Source: The Economist News Magazine
Date: February 14, 2026
Author: Jon Meacham, Professor, Vanderbilt University
Editorial Note: From time to time, NAPCO editors will bring articles to our readers’ attention this year that celebrate the 250th founding of our nation that speak to the principles of human rights, liberty, self-governance and the rule of law upon which our country has been founded. Building a nation as good as its promise is a never-ending endeavor.
In the beginning, no one paid all that much attention to it – and, if they did, they were not particularly impressed. And yet since its signing the Declaration of Independence – drafted by Thomas Jefferson and edited by Benjamin Franklin in the summer of 1776 – has served as a kind of north star for Americans, especially in hours of strife. “I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it,” Fredrick Douglass said in 1852. “The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles.” That a man who had escaped enslavement and was not included in the Declaration’s assertion that “all men are created equal” could hail that crucial American document even amid the darkness of the antebellum order is testimony to its power and possibilities.
What explains the Declaration’s potency? I think Americans are drawn to it for the same reasons human beings are so often drawn to sacred scripture. Commandment and covenant, the Declaration is the biblical base of America’s civic religion, offering precept and promise. We turn to it in remembrance of battles won – beginning with the Revolutionary War itself – and to arm ourselves for battles still to come.
It is our oldest assertion of national aspiration, an articulation of the principle for which a disparate group of New World colonies chose to take on the world’s mightiest empire in armed struggle. The causes of the American revolution were varied, and not all were noble. Independence was declared after years of battles over power and money in the wake of the Seven Years’ War, when London assumed a larger burden in defending its American colonies. “The Americans have made a discovery, or think they have made one, that we mean to oppress them,” Edmund Burke remarked in 1769. “We have made a discovery, or think we have made one, that they intend to rise in rebellion against us…We know not how to advance; they know not how to retreat.” By the summer of 1776 – after Lord Dunmore, the British governor of Virginia, had promised freedom to any enslaved person who rose against the colonists – war had come. Yet for all the American limitations on who was included in the Declaration’s assertion of equality, the ideal of individual liberty, an inheritance from the British tradition, was – and is – at the heart of the national experiment.
And when that experiment is under stress, the Declaration has proved useful in defining national problems and inspiring popular effort to solve those problems. … [B]y invoking the phrase “In the beginning,” American leaders from Douglass and Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King have found Jefferson’s words essential in framing the present in terms of the past.
In his first major public speech, in 1838, Lincoln spoke of the sanctity of the founding; and in 1859, on the eve of his presidential campaign, he described the Declaration and its major author with reverence. Jefferson, Lincoln wrote, “had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” At Gettysburg in 1863, Lincoln brilliantly grounded the Union cause not in the prose of the constitution but in the poetry of the Declaration: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” One could debate the constitution, which was the means of America. Lincoln’s rhetorical gamble – which he won – was that one could not question the purpose of America, which, in this rendering, was Jefferson’s “proposition.”
Eighty years later, amid a global war against totalitarianism, Franklin D. Roosevelt turned to the Declaration to clarify Allied aims. On April 13, 1943, Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial in Washington by linking Jefferson and the American revolution with himself and the second world war. “He faced the fact that men who will not fight for liberty can lose it,” Roosevelt said. “We, too, have faced that fact. He lived in a world in which freedom of conscience and freedom of mind were battles still to be fought through – not principles already accepted of all men. We, too, have lived in such a world. He loved peace and loved liberty – yet on more than one occasion he was forced to choose between them. We, too, have been compelled to make that choice.”
And Jefferson supplied King with the substance of the things hoped for. “I have a dream,” King intoned at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” There, in the midst of the 20th century, in the heat of a freedom movement, King – like Lincoln and Roosevelt before him – could find no clearer articulation, no better summary of the American promise, than Jefferson’s ancient words.
In our own illiberal hour, the Declaration offers a measure of hope – which has always been part of the point. “The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britian; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use,” Lincoln remarked in 1857. “Its authors… knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.” As it was in the beginning, so it remains.