We have an opportunity here in the 250th in Philadelphia with the Declaration's journey.

I think to educate our visitors, not just Americans, but people from around the world, about what the Declaration was, what it is.

The words were written in 1776.

The words have not changed.

But the meaning of those words has evolved.

The Declaration of Independence was a statement of principles as part of a broader American revolution that in some ways continues today.

Libertarian equality for all.

Are we meeting the threshold right now?

Not really, but it's an aspiration.

It's a goal.

That opening paragraph is the vocabulary that Americans have been using to assert their rights for the last 250 years.

The rhetoric of the Declaration invokes all citizens, but really who was implied in the Declaration of Independence was wealthy landowning men.

If we don't challenge the presumption that what's been is what will always be, we'll never be able to move forward to a better place where we truly are all equal.

(upbeat music) - It was always in our minds that when 2026 and the 250th comes, we wanna be telling this broad story that spans a quarter millennium, that also reaches around the globe.

Americans' understanding of their Declaration has been a dialogue, not just among themselves and between generations, but with the world.

Philadelphia was the political center of the colonies at this moment.

It's where the Continental Congress was meeting, and it was a sort of central location.

The Continental Congress included men from all 13 colonies, from New Hampshire down to Georgia.

We tend to focus on the signers, but there were a lot of men involved in the decision.

The Declaration of Independence was part of the American Revolution.

The American Revolution was a break from Great Britain of some of the colonies of the British Empire in North America.

There were economic factors, there was the ongoing war which had started in April of 1775, and most of all there was this real interest in having representative government and having the voice of the people heard in a way that it hadn't been under British rule.

In January of 1776, an English immigrant named Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet called Common Sense.

Common Sense put in plain language a call for the American people to create an independent nation to do away with being part of the British Empire and create a new form of government.

It's one of the best selling printed works after the Bible here in the colonies and it spreads like wildfire.

So the Committee of Five was created in June of 1776 to write the Declaration of Independence.

Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Roger Sherman.

Adams and Benjamin Franklin, the elder statesmen in this Committee of Five, pressed on Jefferson to be the one to be the lead author.

Jefferson had been living in a boarding house that was close to Independence Hall, and then he decided to move out to Seventh and Market, which was really the country at that time.

And so we can imagine him working there and really taking time to draft different documents, and then coming to places like City Tavern and having meals with the other committee members.

Robert Hemings is Jefferson's enslaved valet and he's present in Philadelphia as a 14-year-old while Jefferson is writing the Declaration of Independence.

About 20 years later, a little bit less than that, Robert Hemings is the first person that Jefferson frees.

There's this real connection between Robert Hemings being present at the Declaration of Independence and then pursuing his own personal freedom later in life.

Thomas Jefferson was America's foremost philosopher of liberty who in drafting the Declaration of Independence gives us the civic creed that the nation remains organized around.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.

Jefferson is also like everybody in the elite class of Virginia and in slavery.

Slavery is not explicitly mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, but it could have been.

There was a 28th grievance in the list that got removed.

That grievance was written by Thomas Jefferson and in it he describes slavery specifically as a form of human oppression.

The king was thereby using the oppression of one people to threaten another people with anger and uprising.

And ultimately the Continental Congress compromised and cut that grievance because it felt like a step too far.

Everything else they could fairly attribute to King George III but this was a bit too much to blame him for the entire transatlantic slave trade.

Had it not been removed the document would begin with a statement of equality and then conclude with a statement about the horrors of oppression of slavery.

By not including that part it became as brilliant as it was one of the most hypocritical documents in history.

The people who are writing the document sitting there said it is self-evident that all men are created equal.

Didn't really believe that particularly when it came to Africans.

Many of the representatives of the Congress, even though they're agreeing to these words and adopting these words, are enslaving people back at their homes in the various colonies.

Jefferson had a couple of different plantations.

Monticello is the home plantation.

It's the place that he decides in an early age where he will build on top of a mountain just two miles away from where he's born.

It's this stunningly beautiful place that aspires to these lofty ideals that was built by enslaved labor, built amongst this world of radical inequality to espouse the ideas of equality.

It's a fascinating place.

Of course, he's born into a slave society, and he knows at a very young age that he will inherit enslaved people upon his coming of age.

His very first memory is of being carried on a pillow by an enslaved man.

Jefferson marries Martha Wales Skelton.

She would become Martha Jefferson in 1772, and she dies ten years later after a series of miscarriages and pregnancies.

It's through her father that he'll acquire over 10,000 acres of land and over 130 enslaved people.

The Hemings family was the largest family at Monticello, free or enslaved.

Five generations of the Hemingses lived here.

And probably the most well-known member of the Hemings family is Sally Hemings.

And that is because she was the mother of at least six children who were fathered by Thomas Jefferson.

Martha Jefferson and Sally Hemings were half-sisters.

Thomas Jefferson is one of the most divisive figures in American history and always has been.

It's not new that people would argue over what Jefferson thought, what Jefferson actually meant, or who gets to claim Thomas Jefferson.

On the night of July 4th, the first copies of the Declaration of Independence were printed by John Dunlap in his printing office at 2nd and Market Streets.

John Dunlap was an Irish immigrant in Philadelphia and he had a successful newspaper.

So when they were looking for someone to take on this massive order of printing poster-sized copies of the Declaration, he's the person they turned to.

Public readings of the Declaration of Independence happen in cities all across the new United States, beginning in Philadelphia.

And the crowd will boo and cheer and there'll be cannon fire and bells ringing.

But there were certainly people within earshot who were not invited to join the celebration.

We have a fantastic account from one young black person who heard the Declaration of Independence read aloud outside Independence Hall on July 8, 1776.

And that was a young James Forten.

James Forten was born free here in Philadelphia, part of the rising free black population of the city.

James Fortin served as a sailor when he was a teenager during the Revolutionary War aboard a privateer ship, worked as a sail maker in the city of Philadelphia and became the wealthiest African American man in the United States in the early 1800s and became an abolitionist leader.

Many of our folks were enslaved alongside Africans and many of our folks intermixed with those that we were enslaved with.

Between the 1670s and 1770s there were more Native slaves exported from New England than there were African slaves imported into the Carolinas.

[Music] In Native American communities the Declaration has had a very, very complicated reception.

Native people are referenced in the last grievances of the Declaration of Independence as "merciless Indian savages."

This is one of the most challenging and troubling passages in the Declaration of Independence.

Native nations divided over what they were going to do during that war and the majority would side with the British to try and keep the American colonists away from their frontiers.

The Native American population, they're continually being pushed west for over a hundred and hundred fifty years by 1776.

It's important to remember that every piece of what is today a United States territory has an indigenous population and the Native American polities existed for centuries and centuries before any Europeans came to this land.

I'm from Mashpee, I'm Mashpee Wampanoag.

We are the people of the first light, the people of the dawn.

We are some of the first to see the sunrise on this continent.

I can't speak to whether or not Wampanoag people were particularly aware of the line "merciless Indian savages."

We were aware of the struggle for independence from a ruler that was in a country across the ocean.

Our folks have always seen that the rule of the governing powers comes from the consent of the governed.

That's always been a part of our outlook in the world, which we shared with our neighbors, and I think which also inspired and infected our neighbors.

There was a delegation of Micmac and Maliseet chiefs who had come to Massachusetts.

They were actually hoping to meet with George Washington.

They didn't know that he had moved from Boston down to New York with the Continental Army.

But when they show up, they have a treaty negotiation with representatives from the Massachusetts government.

And they're pledging their support to the Continental Army and the cause of independence.

This happened at what was called the Treaty of Watertown.

And while they're in the middle of this meeting in Watertown, Massachusetts, the Declaration of Independence arrives.

And so the Massachusetts delegates say, we really ought to let you know that situations have changed.

We're now part of something called the United States.

And here's the document that states that that exists and what it means and why.

And we get a response from Maliseet Chief Ambrose Baer who said, "We like it well."

Now that's the translated version of this response, but this is the first moment that the independence of the United States was acknowledged by a foreign power.

And it's acknowledged by a Native American chief, not by a European power.

I think we often think of indigenous communities as being particularly isolated from one another without kind of a wider knowledge of the world around them, which is simply false.

There's a lot of fundamentally Native American concepts of democracy that have huge impact on American democracy.

When they're thinking about how do we get 13 colonies to all function together, they are looking at native examples and things that had already existed in North America.

Historians and scholars have debated the influence of the six nations principally centered in upstate New York, the Iroquois Confederacy on the states formed by the Continental Congress in 1776.

There is certainly a commonality alluded to by people like Franklin through the late 18th century.

The way that Americans remember Native American people, indigenous people is heavily influenced by 20th century mass culture, mass media, movies and stuff like that.

If you look at me, most people don't look at me and think that guy is Native American.

Most people would agree that freedom and equality are things that are good and that government should protect.

We agree on the values.

We disagree on how to get there.

But the values should be uniting, not divisive.

Philadelphia was founded as a place of religious freedom and toleration.

It stood in contrast to other colonies which had sort of state religions, which was the Church of England.

William Penn made it an edict that all those who wish to worship may come to Pennsylvania and worship with religious freedom.

The religious diversity of Philadelphia is pretty remarkable and many visitors who come to Philadelphia comment on that in their writings, how they can see various places of worship in this very city.

There's rising Methodism, there were Presbyterian churches, also a very significant Quaker population in Philadelphia.

More than 300 different African ethnic groups were uprooted from Africa and brought to the U.S.

So you had 300 different traditions.

Just because we were all from the continent of Africa didn't mean that we spoke the same language, that we called the Almighty by the same name.

Muslims were here at the time, but they were not seen as human beings because those were Muslims who were enslaved.

They were hailing from what's today Senegal, Gambia, the Senegambia region.

Many of the enslaved Muslims who were brought to America were forced to be converted into Christianity, but many still kept their traditions alive and kept practicing in different ways.

The founding fathers, particularly Jefferson, was giving particular thought to how to think about Muslims and he wrote about that and he owns a copy of a Quran but they were not recognized.

So there's a growing Jewish community in Philadelphia in 1776 and over the course of the Revolutionary War they're growing in numbers to the point that they actually want to build their own synagogue to have a physical meeting place not just meeting in people's houses but having a place where they can all come together and define themselves as a religious community.

The congregation was established in 1740.

Jonas Phillips joined with others to establish the actual congregation.

Jonas Phillips was a Jewish immigrant from Germany who had come to live in Philadelphia and settled here to do business.

We know that Jonas Phillips served in the militia.

He started in the South as actually an indentured servant and he worked his way up to becoming a pretty successful merchant.

During the summer of 1776, he encountered a Dunlap printing of the Declaration of Independence here in Philadelphia.

Jonas Phillips sends this copy of the Declaration of Independence to his relative in Amsterdam, and he encloses it in a letter that he actually wrote in Yiddish or Judeo-German.

And the note says, "We are seeing a new nation formed," and he says, "I think they're going to win."

This letter had to go through the Dutch Caribbean to get to Amsterdam, and it was intercepted by a British ship.

And you have to imagine that a British officer opening up this letter that was written in Yiddish in Philadelphia in July 1776 might think that it was written in code.

So this document actually ends up in the prize papers in the National Archives as a sort of intercepted mail.

It was just private correspondence.

There wasn't anything, no political intrigue in it, but that means that this copy of the Declaration lay hidden for years without anyone really realizing that it was there or knowing the full story.

Jonas Phillips was also instrumental in the religious tests clause of the U.S.

Constitution.

In the Pennsylvania Constitution, there was a requirement for a religious oath, more specifically a Christian oath, in order to hold political office.

And Jonas Phillips and members of the congregation Mikva Israel disagreed with this.

Jonas Phillips has a very moving letter, a very powerful letter, in which he addressed members of the convention through his own personal experiences.

Somebody who fought for the revolution, fought for independence, will not have his patriotism conflict with his Judaism and vice versa.

The two are not to be foes against one another, but as friends that live in harmony.

He reminds the Constitutional Convention that the liberties that are promised in the Declaration of Independence should extend to all people, not just Christian people.

Jonas Phillips's grandson, Uriah Phillips Levy, becomes a commodore in the U.S.

Navy.

It's the highest position that a Jewish person had held at that time.

After he leaves the Navy, he actually purchases Thomas Jefferson's plantation of Monticello and tries to restore it out of sort of respect for Jefferson's legacy and influence both through the Declaration of Independence and his political career.

Christ Church is here.

The first Catholic church in Philadelphia is still here.

These three institutions are within one block of each other.

I believe when William Penn said to the Jews, "Celebrate your religion with freedom," he opened a door, and that that door should never be closed.

And it has opened.

It has opened for Jews.

It has opened for Muslims.

It has opened for people of all faiths to continue to celebrate and to understand that the basis of this country is our differences and its beauty.

The age of enlightenment from the late 1600s through the 1700s was this period of time where scientific thought and reason and natural rights were being discussed openly and that influenced the creation of governments and rebellion against existing governments because the thought was spreading that the people should have more power.

France and Haiti both have revolutions in the decades following the American Revolution.

The French adopt a rights document that has clear references to the American Declaration of Independence.

Thomas Jefferson was in France as ambassador when he helped the Marquis de Lafayette to draft the first draft of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

What's distinctive about the French one is that it's not really about historical grievances at all.

It's entirely about what rights one has as a citizen.

The French Declaration of Rights has become, in the modern world, probably the first thing people look to when they want to think about how did human rights get off the ground.

It lays out an extensive set of rights, which are civil and political rights.

Many early Americans, though, including some of the people we now call founding fathers, were deeply worried by the French Revolution.

The Haitian Revolution is an outcome in some ways of the French Revolution itself.

Haiti, then called Saint-Domingue, was a colony of France.

France was an imperial power just like Britain.

And what began as a revolt of free people of color on the island of Saint-Domingue, escalated in various ways until it also became a revolt of the enslaved population of the island, which was the vast majority of people living in this extremely valuable colony of France, producing much of the world's sugar at that point.

But you can imagine how for Americans this was an alarming situation to imagine what a large-scale slave uprising would look like.

The U.S.

was allies with the French, helpful to the French during the revolution.

This is because the French were revolting against a monarchy, which the U.S.

could understand because they also revolted against the British monarchy.

What they couldn't understand is black people revolting against white people.

And this Declaration of Independence that is issued by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who becomes the Emperor of Haiti, it talks about the need to make sure that the Haitian people are free forever, that they're not going to be re-enslaved.

Jefferson was actually President of the United States at the time of the Haitian Declaration of Independence, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines writes a letter to Jefferson trying to explain that they're doing exactly what Jefferson and his compatriots had done in 1776.

They're trying to overthrow tyrannical power, and Jefferson, as far as we know, never responded.

Jefferson's policy is to ostracize Haitians, to limit the amount that the United States was willing to acknowledge that they even existed as an independent power.

It was a long, bloody struggle.

The loss of life was actually much greater than in the French Revolution.

The country finds itself deeply impoverished and no longer a place of extraordinary wealth.

The United States does not acknowledge Haitian independence until President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

There's deep anxiety about what's happened in Haiti precisely because it becomes associated with slave revolt, with violence, with instability.

Now the country of Haiti has been punished for building an independent black state.

And of course with embargoes and reparations and all sorts of crippling debt.

And that's a huge part of the reason why Haiti remains so poor today.

But it really reshaped the globe.

Our freedom has put us in a hole and we are still paying the debt.

But, like we always say, "L'Union pour la Force."

There is strength in unity, and I think there is more to be seen from our beautiful little country.

The people of the United States are very much following the news around the world about other nations declaring their independence.

They're concerned about the legacy of their own revolution.

How would the revolution be taken in different directions?

The republics that were created out of the old Spanish Empire, all of those nations, there's a direct line to being inspired by the Declaration of Independence.

The Spanish and Portuguese empires controlled much of Latin and South America from the earliest European conquests in the late 1400s.

By the late 18th century there was international wars, the French Revolutionary Wars threatened Spain directly, and then we had the Napoleonic Wars, so Spain and its empire was under huge threat and war began to take over the decision-making process.

And so when there was a war you need funds, you need money to be able to pay for troops, for ships, for everything.

And so there is these pressures to tax more.

The people in South America and Central America, they're feeling disenchanted with their home governments because they're not the priority.

The colonists were frustrated by a lack of rights, of freedom over social structures, which had a clear caste system that privileged the rights of the European-born population over the rights of the indigenous, the people of African descent, and the people of mixed descent.

Many people in the United States are even sort of judging how other nations are declaring independence and deeming whether does that nation even have the right to declare independence.

You have revolutionaries like Simón Bolívar who rise up and lead these independence movements.

Simón Bolívar is the most famous face of all the Latin American liberators.

He was one of the wealthiest creoles in the Spanish empire at the time.

Bolívar is seen by many as a visionary as someone who conceived of the independence of Venezuela not in isolation, but had the idea that for all of this to work, these countries in Spanish America needed to unite.

Since the mid-18th century, communications began to happen at a much faster pace.

The first printing press in the Americas was actually in Mexico City, not in British North America.

Some of the printers and the political leaders of these movements had actually come to Philadelphia and come to the United States to seek support and in some cases the United States sent printing presses and sent printers to try to support these independence movements that they felt had a similarity.

On the 4th of July every year there were toasts to independence that are recorded in the newspapers and we can see how Americans thought about other revolutions through these toasts.

We can see toasts to Simone Bolivar and toasts to Ireland and Greece but we don't see toasts to Toussaint Louverture or Jean-Jacques Dessalines in Haiti.

Well over a hundred nations over the past 250 years would adopt that model to become independent via a Declaration of Independence.

Perhaps the most striking example of another type of citizen using or invoking the Declaration of Independence is Ho Chi Minh.

So Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese nationalist who had fought his entire life for Vietnamese freedom.

He wrote his own Vietnamese Declaration of Independence.

And in doing so, he invoked directly the American Declaration of Independence to outline his arguments for why Vietnam deserved independence from Western influence.

And in some cases, they actually issue their declarations of independence in Independence Hall and in Philadelphia so that they can create this tangible connection between their independence movement and the independence movement in 1776.

This includes Thomas Miseric, who issued the Czech Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, as well as a Korean Congress that met in Philadelphia and marched through the city streets and issued their own declaration in pursuit of Korea's independence from Japan.

For Abraham Lincoln, there's probably perhaps no more important document than the Declaration of Independence.

He is constantly referring to it in his speeches.

When he comes to Philadelphia on his way to take the oath of office as President of the United States, Philadelphia does become very much a symbolic place for rights advocates throughout American history.

Lincoln interpreted the Declaration as a living document.

He saw the Declaration as setting out an agenda for the nation to become a more just one over time.

And he wanted that equality to apply to all Americans, including enslaved people.

The Confederacy views the declaration as a model for secession because they wanted to continue to have the institution of slavery in the Southern States.

And Lincoln wanted to abolish slavery.

Lincoln became a household name during a series of debates with Stephen Douglas for the Illinois Senate seat.

And in these debates, Stephen Douglas presented a view of the Declaration of Independence that Lincoln felt was limited.

When the southern states decide to secede from the Union after the election of Abraham Lincoln as president, they turn to the Declaration of Independence as their model.

In order to create the Confederate States of America, they all issued statements explaining why they were leaving the Union.

The Mississippi Ordinance of Secession opens up with explaining, "We believe in slavery.

It's the most important thing in the world to us."

South Carolina and some of the other Confederate states when they succeeded included excerpts from the Declaration of Independence statement on the right of a nation to break free from another nation.

They rejected openly the promise of equality.

George Wythe Randolph becomes one of the leading figures in the Confederacy and he's an interesting figure because he's Thomas Jefferson's grandson.

All but one of his granddaughters will become staunch Union supporters and will be very critical of their brothers and their sister who side with the Confederacy.

In one of George Randolph's letters, he'll describe the Declaration of Independence and he'll say this is just ridiculous that all men are created equal.

It was meant literally it would mean that prisoners in jail would be just as equal as I am.

He actually meets with President Abraham Lincoln on the day that the first shots of the war are fired at Fort Sumter.

And you have to imagine that was a fascinating meeting between these two different people with completely opposite interpretations of the Declaration of Independence.

The Union Army included a mix of people.

There were certainly people who believe strongly in the cause of abolition, but there were also people who were fighting to maintain the United States and fighting out of loyalty for President Abraham Lincoln.

The enlisted troops of the Confederate Army are everyday people of the states that seceded and even some people from other states that didn't secede because they supported the cause of the Confederacy.

The Confederacy is really interesting because there were opportunities for the largest property owners to not serve in the Confederate Army.

They could pay for other people to serve in their stead.

And so you would think that the people who had the most to lose if the Confederacy lost the war would want to fight and in some cases they did.

But in other cases you had poor people who were working in similar conditions to the enslaved and free black laborers in the South.

When Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, the one thing that he wanted to do was completely cripple the South's ability to rely on its own enslaved labor.

The entire South was completely and utterly dependent on slavery.

It was it was the point of their entire economy.

Lincoln's primary reason was to affect the economy of those that were in the Confederate states.

At the end of the day if you cripple their economy you cripple the Confederates at large.

And so by issuing this Emancipation Proclamation which did go out to many of the enslaved people across the South, Lincoln was calling for them.

He was calling for them to leave.

He was saying that slavery will not exist after this war is over.

We can see the influence of the Declaration of Independence on Abraham Lincoln's entire career all the way through the presidency and his famous Gettysburg Address.

Four score and seven years ago, a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

This is one of Lincoln's most famous quotations and he's directly referring to the Declaration of Independence.

Ultimately the Confederacy falls, the Union Army wins, and the UDC, the Daughters of the Confederacy, then try to rehabilitate the image of the Confederate cause.

They're the women who are related to Confederate soldiers.

They step up after the Civil War and try to reclaim the memory of the Confederacy.

They really latch on to, for instance, the Declaration of Independence, the memory of the Revolution, and they argue that the Confederacy is actually the rightful heir of that revolutionary legacy.

And the daughters of the Confederacy then push that idea forward.

They write novels, they write textbooks, they do public kinds of events and celebrations.

Raising Confederate monuments and having all sorts of events where they celebrate the Confederate government, celebrate the Confederate leaders, and consistently say that this was not an immoral cause dedicated to enslaving people of African descent, but rather it was this glorious cause that the white South fought in order to maintain regional autonomy and what they often call states' rights.

When there was the big push in recent years to remove a lot of those monuments throughout the South, the defenders of those monuments argued that they were monuments of war.

But the large majority of them were constructed in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Confederate flag today is often invoked by people that believe in this lost cause.

I think that black people are so offended when they see the Confederate flag because it represents the pain of all of our ancestors and what we've had to live through in this country.

We talk about black intellectual history I think we're talking about solutions, creativity, writings, prose that are coming out of the struggle with either being enslaved or being in a community where many people look like you are enslaved.

We have in the black intellectual history of the Declaration of Independence Lemuel Haynes who is credited as perhaps the first person to use the language we hold these truths in an abolitionist cause.

Lemuel Haynes wrote an essay called Liberty Further Extended in 1776 and on the cover of this essay he quoted the Declaration of Independence and that second sentence that promises the life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the equality that we now think of when we think of the Declaration of Independence.

Haynes was a man of African descent from Massachusetts who served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and then later became a minister in Massachusetts.

So from that time all the way through the 1790s to Frederick Douglass and his famous oration in 1852 to Martin Luther King Jr.

and his I Have a Dream speech we can see this trajectory where the same phrases continue to inspire and frustrate black leaders in the United States.

The black intellectual were people generally speaking during that period who had backgrounds in theology.

Blacks early on in Philadelphia such as Richard Allen, Absalom Jones formed organizations such as the Free African Society.

That was a very early civil rights organization that allowed them to actively campaign against the horrible institution of slavery.

Frederick Douglass has this incredible speech that is commonly known as "What to a Slave is the Fourth of July."

He said, "What is your Fourth of July to me?"

He says, "All I see is hypocrisy."

This is what he argues in this powerful speech, one of the greatest speeches ever given in America.

You even have other black abolitionists such as Sojourner Truth and even Harriet Tubman.

Who actually went back down to the South after escaping to freedom herself and helped more people come and get out of the South, escape slavery through the Underground Railroad.

The Underground Railroad was a beautiful and complex system of individuals working together for one cause, which was to free people from enslavement all across the country, even globally from the Caribbean all the way out West and even up to Canada.

We had conductors like William Still, the father of the Underground Railroad, who not only wrote down people's stories that are still available today, but he kept track and record of where people were going.

Stephen Smith, who quite literally had a train.

You had a lumberyard further out from Pennsylvania where people could hop on and travel to the city and stop at Broad and Noble, get off and more than likely go into Northern Liberties.

Henrietta Duthier, my personal and favorite Underground Railroad conductor, she lived here in the city of Philadelphia.

Her house and original spot for her funeral home was actually in what is Star Garden and she used to hide people in coffins and stage fake funeral processions because who was going to bother the dead?

And so people could travel back and forth across this region.

Within the different strains of abolitionism, you know, there were all sorts of different ideas about what should happen with African Americans if they didn't indeed go free.

The founders had different opinions on this.

Jefferson thought black people needed to kind of be in their own community, that it wasn't possible to have an integrated society.

And then you have other abolitionists who are really pushing for full inclusion and citizenship in the United States.

Declaration of Independence was a brilliant, in one sense, document.

The Civil Rights Movement was able to move the country forward because this document had in it all of the kernels that were necessary for us to plant the seeds of what was just and what was unjust.

Arguably the most famous invocation of the Declaration during the Civil Rights era came in Dr.

King's speech during the March on Washington, where he frames the document as a promissory note.

Martin Luther King Jr.

in the 1960s sort of resets what it means to be an American.

Really provides the moral rhetoric for what it will be to have an interracial, pluralistic democracy.

You have to give him credit.

He is that voice, not just of reason, but a voice of strong ethical understanding and underpinning.

From Martin Luther King Jr.

Malcolm X through to Barack Obama were very essential with respect to not only philosophy but relating that and turning it into activism leading to the first African American president of the United States.

And with Barack Obama being a constitutional expert I think that is very important as it relates to the Declaration of Independence.

Barack Obama's probably greatest speech happened in 2008 right across the street from Independence Hall in the Constitution Center.

We were essentially people who came to America with nothing but were able to make a lot out of what we had so this was our strength.

We believe that there's nothing more important for human beings than to have that individual right to speak for freedom.

The Declaration of Independence was not necessarily written with women in mind.

People like Abigail Adams had hoped that it would be.

In 1776, we have a few accounts of women reacting to the Declaration of Independence.

Certainly John Adams had heard from his wife, Abigail, who said that if in the new code of laws, which will be necessary for you in Congress to make, you do not remember the ladies, we are determined to have a revolution of our own.

Adams responded, sort of sloughing it off, and she wrote to her friend saying, "He thinks I'm kidding, but I am not kidding."

So rights apply to a fairly small group in land.

Real estate is real property that then produces wealth.

The rights that apply to property were available only to free white men.

Women have very few political rights.

Married women are subject to the old tradition and law of coverture in which their property upon marriage transfers to the ownership of their husband.

So it's actually not being a woman that denies you rights it is in fact your marital status that denies you rights.

And so if you were unmarried you could have all the rights to own property to make contracts to get credit to borrow but if you were married coverture kicks in when we think about women the Revolutionary War of women in any wars we immediately reach for the women who did unusual things like Deborah Sampson who passed herself off as a man so she could fight as a soldier in the Revolution and we also think of the women who supported the war like Betsy Ross who made the flag.

In 1776 women begin to get their voting rights, their right to suffrage at the state level.

Women could vote in New Jersey from 1776 to 1807 and they did vote.

Poll lists that we found here at the Museum of the American Revolution show hundreds of women voting in the 18th century and early 19th century in New Jersey.

That was changed and only men were allowed to vote after that point until the 19th amendment in 1920.

Black women still could not vote so all women do not have the same rights even though we have this category women that women's rights activists are pushing from the 19th century on.

There's still all kinds of restrictions that prevent people of African descent and other people, minorities from voting in various states.

And it's not until the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s that that's rectified.

[Music] In 1848, the very first Women's Rights Convention is held in Seneca Falls, New York.

It was this meeting of women as well as men who believed that women needed more rights.

Not exclusively the right to vote, but rights to education and rights to property and just the right to be equal to their husbands.

Seneca Falls Convention had representatives from all over the United States participating.

One of the notable participants was Frederick Douglass, another was Lucretia Mott.

Lucretia Mott, who was white, probably the most well-known woman in America in terms of women's rights, but she also fought for the abolition of slavery.

She ends up in the Philadelphia area, and as a Quaker, she is someone who becomes really outspoken.

Another participant was Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

And so they issue a Declaration of Sentiments, and this declaration was primarily written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who we can see evolve over the course of her career from fighting for women's rights more generally to fighting specifically for suffrage and writing multiple declarations for that purpose.

That Declaration of Sentiments, by no mistake, is modeled after the Declaration of Independence of the United States.

In 1876, it's the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, and Philadelphia puts on a big show.

They have a centennial exposition, and they plan this massive celebration outside of Independence Hall on the 4th of July.

The women who are advocating for suffrage see this as an opportunity to make their voices heard.

And they try to present this declaration to the Vice President of the United States during the formal celebration, and they're rushed off the stage.

And the crowd clamors for copies of their declaration, and Susan B. Anthony gets up on a bench outside of Independence Hall and starts reading it aloud to this growing crowd.

[Music] Eleanor Roosevelt is key to drafting and editing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the UN.

She's part of a committee that is also working to make sure that women's rights and concerns are voiced in the proceedings of the United Nations.

This declaration very much follows the trajectory and the legacy of the 1776 United States Declaration of Independence.

You have generations of women who are fighting back and using the words of the Declaration of Independence to advocate for their own liberty rights and the pursuit of happiness.

The Declaration has been showing up in the news lately in a more robust way than I think in years.

At times when Americans are searching for what they're about, for what this country means, the Declaration is always there.

Has it lived up to its expectations and has it lived up to its promise?

I think almost everyone agrees we're not there yet.

How do we make sure that our government is living up to those promises, especially considering that we are that government?

This is a democracy.

It's this constant expansion of who gets to be part of this group of people who are created equal and who are endowed with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The question of who does the Declaration of Independence belong to really extends far beyond the nation-state as we think about the place that immigrants have in our nation today and the broader impact abroad.

So the question that we have to ask is why are there people who want to keep people out?

There is no United States without immigration.

Ellis Island was operational from 1892 to 1954 and we do see in that era roughly 12 million immigrants entering the United States through that site but it's also an era bookmarked by restriction.

You have the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which was essentially a blanket ban on immigration from China that would be in effect to a certain extent for nearly 100 years.

Right.

And then on the other side of that you have 1924 the Johnson Reed Act, which is the most restrictive immigration law in US history.

It applies really strict quotas.

These quotas were race based, right?

You see quotas that are disproportionately privileging northern and western Europe.

In the case of a country like Italy, northern Italy gets a larger quota than southern Italy.

Many people like me are living in fear that there are now forces that have gained forces, like you know who want to see a Christian nationalist perspective dominate.

We need to come together and we need to build a better future for everybody involved and we can address some of the insecurities that give rise to authoritarianism, give rise to people trying to exclude others from this broader canopy.

Everyone when they enter this country comes in with that expectation that they'll be able to find safety, be able to find community as we are a melting pot and so there may be people that are like them already here.

Who is American?

Who is patriotic?

Who gets to label?

Who gets to define?

We like to brand anyone who disagrees with us as un-American.

And I think that just can't stand anymore.

We as part of the LGBT community, we went through the whole don't ask, don't tell thing in the 1990s.

And now trans people again, out of nowhere, are banned from serving in the military.

The Declaration of Independence gives people, particularly collectively, tools for talking about rights, for talking about liberty, for talking about what government can and cannot do to them.

That vocabulary, I think, is probably the most important element of the text for us today.

In working with young people today and teaching American history today, students I think are less interested in sort of the dynamics of how the Declaration was written and why it was written as opposed to how it's been applied or misapplied throughout American history.

You can use the Declaration of Independence to make any sort of different argument that you want.

Some of those arguments, just like George Wallace in the 1960s, might revolve around ending some people's freedoms or civil rights based on the idea that their freedoms or civil rights might infringe upon your own.

I think we should recognize that this experiment in America is still sort of worthwhile.

The very subjects that it subjugated, the very individuals that it violated still believe in its potential and to continue to not give up and make it better.

The American dream.

It is something that is inherently really beautiful and still very true but sometimes it seems as though it's a bit harder especially now.

To make a nation means you've got to have a vision and the vision is of a multicultural pluralistic society moving toward a more perfect union.

I think it would be a terrible mistake to put it down and relegate it to the past or to imagine it some as something that lives only on wrinkled parchment.

We need to make it ours.

Even if you may not feel a direct personal connection to the Declaration, you can feel a connection to the stories of its influence over time.

You can see yourself in the people who have fought for their rights, the people who have protested, the people who have written their own declarations, the people who have used the words of the declaration to fight for a better future.

[music] We want to have people see themselves as part of a chain that goes back to the 18th century.

That generation expressed some really powerful ideas and passed that on to us.

We wanted to explore that story for America's 250th, I think as a way for us to feel a kind of emotional connection to that founding generation that hopefully connects with our lives today.

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