Contrary to many libertarian arguments, the Declaration does not manifest hostility to government. Many of its complaints are that the British had provided too little government, not too much. It also makes repeated arguments about how the king and parliament had violated the British constitution. The Declaration’s deepest commitment is to constitutional government and the rule of law. “Under Law” is a better description of the nation’s founding than the “Under God” that was later added to the Pledge of Allegiance.

Although Thomas Jefferson claimed on his tombstone to be the author of the Declaration of Independence, this claim is significantly overstated. Jefferson drafted the initial document, but it was heavily edited by the Continental Congress. Moreover, Jefferson was not drafting the document in his own voice, and interpretations of the Declaration that rely on Jefferson’s intellectual peculiarities are strained. The voice of the document is best described, not as the voice of the states, or even of the delegates to the Continental Congress, but the voice of the American people.

The references to liberty and equality in the Declaration have been contested from the very beginning. Although some have argued that they had no application to slavery, many people in the late eighteenth century perceived them as clearly inconsistent with slavery. These references have triggered equally conflicting responses from courts, where judges have relied on them to abolish minimum wage laws and to strike down regulations of businesses. Other judges have invoked these references in support of more equal legislative chambers and same-sex marriage. Supporters of every conceivable position have relied on this part of the Declaration. These references have become in effect a national Rorhschach test – one sees in them what one is already inclined to see. Given this contested history, courts invoking this language should do so with caution.

Americans looking back at the Declaration did so through court cases, political debate, and celebrations in popular culture. Numerous judicial decisions beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing through the twentieth century have upheld the view that the Declaration of Independence created one nation, the United States of America. This was also the view of some of the greatest lawyers of the mid nineteenth century: Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln. Even Andrew Jackson, largely seen as a proponent of states’ rights, embraced this view in the nullification dispute with South Carolina. And ordinary Americans have celebrated the Fourth of July as the birth of a nation from the very beginning. For the thirteen independent nations view to be correct, all of these decisions, statements, and celebrations would have to be wrong. (They are not.)

This introduction to Part One introduces the topic of why the ceremonial parchment in the National Archives should not be considered the definitive text of the Declaration of Independence.

The parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence, enshrined in the National Archives, is not the most relevant text of the document. The correct text is the text distributed to the American people – the Dunlap Broadside, which was printed on the night of July 4, 1776. The parchment copy was not created until later, for ceremonial purposes, and its eccentric handwriting should not be taken as definitive, a mistake that many historians have made.

This Part introduces the argument that the Declaration created an American nation – the United States of America – that became a distinct juridical entity in the world community as of July 4, 1776. That is, the states entered into the world confederated with each other. The United States had a constitution as of July 4, 1776, but it was an unwritten constitution based on tacit popular consent. The Articles of Confederation would later specify much of the internal structure of that confederation, but the Articles did not form the confederation – there was already a de facto confederation at the time of the Declaration. This nationalist reading of the Declaration of Independence is far more consistent with text, history, law, and popular understandings than the view that the Declaration created thirteen completely independent nations.

The Conclusion summarizes the main themes of the book, noting how they have special salience as the second administration of Donald Trump unfolds and as we near the 250th anniversary.

This Chapter provides a close reading of the Declaration’s text. Supporters of the thirteen independent nations argument rely almost entirely on the Declaration’s assertion about “Free and Independent States.” Yet, this assertion is far less compelling than is often claimed, and the relevant passage can be read quite differently (as declaring the independence of the “United Colonies”). More importantly, other passages in the Declaration strongly support a “one nation” argument, including the document’s opening reference to “one People” and its conspicuous failure to identify any state by name. The Chapter also focuses on the importance of the capitalization of “United Colonies” and “Free and Independent States” as well as the “United States of America” (phrases where the Dunlap broadside differs from the ceremonial parchment, an issue that prior historians have often bungled).

This chapter analyzes Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), arguing that the Supreme Court’s rulings – that free persons of African descent were not constitutional “citizens” and that the Missouri Compromise violated the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause – were grievous interpretive errors. It examines Chief Justice Taney’s majority opinion, which denied Dred Scott’s citizenship based on a flawed historical claim and invalidated Congress’s power to prohibit slavery in territories by inventing “substantive due process,” asserting a fundamental right to slave property. The chapter contends that these holdings misread the Constitution’s text, structure, and history, as Justice Curtis’s dissent demonstrated, showing free African Americans were citizens in 1787 and Congress had long regulated territorial slavery. It argues the Constitution was not inherently proslavery and it defends the Founders against the Court’s calumny that they intended to exclude African Americans from the principles of the Declaration and the benefits of the Constitution. It argues the Dred Scott Court misused originalism, improperly projecting the ideological views of Chief Justice Taney’s intellectual milieu back onto the Founders. The case sets the stage for exploring Lincoln’s response and underscores the limits of judicial review in a constitutional democracy.

The Introduction begins with a short paragraph of conventional views about the Declaration, drawn from legal and historical writings, and argues that everything in this paragraph is wrong. It argues that when we get the Declaration wrong, we get America wrong, and we need to get America right. It then provides an overview of the major themes of the book.

This chapter considers the conflicting views on whether the Declaration of Independence is law. It sets forth the arguments on either side, ultimately concluding that neither side is completely persuasive. It argues that the Declaration was a legal document of continuing legal significance, even if it is not directly controlling law in the sense of a modern statute. It then sets forth the numerous ways in which American courts have relied on the Declaration, in cases ranging from citizenship to states’ admission to the union to the interpretation of provisions in the federal constitution.

Although the liberty and equality language of the Declaration was probably not the most important part of the document in 1776, it has come to be that today.

This chapter explains how revolutionary Americans understood what had happened in 1776. There is ample evidence showing that they viewed the Declaration as creating one nation, at least with respect to the world. The United States of America was regularly spoken of as a nation and was treated as a nation with respect to issues such as foreign relations and citizenship. The Continental Congress had little hesitation in reversing the decisions of state courts. A functioning confederacy, recognized as such, long predated the Articles of Confederation. The chapter concludes with the case of North Carolina and Rhode Island and argues that they were never formally outside of the United States, even during the period in which they had failed to ratify the US Constitution.

We are sometimes told that the Declaration is an airy statement about individual rights, whereas the Constitution does the hard work of structuring a government. This Part argues that the Declaration is primarily concerned, not with individual rights, but with the structure of government. That is, how do we structure a government so that our rights are most reliably protected? And the answer is not as little government as possible, but a competently structured government, subject to the rule of law, that works for the benefit of the people.

This poses the problem of American civic fracture and failing civic attachment, and points to renewed civics as the remedy.

Abraham Lincoln hoped to generate sufficient Whig support for his opposition to Kansas-Nebraska to get him elected to the senate in 1855. But that support failed to materialize, and in 1856, as the Whig party sank lower and lower under the burden of its own divisions, Lincoln joined a new anti-slavery party, the republicans, a coalition of northern Whigs and disgusted northern democrats. He ran against Stephen a. Douglas for the senate in 1858, and together they staged a memorable series of seven debates across Illinois. Douglas won the election, but Lincoln won a national reputation as an enemy of slavery's extension.

This chapter examines how various civil rights movements have interwoven the Declaration into their advocacy for causes to combat social and legal discrimination, including chauvinism, labor exploitation, and election plutocracy. A variety of groups, including first-wave feminists and labor advocates, effectively relied on it to promote various constitutional causes. Among suffragettes, its statement of human equality stood out, while workers’ movements favored the document’s condemnation of autocracy and oppression. As with other groups who likewise relied on the Declaration’s mandates, it represented a national commitment toward achieving a liberal equality for the common good. The Declaration of Independence remains relevant today to matters as broad in constitutional scope as federalism, campaign financing, AI advertisement, and separation of powers. Its sweeping statement of unalienable human rights and equality continues to embody core American commitments to representative democracy. That manifesto of equality and freedom has for two centuries influenced politicians, civil rights organizations, and ordinary people in the United States and abroad.

As unprecedented as the Declaration was, it was not without intellectual antecedents. The Declaration interacted with and built upon recent expressions of European Enlightenment political philosophy in its focus on “Nature and Nature’s God,” and in its reliance upon the normative principles of “laws of Nature” as well as natural or “unalienable” rights. European Enlightenment political philosophers themselves stood in complex and varied relationships with their ancient and medieval predecessors; sometimes adding to, sometimes transforming, and sometimes rejecting these preceding ideas. The Declaration brilliantly navigates this complex web of intellectual antecedents by treating the ideas of laws of nature, natural rights, the social contract, and republicanism in such a way that the points of tension between their different interpretations are minimized and subsumed within a shared understanding of the importance of nature for political life. In so doing, the Declaration provides an intriguing hint of how the deep fault lines between these political philosophical traditions might ultimately be bridged. The Declaration’s succinct statement of political principles may be viewed as a transformative distillation of a few of its most important European antecedents.