American Scripture by Pauline Maier

Author:Pauline Maier [Maier, Pauline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79195-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IV

American Scripture

RESPONSIBILITY FOR DISTRIBUTING the Declaration of Independence fell to Congress’s president, John Hancock. He executed that job with none of the anxiety that had gripped him a year earlier, as he and Samuel Adams set out for the Second Continental Congress. Fear of division haunted him then, fear that the other colonies would blame Massachusetts for the outbreak of war and leave it to face the British alone. But in July 1776 Congress managed to agree unanimously on Independence, a far harder decision than any that preceded it.1 Britain’s persistent, wrongheaded policy provoked that unity, but it also rewarded months of strenuous political maneuvering within Congress and throughout the country. Now it was necessary to tell the American people that they had assumed a “separate and equal station” among the “powers of the earth,” and then, more difficult, to earn recognition of that status on the battlefield.

How the word went out is one story; what became of the Declaration afterward is another, more complex and of continuing significance. The Declaration was at first forgotten almost entirely, then recalled and celebrated by Jeffersonian Republicans, and later elevated into something akin to holy writ, which made it a prize worth capturing on behalf of one cause after another. The politics that attended its creation never entirely left its side, such that the Declaration of Independence, which became a powerful statement of national identity, has also been at the center of some of the most intense conflicts in American history, including that over slavery which threatened the nation itself. In the course of those controversies, the document assumed a function altogether different from that of 1776: it became not a justification of revolution, but a moral standard by which the day-to-day policies and practices of the nation could be judged.

The Declaration of Independence was in some ways the most unlikely of all documents to play such a role, one whose work was essentially done once it had successfully announced and justified Congress’s decision to break with Britain and begin a new nation. Moreover, its assertion that “all men are created equal,” which became a prominent part of the document’s moral message, had originally referred to men in a state of nature, that is, before government existed. To accomplish so thorough a remaking of that eighteenth-century document went beyond the power of any one man. No less than its original creation, the redefinition of the Declaration was a collective work by Americans who struggled over several generations to establish policies consistent with the revolutionary heritage as they came to understand it in the only way open to them—through politics.

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