The Declaration of Independence: A Racial Experiment in Liberty
Bradley J. Birzer
American Institute for Economic Research, 2026, xv + 259 pp.
Bradley Birzer, who teaches American history at Hillsdale College, has written a book that contains an abundance of information not only on the Declaration but also on its impact and on the gradual development of the movement for independence from Britain. Readers will learn a great deal from reading it. Birzer is best described as a moderately conservative Republican who has drawn from many schools of interpretation. Though he is most sympathetic to what he calls the “classical republican” position, he quotes, often at great length, from other schools of thought as well, and readers will be in a good position to judge these views for themselves. He is in many, though not all, issues an apt student of Russell Kirk, whose devotion to the classics and Christianity he has faithfully echoed. In what follows, I shall comment on a few items of interest.
The strengths and weak points of the book are prefigured in the introduction, which contrasts a speech by Calvin Coolidge that finds eternally valid truths in the preamble to the Declaration with Woodrow Wilson’s view that the “mechanical” doctrine of government expressed in the Declaration had become outmoded and needed to be replaced by a “functional” view in line with the then-modern theory of organic evolution. Birzer incisively comments that “to interpret the Founding in such a fashion, though, is to dismiss the significance of the Founding and place history as an ever-moving target. It becomes malleable, subservient to the whims of the present.” That is well said, but Birzer himself succumbs to a progressive myth when he tells us that “when Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed racism, he called the Declaration a ‘promissory note.’ Not everything was perfect in 1776, but the very words of the Declaration forced Americans to reexamine their own prejudices and make right that which was terribly wrong.” In seeing the Declaration as a charter for the egalitarian ravages of the civil rights movement, with its endless demands for redress that have culminated in modern wokery, Birzer has here fallen into a trap that has ensnared many so-called moderately conservative Republicans, and it is unsurprising that he quotes the words of a plaster saint with evident approval. Certainly Russell Kirk knew better than this!
The most insightful part of the book is Birzer’s discussion of the classical and Christian sources of the Declaration. Like Kirk, Birzer sees these sources as complementary and not discordant, and he does not neglect the traditional rights of Englishmen:
“With the Declaration’s opening statement, though, the laws of Englishmen were good but not sufficient to explain separation. Indeed, the laws of Englishmen went only so far as rebellion (such as at Lexington the previous year), but separation demanded a greater law, something transcendent. Thus, the appeal to the laws of nature and God. . . . When Jefferson and Congress appeal to the natural law, they are embracing the western tradition of Aristotle, Cicero, and Locke. . . . After giving a philosophy of history, the Declaration, in the second paragraph, begins with a metaphysical understanding of the human person and ends with a political philosophy. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ Man, to put it simply, has dignity. . . . This Jeffersonian statement, though radical and revolutionary, also has a context in the western tradition. . . . From Heraclitus to Socrates to Zeno to Cicero to St. Augustine, there was a deep desire to find a commonalty among all human persons, finding its ultimate theological fulfillment in Christianity.”
Although Birzer is right to stress the roots of the preamble in the Western tradition, he is in my opinion wrong to see these familiar words as a charter for a vast future program of reform. In some words I omitted from the quotation just given, he again invokes Martin Luther King Jr.: “All men have dignity. This is an incredibly profound statement with immense implications. As Martin Luther King, Jr., stated, it was a promissory note.” The Declaration does say that among the truths that “we hold to be self-evident” is that “all men are created equal,” but what does this mean? To answer this, it should be borne in mind that the document is a declaration of independence. The claim it makes is that the purpose of a government is to “secure” the “unalienable rights” acknowledged in the Declaration and that if a “long train of abuses” shows that the current government intends to subject a people to “absolute Despotism,” it is the right of the people to “alter or abolish it.” In other words, “created equal” must be understood as the equal right of a people to form a new government. It should not be taken to support measures to uproot customary institutions in the name of promoting “equality” so that we could have what Lincoln would later term “a new birth of freedom.”
Attention to the circumstances in which the Declaration was written offers, in my view, strong support for taking “created equal” to mean “having an equal right to form a new government,” not equality in some broader sense. For one thing, if “equality” had been interpreted in a more expansive way, all of the colonies would have been condemning their own governments and institutions, since people in them (and I don’t mean only slaves) did not have equal political and social rights.
Moreover, the document aims to present to a “candid world” the justification for the colonies’ actions. At that time, rebellion was generally condemned; it thus seems hardly likely that in attempting to justify their conduct, the former colonies would appeal to principles that show that the very powers they were appealing to for sympathy and support had illegitimate institutions, since in none of them was equality in the broader sense to be found. Indeed, the colonists’ principal ally in the War of Independence was the France of Louis XVI before the French Revolution, which it would be risible to view as committed to equality.
But what about slavery? Isn’t this inconsistent with the Declaration? Indeed it is, and like nearly all of his contemporaries, Jefferson thought it a great evil that ought to be ended peacefully. This did not commit him to a program of immediate abolition and, as is well known, he, like many of the signers of the Declaration, owned slaves and feared slave rebellions. Those who condemn Jefferson on this score repeat the anti-American rhetoric of Dr. Samuel Johnson, a paid propagandist of George III, who called for the suppression of the American Revolution and famously wrote: “We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
Birzer’s book, as I have said, ranges widely, and that is one of its strong points. But one issue is ignored, and it is a vital one: The concluding paragraph of the Declaration says, “That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” Note the plural—“Free and Independent States.” Despite these clear words, Birzer takes for granted that the Declaration is to be read as proclaiming a unified nation, and in his conclusion, he casts John Randolph of Roanoke and John C. Calhoun as villains: “Amazingly, though, Americans often forgot [the Declaration’s] existence or downplayed it. That famous curmudgeon, Virginia’s John Randolph of Roanoke, dismissed it in 1826 in a speech before the U.S. Senate. . . . Equally brutal in his assessment was John C. Calhoun in the 1840s when discussing the Oregon Bill.” In thus characterizing them, he differs from his mentor Russell Kirk, who wrote an admiring biography of Randolph and whose essay “John C. Calhoun Vindicated,” published in the Southern Partisan (1983), I commend to his attention. They grasped, as Birzer does not, the importance of states’ rights in preserving liberty against the leviathan central government. In Randolph’s words, “I love liberty; I hate equality.”
