The American democratic experiment reaches an important milestone this week. The 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence offers us the opportunity to reflect on a collective act of courage that brought a new nation into being, improbably severing ties with the most formidable military power in the world. In 1,337 words, the Declaration articulated our country’s foundational ideals, rooted in the principles of liberty, equality, inalienable rights, and governance based on the consent of the governed. Flawed though they were in practice, from the moment they were promulgated those principles electrified the world.
In less polarized times, our nation’s big birthday might have brought Americans together across our many differences to reflect on what binds us as a nation — a moment to take pride in a history of progress while remaining clear-eyed about our country’s shortcomings. But in recent years, the meaning of the American Revolution has been increasingly contested. Some, including the organizers of the official Freedom 250 commemoration, like to put forth a sanitized and deeply cynical portrayal of the American origin story, one that glosses over this country’s failure to live up to the foundational promise that “all men are created equal,” most tragically through the accommodation of slavery. Others focus on what the revolutionaries of 1776 failed to accomplish, less interested in grappling with the founders’ ideals than in dwelling on their flaws, portrayed as a legacy of exclusion, subordination, and hypocrisy.
But what if America’s origin story doesn’t fit neatly into either ideological box? As Barack Obama recently reminded us, “It is worth remembering just how radical the whole idea of self-government really was back in 1776.” Offering a path through these competing narratives, the former president suggested that “it’s possible to celebrate the founders and appreciate what they did, as well as look objectively and critically at how their values strayed very far from what they professed.” Though they “fell terribly short of the Declaration’s promise,” he added, the founding generation provided “a framework that allowed each generation to make our Union more perfect.”
Indeed, when the signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in the cause of liberty and self-determination, they set in motion a remarkable period of democratic experimentation and popular mobilization that had no precedent in world history.
For a start, we didn’t leave the British Empire as one country but rather as 13 free and independent republics. Those fledgling republics wasted no time in adopting their own constitutions, inventing new mechanisms of democratic self-rule. While it is often said that the voting population was limited at the outset to male holders of property, the push toward a more inclusive electorate was already underway before the ink on the Declaration’s parchment was dry. Pennsylvania eliminated the property requirement in its 1776 constitution, crafted in the aftermath of independence, while New Jersey’s new charter, adopted two days before the Declaration, extended voting rights to Black Americans and women (though the provision was repealed four decades later).
This remarkable experiment in popular sovereignty would be tempered a dozen years later by the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, which produced a plan of government far less democratic than those taking root in the states. But that wasn’t the end of the story. As Gloria Steinem aptly said, while the framers of the Constitution didn’t give us a fully formed democracy, they did give us “the contagious idea of democracy” — one that fueled a succession of social movements that have made America more democratic and more inclusive over time. Along the way, from Seneca Falls to Gettysburg to the 1963 March on Washington, reformers repeatedly returned to the Declaration’s inspiring prose to bolster their own demands for equality, inclusion, and justice.
The Revolution was also a moment when those who had no say in politics and those who faced barriers based on the circumstances of their births could dream of something more. As the historian Jane Kamensky put it, “To believe in America, rooted in the American Revolution, is to believe in possibility. Everybody, on every side, including people who were denied even the ownership of themselves, had the sense of possibility worth fighting for.”
Contrary to traditional accounts, which focus mainly on the contributions of a few leading statesmen, many of whom were deeply entangled with the institution of slavery, the American Revolution was a time when people from all walks of life, men and women, enslaved and free, settler and native, were drawn into a lively and deeply contentious debate over the kind of nation we would be. We know this because historians have done much in recent years to recover voices that had long been lost.
Alan Jenkins of Harvard Law School has invoked a “founding family” of thinkers, writers, and leaders who contributed to our nation’s origin story from a position of exclusion and marginalization. They include the enslaved Black poet Phyllis Wheatley, who penned poems supporting the American cause, and Mercy Otis Warren, who wrote plays and produced pamphlets advancing supporting independence.
Taken together, this richer cohort of intellectual forebears expands the universe of voices and narratives that can help us connect the Declaration with our multicultural democracy today. That sense of possibility was the inspiration for a recent Brennan Center convening. “The Cause of America: Recovering Our Nation’s Revolutionary Promise” was a daylong event that brought top historians, legal scholars, and thought leaders together to explore the revolutionary aspirations of the founding era.
The conference title invoked a phrase coined by Thomas Paine, an immigrant from England who arrived on these shores just as the conflict between the colonists and Britain was reaching a flashpoint. Paine saw America’s fight for liberty as more than a dispute over taxation. He saw it as a turning point in world history. In his highly influential pamphlet, Common Sense, published in January 1776, Paine argued that “the cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.” At a moment when independence from colonial rule seemed unthinkable for many, Paine made the case for taking this radical step in plain and accessible language.
The pamphlet was a sensation, reprinted widely in newspapers and read aloud in taverns and meeting places. At a crucial moment, Paine’s enthusiastic vision of what America could be inspired many to embrace the ideals of liberty, human rights, and self-determination.
Those ideals, which Americans have fought to realize in the years since 1776, still have the potential to inspire us today.
