not insensible to these mutilations.”

Jefferson died in 1826 still unhappy with changes made to his original draft. Regardless, Lincoln studied it closely, reading it as a moral form for all times. President Trump ordered a Navy Blue Angels flyover on Independence Day, 2019. President Biden invited guests (essential workers who helped with the response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as military families) to a White House lawn picnic. No President allows the Fourth to pass without some flag-waving and patriotic tongue-wagging.

Which Fourth did you celebrate? The picnic feast? The festival of explosions and pyrotechnics a Facebook friend astutely labels a “fizzle-boom money wastage”? Or did you pull out a copy of the Declaration of Independence and at least read the opening paragraphs of this world history influencing document?

From the choices offered above, I’m guessing the first for sure, the second quite possibly, and the third .. . well, how were you supposed to know this was going to be on the test?

If you were inspired to read your personal parchment copy of the Declaration, you should push yourself beyond feel-good responses to Jefferson’s (and his editors) ringing prose. It’s a document that has inspired abolitionists and feminists, nations and artists. Today, individuals and movements continue to use it ... and abuse it. As one careful historian put it, they do this without fear and without research.

But Jefferson gets the last word on the Declaration.

“It was intended to be an expression of the American mind,” Jefferson explained in a letter to Henry Lee in 1825. He goes on to claim that “[the Declaration’s] authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day.”

— Gary Daily, Terre Haute