How a Forgotten Document Became America’s Defining Idea

WALTER ISAACSON: Michael Auslin. Welcome to the show.

MICHAEL AUSLIN: Thank you for having me. Walter.

ISAACSON: You have this great book, National Treasure, which traces the Declaration of Independence — even the parchment copy of it. And I wanna quote a line that you say, which is, “Our founding document remains a powerful statement of unity as much today as 250 years ago.” Hey, we’re about to celebrate our 250th. We’re not very united. How can this document help us reunite?

AUSLIN: Well, I think that is the, the greatness of the Declaration over our history is that at, at multiple moments where we seemed deeply divided — and often were deeply divided — people kept returning to it. They returned to it for a couple of reasons. One is that it gave this vision of the type of future, the type of country, that they wanted to live in. Second, they would look back at times of division to what seemed to be a time of more unity, meaning 1776 when patriots across these very, very different and often divided colonies came together. And they tried to recapture that. Third, because I still believe, Walter, and I want to believe, that the vast majority of Americans really are still united. That we have very powerful and, and strong and often angry voices on both the right and the left. But the vast majority of us still like our neighbors, talk to our neighbors, go about our daily business. And when they do that, the document is one that often appeals to them as being this constant in their lives. So I think that, you know, we can certainly talk about how the wri — how the signers wrote the Declaration to stress unity. But I think what it has become over our 250 years is the touchstone. It’s not the document we argue over, like the Constitution. It’s the document that tells us how we should want to live together.

ISAACSON: You talk about it being an aspirational document. ‘Cause all men were not considered created equal in the original colonies and the new nation. And yet it becomes a forcing mechanism. Lincoln, fourscore and seven years later invokes it as he’s burying 7,058 people at Gettysburg for making the sentence more true. And the women at Seneca Falls declaration invoke this sentence. So is that part of what makes this document important, is that it becomes our mission statement?

AUSLIN: Absolutely. And I think it is the greatness of the Declaration that allows it to fill those 18th century silences later on. It’s why David Walker, the great Black abolitionist, can appeal to the declaration saying, You and your fathers have not lived up to it. It’s why Frederick Douglass can appeal to it in his famous What to the Slave is the 4th of July where he says, But I do not, I do not despair because of the Declaration. As you mentioned, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. And by the way, millions upon millions of immigrants from non-Western, what we would consider Western non-liberal nations, non-democratic nations, who embrace this document and translate it for themselves — which I try to show in the book — to make it their new birth certificate.

The document appeals to all of these people, again, to this point of unity. They’re not asking for special treatment, they’re asking for regular treatment. They want to be treated fully as Americans, like every other American. They want to be fully part of the country and not to carve off enclaves of any kind. That’s why I think it is the great unity document. They understood that, that’s why they appealed to it. They could have just appealed to the Constitution, said, Well, you know, this is, this is illegal. But no, they appealed to the spirit within the Declaration to say, We want to be fully American like the rest of you. That’s why I think it is carried through so strongly through the 19th and 20th centuries through the Civil Rights movement up to today.

ISAACSON: It’s carried through very strongly, but originally it wasn’t considered that big of a deal. In fact, of course, famously, John Adams thinks July 2nd will be our birthday. That’s when we voted for independence. They, other than George Washington having his lieutenants read it in Battery Park to his troops, it’s not celebrated across the colonies. How did it become such an important and celebrated document?

AUSLIN: Well, it is right in the very first readings, of course, July 4th, John Dunlap is given an order to print up Broadsides. There’s only 26 of those left. John Hancock then sends them around the colonies, now the states. And we do have records of it being read, of course, Philadelphia, July 8th, as you mentioned, George Washington, General Washington, reads it to the troops on July 9th. It’s read in Boston, it’s read up in New Hampshire. It makes its way down. It takes a while, obviously, to get all the way through the colonies. Savannah doesn’t get it until middle of August. And then they, you know, then they finally can hear that they’re a new nation.

And we have these accounts. Abigail Adams writes John, of what happens in Boston where, you know, they, everyone gets so excited, they throw down the arms of the king on the old State House and trample it into the dust and burn it. But you’re right after that, it’s done its job. And you know, it’s printed, it’s printed in broadside, it’s printed in the newspapers. You don’t have to keep telling people they’re independent. They know. And so there’s other stuff to do. You have to win the war. You have to figure out how you’re gonna live together as a nation.

So the Declaration does actually get forgotten for decades. And while Americans celebrate independence, they don’t really often reference the Declaration. And interestingly, because of that, Thomas Jefferson actually isn’t trying to claim credit for the authorship. John Adams isn’t disputing with him who’s more important to independence because the issue only develops later. And really where the Declaration takes off is after the war of 1812, after the British burn Washington and the Parchment declaration — which almost no Americans knew existed, because it was a paper of state kept rolled up. And you know, among the other papers of state the story gets out that by the skin of its teeth, this document is spirited out of Washington, carried into the Virginia countryside and saved when the White House and the Capitol and the State Department are burned. And Americans say, That’s great. And they go, what was saved? They didn’t know it existed. So now they want to see it.

And so a number of things happen right at this moment. First of all, a couple of very entrepreneurial calligraphers, essentially, an artist, create what we consider artistic reproductions of the Declaration. And for the first time, they very carefully and faithfully trace the signatures. This fascinates Americans. They’ve never seen the signatures. So suddenly you’re seeing John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. And these things sell very well. They’re sold by subscriptions. You have John Trumbull come out with his famous portrait in the Capitol, which is not the signing of the Declaration. It’s not July 4th, it’s the presentation of the draft to Congress. But Americans embrace this as the moment of birth, and they sell thousands and thousands of copies. John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State, has a faithful facsimile, the one you see over my shoulder in the middle there, reproduced. It’s called the Stone Engraving, to make it the iconic image so that Americans — even as the document itself is fading — can see it in all of its glory.

And then I think very importantly, on July 4th, 1821, the, the 45th Anniversary of Independence, John Quincy Adams brings the original parchment to the Capitol, reads it in front of a crowd of thousands, and then he gives his famous, “We go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy” speech. But the other part of the speech that people don’t pay attention to is that for the first time at a, at a truly, you know, senior level, a high level, he links the Declaration to our constitutional order. What had been forgotten, what had been seen simply as a legal document, an instrument announcing declaration — announcing our independence — now becomes the wellspring of our self understanding as a nation that had first of all, triumphed against Britain for the second time in a generation. And now was dramatically growing and expanding across the West. This is where I think it begins to take on that new life, that life that ultimately, as you mentioned before, reaches its apotheosis with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

ISAACSON: You talk about the 45th anniversary, John Quincy Adams making this sort of a national document. And what really amuses me — perhaps shouldn’t — is that suddenly there becomes a tension between John Quincy Adams’ father, John Adams, who’s still alive, and Thomas Jefferson. They both end up dying the same day, the 50th anniversary, and yet they’re disputing between then who was more important, and Adams diminishing what Jefferson had done.

AUSLIN: Absolutely. And I think that is precisely…reveals how important the declaration had become to the American people by the fourth, fifth decade of our existence. That what had again been seen as something that did its job on one day in July of 1776 now defined us as a people. And that greatest sentence was beginning to gain purchase, not everywhere in the nation, but in many of the quarters to say, This is who we are.

And so, yeah, suddenly now you have John Adams he’s, he’s actually drawn into this by an anti-Jeffersonian federalist Timothy Pickering who says, Jefferson didn’t really do anything new, did he? And John Adams writes, No, nothing that he wrote hadn’t been hackneyed about for two years before. And he’s listing these sources. It’s a private letter that becomes public. So Jefferson feels he has to respond in a private letter to his allies, including James Madison. And he writes, You know what? Adams is, right. He said, it wasn’t my charge to come up with something that had never been thought or said before. Instead, it was to be an expression of the American mind.

ISAACSON: I love that phrase, by the way. Let’s pause on it. Why did he think it was an expression of the American mind?

AUSLIN: Well, first I would say it was genius to do so, because if he had written something new in July of 1776, then everybody would’ve started arguing over that and saying, What is he talking about? Instead, he understood that if he could take what Americans had been saying in their colonial assemblies, what they had been hearing from the pulpits, what rabble-rousers like, you know, Tom Payne and Sam Adams had been saying in the streets and put it into a document that spoke to all Americans, then he would touch everyone. He would express what had been the motive ideas that had carried us into the revolution. And now — at least at that point, 1776 — were carrying us through the first very difficult year of the revolution.

So he understood it wasn’t to make stuff up that no one had ever come up with, but it was to take his own thoughts on the Constitution for Virginia. It was to take George Mason’s thoughts on a Virginia Bill of Rights, which he shortens to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It was to take John Locke’s thoughts on the limitations of government and natural rights. It was to take biblical thought. You know, this was a very Protestant nation. People were hearing about liberty more from the pulpit than anywhere else. And it was to take that and put it into this document and then express it for everyone so that you could, you could write about an atrocity that had happened, let’s say in New Hampshire. But write it in a way that someone in Georgia would understand and feel that it had happened to them as well. So this is — and this later in life in these exchange of letters, is he acknowledges this. And he said, This was to express the American mind. And I think by that point in his life, he understood that he had done so in a way that fitted not just the moment, but as Lincoln was to say, Fitted all time and all people.

ISAACSON: The museum and center of former president Barack Obama opened in Chicago in the past week. And the exhibit begins with a Declaration of Independence. What do you make of that?

AUSLIN: I haven’t been there yet since it just opened. And I think it’s perfectly appropriate. And I think it should in many ways. And in fact, I, you know, I think it’s actually surprising that no president until President Trump put a copy of the Declaration in the Oval Office. It is that birthright that I think every president — they swear to uphold the Constitution and defend the Constitution, but what they’re really doing is defending the spirit of the Declaration because it’s the spirit of the Declaration that infuses the Constitution and of course, the Bill of Rights. And, and I think, you know, was, was very well understood at the time.

ISAACSON: You have a theory in your book that I love, which is that the importance of the Declaration rises over time, partly because of immigration, and that in some ways the fact that we become a nation of diverse immigrants as opposed to a nation of blood and soil and heritage of the land makes us a nation based on a creed, which makes this Declaration more important. Nowadays, at our 250th, we’re kind of having this debate over whether we’re a nation based on a creed that we all accept, or we a nation based on land and heritage. How do you see the Declaration playing into that?

AUSLIN: Yeah, absolutely. It is our creed. But I would say the creed is now our heritage. And that I think is the wonderful thing. The immigrant part of the book and possibly my favorite part of the book was to show how the Declaration, translations of the Declaration, ideas of civics, it wasn’t imposed top down, let’s say by the Mayflower community. It was embraced by the immigrants themselves. They are translating it into Swedish, into Greek, into Italian, into Yiddish, into Polish, into Russian. They are the ones doing the translations for their own communities to say, You are now here. You are now new. And this is where Thomas Payne was right. They were creating the world new for themselves. You are Americans. This is your birthright, and you have your responsibility.

So during World War I, you had this wonderful gathering of basically it was immigrants from the different nations created a group to support America in the war, pledging themselves as loyal Americans saying, This is now our country. Though this country is engaged in a war in the old world, which we just left. We, the representatives of the old nations, are now Americans, and we have our rights and we have our responsibilities to uphold this creed, to defend democracy, defend the idea that in the old country, yes, you were separated by who you were and where you were born in the little town or village that you came from — not here. That here you are part of this great mainstream. What, Adams, James Truslow Adams, would call that American dream in 1931, you know, in this period where the country had dramatically changed through immigration, at least 20 million coming in the 40 years from 1880 to 1920, and the foreign born population being at least 15%. But in some places like Cincinnati, it’s upwards of 60% are, you know, German immigrants and other immigrants from central Europe. They are embracing, translating these copies of the declaration, putting it up on their walls.

There’s a Hungarian traveler who goes through the United States in the 1830s, and he said, I never went to an inn, you know, a motel, an inn inside of America where I didn’t see a copy of the Declaration on the wall. It was always there next to the Bible. This became the defining statement of who we were in a civic polity. And the immigrants adopted it as much, if not more than what some would today call the heritage Americans. But that creed has become our heritage. And I think that is exactly right. And it’s why each of us still, I feel, you know, should pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor in this community. We live here together.

ISAACSON: Michael Auslin, thank you so much for joining us.

AUSLIN: Thank you, Walter.