OPINION: With 4th of July approaching, remember what we are celebrating

It is not Equality. Nor is it the birth of a single and supreme national government and indissoluble union, as Abraham Lincoln maintained. 

1776 was about freedom from arbitrary rule (by King George III and Parliament from 1763 to 1775) and self-government against the new principle of imperial rule by command. The latter was TYRANNY and had to be resisted! History does not repeat itself. Like causes, however, produce like results. Remembering the past factually is the key to exposing myths as the untruths they really are. Its original purpose remains relevant today since government by Command and Diktat are alive and well (2008-2016, 2020-2024). George Orwell was right when he warned us that "the most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history." 

"The American Declaration," Prof. David Armitage of Harvard University reminds us, "like its successor declarations was a document of statemaking, not of nation formation. It declared that what had formerly been dependent colonies within the British Empire were now independent states outside that empire's authority. It did so without mentioning ‘Americans' or using the word ‘nation' Instead, it concentrated on the emergence of ‘one people assuming their separate and equal status among the nation's of the earth and declared that these United colonies are, and of Right ought to be FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATEs'” (P. 17) 

“In short, they declared their possession of Sovereignty, both internally, over their own people, and externally, against all other states and people." (Р. 20). Without a future, it had failed in its central purpose of declaring independence. "The Declaration of Independence ‘declared that the former United Colonies were now the United States of America [in the plural, not singular].’” 

So, when did the Declaration become identified with the second paragraph and its first three sentences? Following Prof. Armitage again, "the rights claims of the Declaration itself played little part in American political discourse in the first forty years of the republic." Only in the years after the War of 1812 did it become a national icon. Only then, in a part of the North, did the rights described in the second paragraph gradually eclipse altogether the document’s assertion of the In the North, newer ideas or "isms" from France became popular--- democracy, equality, abolitionism, feminism, socialism, and nationalism--- had to be justified and Americanized. Thus was accomplished by making the Declaration of Independence to be more about equality later nationalism. See, for example, newer declarations by working men, African Americans, women (Frances Wright, Elizabeth Cady Stanton), and utopian socialists (Robert Owen). Even Abraham Lincoln, later president, joined in the historical revisionism of the time. 

For the historical Declaration of Independence and its purposes beyond being "the first secession movement,” see David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Harvard University Press, 2007, 2011) and Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1997). For misinterpretations of the Declaration of Independence, see Armitage’s book (pp. 92-102). Prof. Maier's study is more about the misinterpretation of the Declaration of Independence before America's Civil War, when it became sacred "American Scripture." See also W. Kirk Wood, Beyond Slavery: The Northern-Romantic-Nationalist Origins of the Civil War (2019) and Eric Foner, Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (2019). The difference between “All men are created equal" and "All men are equal" is explained by Daniel J. Boorstin in "The Equality of Human Species," in Hidden History: Explaining Our Secret Past (New York, 1987), 111-126.