Abraham Lincoln often spoke of the Declaration of Independence as “the faith of our fathers,” as though it were for Americans what the Torah was for God’s chosen people. He meant that America was not a nation that grew up willy-nilly from a common tribal past, but one that began in an intentional way, through what he called a dedication to the “proposition that ‘All men are created equal.’” Accordingly, America is sometimes called a “propositional nation.” We are now approaching the 250th anniversary of the document and the revolution it defended and the Declaration remains so alive that we still have battles over its meaning and significance. Lincoln – or even Thomas Jefferson, its chief author – would surely recognize many of the themes in our discourse about the Declaration as captured in the essays in this volume.

Historian Carl Becker, himself the author of a semi-classic twentieth-century study of the Declaration, once said in a convoluted way something to the effect that every generation rewrites history to suit its needs and according to its perspectives. This twenty-first-century collection of essays on the Declaration in part validates his claim and in part does not. Probably the chief way in which this collection differs from earlier efforts is in its broadened horizons. There is a systematic effort to consider the Declaration in relation to groups and concerns that had largely not been much attended to in the past – women, labor, Native Americans, the international resonances of the document.

But there are familiar themes as well, though mostly treated differently from the past. The intellectual roots of the Declaration is indeed a familiar topic, but the century or so since Becker’s book has enriched and deepened our grasp of the intellectual sources and perhaps even more of their meaning. Not often emphasized in previous treatments are the religious and theological influences. Themes like the relation of the Declaration to the political context from which it emerged, the legal basis of the document, its main ideas – these are all topics that have a long history but which receive new treatment here based on new scholarship.

On balance, however, probably more striking than the novelties and the differences and the scholarly advances is the stubborn persistence of major themes – most especially the relation of the Declaration to slavery and its aftermath, to the American nation and its successes, its outright failures, and its shortfalls in living up to the aspirations expressed in the Declaration.

Not everyone involved in the making of the Declaration expected it to be of such lasting import as it has proved to be. John Adams, the acknowledged “colossus” during the debates leading up to the Congressional passed the Resolution of Independence on July 2, 1776, looked at that date as likely to be the most significant in American history, perhaps in world history. It will be, he wrote his wife Abigail, “the most memorable epocha in the history of America.” July 2, he predicted, would be “celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival,” marked by “pomp and parade, shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of the continent to the other from this time forward, forevermore.” Not July 2, but July 4, the date of the adoption of the Declaration, has been that day of celebration, pomp, and parade. Adams spoke of the Declaration almost as an afterthought: “In a few days,” he told Abigail, “a declaration setting forth the causes which have impelled us to this mighty revolution, and the reasons which will justify it in the sight of God and man” would be issued.

From his perspective in 1776, the event the Declaration marked, the actual declaration of independence, an event with immediate practical consequences, seemed far more noteworthy than Congress’ words about it. Yet much later, Thomas Jefferson identified his role in preparing the Declaration to be one of the three of his achievements to be memorialized on his tombstone. These were all accomplishments – founding the University of Virginia, and drafting both the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty and the Declaration – with lasting and ongoing significance. Since Americans celebrate July 4 rather than July 2, it seems that Jefferson had it more right, that the Declaration’s future had more abiding import than its immediate purpose. Again Lincoln expresses the point well: “All honor to Jefferson – to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.”

Yet its immediate purpose and circumstances of drafting are of obvious importance as well. The Declaration may have been a “merely [!] Revolutionary document” with a purpose limited to the event it defended, but that event was no small thing. The Declaration was a product of the Second Continental Congress, the governing or coordinating body for the alliance of thirteen colonies then engaged in warfare with the British. By the spring of 1776, most of the delegates, as Jefferson put it in his Autobiography, “saw the impossibility that we should ever again be United with Great Britain.” Nonetheless, the assemblage was not yet ready, for a variety of reasons, to formalize the decision. It was believed, however, that the member colonies not yet ready to take such a momentous step were “fast advancing to that state.” Accordingly, it was decided to postpone the final decision a few weeks until the beginning of July. However, to be ready when and if the moment came, “a committee was appointed” consisting of Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston, a distinguished group indeed.

The committee agreed that Jefferson should prepare a draft that it would review and pass on to the Congress. Hence Jefferson’s tombstone inscription, claiming credit as “Author of the Declaration of American Independence.” Jefferson’s claim to be author was somewhat presumptuous, on several different grounds. First, of course, he prepared his draft on behalf of a committee, which did indeed have input into the draft reported to Congress. Second, Congress itself contributed much of importance to the final version of the Declaration. Finally, in a later reminiscence of his task, he identified the object of the draft as he understood it “not to be to find out new principles, or new arguments never thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before, but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm is to command their assent.” This common sense might be expected to command assent in America, if not with all mankind, because “it was intended to be an expression of the American mind … All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day,” sentiments Jefferson found “in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sydney. Etc.” That is to say, Jefferson can hardly claim authorship, in the usual sense, of the content of the Declaration.

Yet he can claim responsibility, for the most part, for the concision, clarity, eloquence, and beauty of the final text, though here again Franklin and Adams and Congress deserve some share of the credit. The hand was mostly Jefferson’s, but the voice was that of the American people. Acquaintance with the political literature of that age well confirms Jefferson’s sense that he was putting into wonderful prose the broad consensus among American Patriots, that is to say, supporters of the movement for independence, of the day. Along this line he might have mentioned his reliance on George Mason’s Bill of Rights for Virginia, prepared shortly before he sat down to his drafting task. The Declaration comes to us nearly 250 years later, when it is no longer clear that the consensus that gave it birth any longer holds for us, if any consensus does. It is one task of this volume to probe whether and how it still speaks to us as a nation, whether and in what way, it is still “the Faith of Our Fathers,” and of us.