The Legacy of the Declaration of Independence

Scholar

Key Ideas & Quote

Why It Matters

David Armitage
Harvard University
Podcast Clip

“The Declaration of Independence was obviously the birth certificate of the United States of America. It’s the first document in which those words appear. But paradoxically, it was not an American document in the sense that the word American or Americans appears nowhere in it. That meant it could both be the signal document announcing the freedom and the independence of the new United States, but within time, it could also be a document relevant to other peoples who, like the Americans in 1776, wanted to place themselves among the powers of the earth to assert their own freedom and independence. The first people to do that were actually in Vermont. The Vermont Declaration of Independence was the very first inspired by the American Declaration, but of course, it would not be the last. We see the spread of declarations of independence first throughout the Americas and then beyond the Americas to the rest of the world, using the form of the American Declaration, a short, punchy document directed both to home audiences and to the opinions of mankind, as the Declaration puts it, and also sometimes using the very phrases and arguments of the Declaration of Independence itself. So over time, we might say the American Declaration becomes a modular document, something that can be broken into different segments, recombined for different causes, and thereby used to animate other independence and freedom movements around the world almost up to the present day.”

Armitage’s analysis is important because he frames the Declaration of Independence in a transnational way, expanding its influence beyond the borders of the United States. In this way, the Declaration becomes a document entrenched in the language of rights, tracing the role it plays in shaping modern concepts of sovereignty and human rights.

David Armitage
Harvard University
Podcast Clip

“There’s a very rich tradition, of course, within the United States itself, of appropriating...the promises of the Declaration of Independence for domestic groups, internal groups, groups that found themselves to be marginalized or oppressed or without a voice being heard within the American polity itself. So throughout the course of the 19th century, for instance, there are so-called Declarations of Independence on behalf of workers and socialists, and perhaps most famously of all, the Declaration of Sentiments on behalf of women, which is rewritten, all men and women are created equal...And we can see that all the way up, for example, to the 1970s... Just to take one example, there’s a Black Declaration of Independence issued by Black churchmen in the 1970s, showing that both the Declaration's promises were ever expanding within American history, but also, of course, the need to claim those promises of the Declaration itself showed that the universal claims of equality stated in the Declaration had not yet been extended to everybody. If we look to the world stage, we see a slightly paradoxical heritage for the Declaration of Independence. That is, for the most part, when the U.S. Declaration of Independence was taken up outside the United States, it was not the second paragraph, but the first and the last paragraphs. That is those parts of the document which speak of peoples breaking away from other peoples to become members of the powers of the earth and to assert themselves as free and independent states. It’s that language of the collective rights of particular peoples among other peoples on the international stage that were inspiring, I think, far more than the second paragraph. So those promises of individual rights, individual life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have a rather lesser effect outside the United States than they do within it.”

This quote matters because it clarifies how the Declaration of Independence functioned differently at home and abroad, and what that reveals about American politics, rights, and global influence. Outside the United States, states tended to use the Declaration’s language about collective self-determination rather than its rhetoric of individual rights as many movements in the United States have.

David Armitage
Harvard University
Podcast Clip

“As a citizen, as an American citizen as I am, I would hope that new readers and renewed readers, those who are coming back to the Declaration, will meditate on the meaning of its promises. What does it mean to be a people? What does it mean to be an independent people? What does it mean to be an independent people within a state that calls itself free and independent? And how are those matters related to the promises of the second paragraph, those noble words about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and all men are created equal? How do we recover both the freshness, the novelty, the originality, and in some ways the explosiveness of those words in 1776? And how do we recover that in a way to remind ourselves that those are, albeit universal ideals, but not uncontested ideals? There are those now in the United States who would dismiss them or look for other foundations for an American identity. We need to return to those promises and return to those ideals and refurbish them and burnish them again for our own time. And I hope readers old and new will engage with that over the course of the coming months and years.”

In his culminating response, Armitage urges Americans to read the Declaration actively and critically rather than passively. He emphasizes the value of civic reflection and civic engagement – punctuating the need to make the Declaration an active tool for civic life.