The influence of the Declaration of Independence lasted well beyond 1776, and its principles continue to resonate around the globe. The Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) and the Comte de Mirabeau (1749–1791) incorporated the Declaration’s sentiments in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” one of the key documents of the French Revolution. Hungarian nationalist Lajos Kossuth (1802–1894), considered the father of Hungarian democracy and that nation’s president in the mid-nineteenth century, argued that the Declaration was “the noblest, happiest page in mankind’s history.” Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816) was inspired by America’s example to attempt to overthrow the Spanish empire in South America, and the former American slaves who settled in Liberia noted in their founding document that “all men, [enjoy] certain natural and inalienable rights: among these are life, liberty, and the right to acquire, possess, and enjoy property.” In the twentieth century, the United Nations incorporated Jefferson’s sentiments in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and various anticolonial movements adopted elements of the Declaration’s language in their independence efforts. Vaclav Havel (1936–2011), the driving force behind the Velvet Revolution in 1989 that led to the collapse of Soviet rule in the former Czechoslovakia, frequently mentioned the Declaration as one of the seminal statements animating the perpetual human quest for self-government.
In this letter to Roger Weightman (1787–1876), who at the time was mayor of Washington, DC, Jefferson apologized for being unable to attend celebrations there marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration but noted that he took comfort in the fact that the Declaration’s principles were beginning to take root and would eventually triumph around the globe.
—Stephen F. Knott