We are fast approaching the quarter-millennial anniversary of the revolutionary document that announced the birth of the United States of America to the world. The Declaration of Independence represents the core text of “the political religion of the nation,” which Abraham Lincoln hoped would forever unite Americans of all stripes. As he said in his 1858 Chicago speech, the Declaration stands as “the father of all moral principle” in America and makes even those with no direct ancestral ties to the Founders “feel that . . . they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote [it], and so they are.”
What is this “father of all moral principle” expressed in the Declaration? It’s captured in perhaps the most famous sentence in the English language: “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.” In his new book, Walter Isaacson calls it the “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.” The sentence that follows is crucial, too: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
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Thomas Jefferson’s language is stirring and beautiful. Yet, it also succinctly expresses an extraordinary amount of philosophical insight in just 55 words. That insight is worth reflecting upon more deeply, as much confusion persists about what the Declaration means in asserting our equality, and about the nature of the rights that governments are obliged to secure.
First, it’s important to dispense with any question about whether the Declaration’s core claims refer to all of humanity. The version of the Declaration that the Committee of Five (Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston) submitted to the Continental Congress explicitly refers to slaves as “MEN.” That’s how Jefferson, the principal author, wrote it—in all caps. Indeed, in a passage that Congress deleted from the Declaration’s final version, the committee reserved its harshest condemnation of King George III for his alleged role in perpetuating the slave trade: “he has waged cruel war against human nature itself,” being “determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold.” If the slaves, essentially half of whom were female, were included among “men,” then certainly free women were as well. “Men” is clearly used in the universal sense.
But in what sense does Jefferson mean that we’re all created equal? His closest political ally, James Madison, speaks in Federalist 10 of the “diversity in the faculties of men,” arising both from unequal natural abilities and unequal efforts to cultivate them. Some are clearly more fit to rule than others, which Jefferson observed when expressing his subsequent hope that the “natural aristocracy”—selected by the people on the basis of “virtue” and “talents”—would rule, rather than the “artificial aristocracy” of “wealth and birth.”
Indeed, King George would likely have considered the self-evident truth that we’re all created equal to be a self-evident falsehood. The defense of kings’ authority was that they were meant to rule by nature (“the divine right of kings”). The Declaration boldly asserts otherwise: no man is inherently the ruler of another. We are all created equal in the sense of all possessing a shared human nature. While man is the natural ruler of the animals, and God the natural ruler of man, no man is the natural ruler of other men.
This notion, of course, is wholly inconsistent with slavery. Thus, the Declaration knocked the intellectual supports out from underneath that peculiar institution once and for all.
While the Declaration illuminates the stark injustice of claiming property in another human being, it doesn’t diminish the importance of property rights, properly construed. There is, however, confusion on this point. It is commonly but erroneously asserted that in using “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” rather than “Life, Liberty, and Property,” Jefferson departed from John Locke—and did so to avoid portraying property as an unalienable right. Locke, whose Second Treatise of Government was the primary inspiration for the Declaration’s assertion of rights, emphasized the natural right of property, calling its “preservation” the “chief end” of government. One will search in vain, however, for any mention in the Second Treatise of “life, liberty, and property,” as Locke doesn’t use that formulation. In likewise not using it, Jefferson therefore doesn’t depart from Locke.
Locke instead speaks of property in three forms: property in one’s life, property in one’s liberty, and property in the fruits of one’s labors. He writes that “every Man has a Property in his own Person” and that people unite in society “for the mutual Preservation of their Lives, Liberties, and Estates, which I call by the general Name, Property” (italics in original). The closest Locke comes in the Second Treatise to referring to “life, liberty, and property” are occasional references to “Life,” “Liberty,” and “Estate,” or to “Life,” “Liberty,” and “Possessions.” But he makes clear that he views all three of these as elements of man’s property: “Man . . . hath by Nature a Power . . . to preserve his Property, that is, his Life, Liberty and Estate, against the injuries . . . of other Men” (italics added).
This is what Jefferson succinctly captures. Rather than departing from Locke’s meaning, Jefferson pithily and poetically conveys it. If Jefferson had used “life, liberty, and property,” the Declaration would have suggested that the first two of these three are not part of man’s natural property. By instead listing “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” the Declaration includes all of Locke’s various species of “Property,” including—to quote Locke—“that Property which Men have in their Persons as well as Goods.”
Securing these unalienable rights is the first object of government, per the Declaration. It’s why governments are “instituted”—not to invent rights or bequeath them (for government-invented rights generally come at the expense of natural rights), but rather to secure the God-given rights that depend upon government only for their protection, not for their existence. As Jefferson put it elsewhere, “The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen, in his person and property, and in their management.”
Lincoln observed that ours is a nation “conceived in Liberty.” Liberty isn’t license, and republican liberty can’t realistically be maintained by those lacking republican virtue. But the Declaration of Independence, on the cusp of its 250th birthday—and having survived, in Michael Auslin’s revealing new account, fire, war, and neglect—is a timeless reminder that the core principle of America is the freedom to exercise our God-given rights. Americans are not a people meant to be compelled, barred, or taxed at every turn by a distant capital—they weren’t in 1776, and they aren’t in 2026. They should be left to govern themselves locally to the greatest extent possible, exercising their self-evident rights and relishing their good fortune to live in a nation whose essence is freedom.