Our collective confusion about the American experience begins at the beginning. Most Americans who think about such questions imagine that they understand the Declaration of Independence, though many of them may be puzzled that it did not (and does not) produce the results one might expect from the commitments which they believe it makes. After much misleading, they take the task of interpreting it to be a belaboring of the obvious, even though they know very little about its text, its content, or the moment in history that produced it. For by the spokesmen for one tradition in American politics they have been carefully taught to apprehend the document in a certain selective way: that is, by the tradition usually acknowledged by press and electronic media, pulpit and textbook maker; the tradition which is perhaps too confident of itself, even though it has brought forward nothing in the way of proof for its favorite assumptions. So much is indeed self-evident truth.
But it is likewise true that for the first one hundred
years of our national existence the Declaration of Independence was usually
understood in another way, according to a theory that reads its commitment to
government based on “the consent of the governed” and to the aboriginal sameness
of all men in their right to a certain order of political experience as a
statement about citizens in their corporate character, as they enter the social
state. In this tradition “all men” is taken as a statement about human nature
that is made specific by subsequent language concerning the Creator. Men are
formed to live under the authority of a particular sort of government. Or so the
Signers maintained. The Marquis de Chastellux observed that they meant by “all
men” primarily “all citizens or property holders”—substantial persons who owned
land and probably slaves. Or all nations of men. The Marquis was attempting with
this formulation to explain why almost no one among the colonial leaders of
American society argued that the Declaration of Independence required of their
country an internal social and economic revolution. In his opinion, by the word
“people” they meant nothing so universal as the “half philosophers” among his
countrymen sometimes intended when they spoke of humanity in general. He was
quite correct in observing that the purpose of the American Revolution was to
preserve (or restore) a known felicity, not to create a new one: not to
transform and elevate mankind “in general,” even though we might, after the fact
of independence, congratulate ourselves for having done so. Certainly the forms
taken by the declarations of rights adopted in most of the original thirteen
states would seem to support his argument. For a majority of them speak of the
status of men “once they enter into a state of society,” or (like South
Carolina) refuse to speak of rights at all. The Virginia Declaration of Rights
was drawn specifically so as to prevent misunderstanding about any disposition
to free the slaves. Other documents are careful about the suffrage. But I
believe there is a better way of deciding what is meant by “all men are created
equal” than by falling back upon circumstantial paraphrase of an astute French
observer. For I think the Declaration can be read according to the canons of
formalist literary criticism, as a structure, as a literary artifact or system
within which each component modifies and reinforces the implications of every
other paragraph, phrase or word operating within the whole.
Continued
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