Constitutional Voices: The Declaration as a Constant Call to Freedom
In part two of a two-part series, Charles Sahm explains how no group has been more steadfast in their devotion to the core beliefs of the Declaration or more determined to make them a universal reality than African Americans. Part one reviewed events up to 1830.
As the abolitionist movement gained momentum in the 1830s and 1840s, it became more common for Black abolitionists like William Wells Brown, Henry Highland Garnet, Thomas Paul, and David Ruggles to cite the Declaration. The “colored convention” movement that emerged in the 1830s employed the Declaration’s preamble in numerous proclamations. For example, a “Declaration of Sentiments” issued at the 1834 convention in New York and repeated at the 1835 convention in Philadelphia quoted the Declaration’s preamble and plead “that the laws of our country may cease to conflict with the spirit of that sacred instrument, the Declaration of American Independence.”
Part One: Constitutional Voices: African Americans’ early responses to the Declaration of Independence
White abolitionists also cited the Declaration with increased frequency. In 1833, William Lloyd Garrison, who later denounced the Constitution as a “covenant with death,” described the Declaration’s preamble as “the corner-stone upon which is founded the Temple of Freedom.” In 1841, former president John Quincy Adams referenced a copy of the Declaration hanging on the wall of the Supreme Court to argue for the freedom of the Africans who took over the slave ship La Amistad. A few months before his Harpers Ferry raid, John Brown authored an abolitionist “Declaration of Liberty,” modeled after the Declaration of Independence, ending the document with the Jefferson quotation: “Indeed; I tremble for my Country, when I reflect; that God is Just; And that his Justice; will not sleep forever.”
Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” is the most iconic use of the Declaration as a political weapon. After denouncing the hypocrisy of a nation founded upon the premise that “all men are created equal” keeping millions of enslaved people in bondage, Douglass changed his tone toward the end of the speech to one of hope: “I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ringbolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”
The Declaration during the Civil War and Jim Crow
The Civil War was fundamentally a war about the meaning of the Declaration. In the lead-up to the war, pro-slavery forces began to insist that the words “created equal” were a mistake. In 1848, South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun argued that the Declaration’s preamble was a “great error.” In 1857, the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision gave this anti-equality reading of the Declaration the force of law. The meaning of the Declaration was the central focus of debates between Abraham Lincoln and Senator Stephen Douglas in 1858. “All men are created equal.… This they said and this they meant,” said Lincoln. Douglas called this reading of the Declaration “a monstrous heresy.”
Lincoln lost the Senate election to Douglas, but two years later won the presidency. And then the war came. In his “Corner Stone Speech,” Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, declared that the original Union “rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races,” an error that the Confederacy was formed to correct. “Our new government,” he insisted, “is founded upon exactly the opposite idea.”
Two and a half years later, Lincoln would dedicate the nation to the proposition that “all men are created equal,” and the Civil War Amendments began, at last, to give that principle constitutional force. Reflecting on this transformation, Senator Charles Sumner titled his eulogy for Lincoln “The Promises of the Declaration of Independence,” arguing that while the founders had “cut the connection with the mother country” and opened the path to popular government, Lincoln had set in motion the consummation of “all the original promises of the Declaration” and time and time again had “summon[ed] his countrymen back to the truths in the Declaration of Independence.”
Although Reconstruction briefly offered hope that those promises might finally be realized, the rise of Jim Crow and the persistence of white racial violence betrayed them. Yet Black leaders continued to invoke the Declaration as a moral claim on the nation. In 1895, at the close of his final speech, “Why Is the Negro Lynched?” Frederick Douglass still expressed faith that white Americans might one day overcome their prejudices and fulfill the nation’s founding ideals. Echoing the Declaration, he urged his listeners to remember “the sublime and glorious truths with which, at its birth, it saluted and startled a listening world … the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality.”
In the 20th century, civil rights leaders often grounded their arguments in the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal citizenship. But the poetry of the Declaration’s preamble still offered a powerful rhetorical weapon. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. DuBois stated that “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.” In 1910, Ida B. Wells cited the Declaration in an essay honoring the 40th anniversary of the Fifteenth Amendment: “Here at last was squaring of practice with precept, with true democracy, with the Declaration of Independence and with the Golden Rule.” On July 28, 1917, the NAACP organized a silent march down Fifth Avenue in New York to protest the horrific racial violence of the era. At the front was a simple banner containing the words of the Declaration’s preamble.
Thurgood Marshall cited the Declaration in a 1954 brief that the NAACP submitted to the Supreme Court for Brown v. Board of Education, echoing an argument that Charles Sumner had made a century earlier in the nation’s first school desegregation case, Roberts v. the City of Boston. “It was one thing, and a very important one, to declare as a political abstraction that ‘all men are created equal,’ and quite another to attach concrete rights to this state of equality,” Marshall wrote.
Martin Luther King, Jr. famously called the Declaration a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir” in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. But it was not the only time he cited the Declaration. He also invoked it in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and in a 1965 Independence Day speech that praised the Declaration for expressing “in such profound, eloquent, and unequivocal language the dignity and the worth of human personality.” In his final sermon, delivered in Memphis on April 3, 1968, King referenced the Declaration when he intoned, “All we say to America is, be true to what you said on paper.”
Malcolm X also invoked the Declaration but, in contrast to King, emphasized its right of revolution. In his 1964 “Ballot or the Bullet” speeches, he made the Lockean argument that Black disfranchisement rendered the government illegitimate and justified resistance: “This is not even a government based on democracy…. Half the people in the South can’t even vote…. Half of the senators and congressmen … are there illegally, are there unconstitutionally.” The Black Panther Party’s 1966 Ten-Point Program concludes by echoing the Declaration’s preamble. In 1970, the National Committee of Black Churchmen issued a Black Declaration of Independence that mimicked the original.
Other groups not originally included in the Declaration’s promise of equality have fought to make the words “all men are created equal” apply to them. Famously, the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” In 1917, Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, wrote to Congress: “Woman suffrage became an assured fact when the Declaration of Independence was written.” In 1978, gay rights advocate Harvey Milk stated: “In the Declaration of Independence, it is written: ‘All men are created equal, and they are endowed with certain inalienable rights.’…That’s what America is. No matter how hard you try, you cannot erase those words from the Declaration of Independence.” Native Americans, Latinos, farmers, and laborers have all cited the Declaration in their demands for equal treatment under the law.
But over the past 250 years, no group has been more steadfast in their devotion to the core beliefs of the Declaration or more determined to make them a universal reality than African Americans. These stories deserve more attention in this semi quincentennial year and beyond.
Charles Sahm is the director of content strategy and program development at the National Constitution Center.