Anniversaries are prime opportunities to honor and reflect upon the past while making relevant meaning for our present and future — work that mirrors key demands of our history classrooms. This year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence offers us an opportunity to consider how people from the center to the margins of American society have made meaning of our founding document. Just as in 1776, the document’s framing is essential to any analysis and reflection. In that spirit, I’d like to share and discuss some of the documents that I present to my students to engage with the Declaration.
The anchor and centerpiece of course is the Declaration itself. And while there are a wealth of lessons in rhetoric, history, and politics to be gleaned from the entirety of the document, a crucial focus for an anniversary discussion is the second paragraph, which contains the language students will be most familiar with; it contains the evergreen principles and themes that have been upheld, lauded and debated as recurring motifs throughout American history: self-determination, equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The documents that next come to mind in the public imagination are those commemorative and celebratory accounts that both address the aspirational and inspirational nature of the document and seek to reinforce tradition. While sources abound in this category (every July 4th produces preservation-worthy orations), I offer two less-familiar landmark presidential anniversary speeches fitting for this moment: Calvin Coolidge’s speech on the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration and Gerald Ford’s Bicentennial Remarks at the National Archives. Students are less familiar with the presidents who held office during these anniversary celebrations, but they recognize the significance of 1926 and 1976, as well as the familiarly commemorative approach both speeches use: asserting the reliability of the Declaration’s principles as a lodestar across time. Coolidge’s speech lauds the Declaration’s “immortal truths” proven by “unerring logic,” while Ford hails it as the “fixed star of freedom” undergirded by “moral truths that are eternal.” These addresses also share similar contexts: tradition-oriented presidents focusing on the Declaration’s principles as a steadying force in the wake of then-recent agitation and transitions (the Progressive Era in Coolidge’s case; the prior decade of social upheaval and Watergate scandal in Ford’s). The takeaway of the commemorative approach: Americans can look to the Declaration as a source of both uplift and stability.
Then we can consider some documents that explore how the principles of the Declaration withstood America’s greatest existential crisis: the Civil War and Reconstruction Era. In the years preceding the war, abolitionist voices like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass censured slavery as a violation of the Declaration’s principles of freedom and equality. Outraged and pessimistic, Garrison excoriated decades of compromises on the issue of slavery that functionally “trampled” the principles of the Declaration, a defiance that (for Garrison) delegitimized the Constitution under a pro-slavery social order. Similarly frustrated, Douglass dismissed the Fourth of July as a “sham” celebration as long as slavery persisted, yet he maintained hope that “notwithstanding the dark picture” of his time, the “glorious liberty” potential of the Constitution contained hope for a proper reckoning and eradication of slavery.
In the wake of the Civil War, political Reconstructors like Congressman John Bingham and President Ulysses S. Grant contended that assurances of citizenship, equality and voting rights in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments validated the Declaration’s principles by encoding them in the Constitution. Along with the abolitionists, these documents challenge us to consider the necessary conditions to realize the promise of the Declaration, in their time and in ours.
Finally, to reinforce the point that everybody (and not just the famous and lauded) has a say in making meaning of the Declaration, I offer perspectives from the margins and grassroots movements that have used the nation’s founding document – its structure, its principles, its language – to assert their causes. As with the commemorative examples, we have many available sources to choose from, but I’ll offer a few favorites that resonate with my students.. Elizabeth Cady Stanton paraphrases and remixes the document in her Declaration of Sentiments on behalf of women’s rights; Martin Luther King insists during the Civil Rights Movement that the Declaration was a “promissory note” in a state of “default” as long as its principles remained selectively applied. The tradition of Native American Declarations emphasizes the principle of self-determination within the Declaration of Independence to challenge and confront a history of hostility, denigration, and broken treaties. These responses might connect with students who don’t always resonate with the circumstances of 1776, but who can relate to approaches that connect the principles of 1776 to these grassroot movements.
Like so many aspects of our society, the meaning and significance of the Declaration have been the source of democratic public deliberation, and our classrooms must be one of those deliberative spaces. The 250th anniversary of the Declaration invites us to engage in that process by considering voices and perspectives from our past — compelling variations on its themes and principles — and engaging with the voices around us to empower and inform our perspectives and actions today.
Malik Ali, a James Madison Fellow and 2017 graduate of the Master of Arts in American History and Government program, is Tukman Distinguished Teacher of History at the Branson School in Ross, California.
