The Meaning of 1776

The Making of the American Mind:
The Story of Our Declaration of Independence
by matthew spalding
encounter, 344 pages, $32.99

On the night he was elected president, in November 2008, Barack Obama addressed a throng in Chicago and declared that America had been made over the course of “221 years—block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.” Obama traced the beginning of the country to the drafting of the Constitution in 1787. In striking, decisive contrast, Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg that the nation had been brought forth “four score and seven years ago.” It began, that is, in 1776 with that first principle that marked the character of this new regime: that “all men are created equal”—that no man is by nature the ruler of other men in the way that God was by nature the ruler of men, and the way men are by nature the ruler of dogs and horses. The only rightful governance over human beings draws its just powers from “the consent of the governed.”  

As Matthew Spalding brings out in his new book, The Making of the American Mind, there seems to be little recognition, even today, that the Declaration was indeed the decisive act not only in proclaiming the principle of a new political order but in constituting the new government. “The Constitution,” writes Spalding, “is the means to achieve the ends established by the Declaration.” The means are “the distribution of powers, legislative checks and balances, an independent judiciary”; the ends were already explicit in 1776. Indeed, the Declaration itself lays down the principles of judicial independence, the separation of powers, and no taxation without consent. 

In a critical passage added by James Wilson, the Declaration asserted the standing of this new nation to “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.” As Spalding observes, the national entity proclaimed there would indeed be a government that went abroad, borrowing money and gaining the recognition of foreign governments. It was also the central government that gave direction—and the animating authority—in reconstituting governments in the separate “states.” And when the peace was secured, where did other governments send representatives to this new country? They did not send ambassadors to Hartford, Boston, or New York. They sent them to the capital of this new nation. 

But as Spalding movingly shows, the impact of the Declaration went even deeper. The “Congress” of delegates, summoned to assemble, became itself the generative force in building the conviction, cultivating the sense, of a single people, though we were hardly a single people at that time. The cultural and moral differences within this new nation were quite sharp. But the magic of the process was bringing forth “a people”—and a distinctly national authority. In breaking from the British political order and British brethren, there was also a move away from a country ruling “subjects” to a country of self-governing “citizens.”

It often comes as a surprise that the first words in the Declaration do not involve an appeal to “rights” but to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Those laws of nature brought forth creatures of reason who alone had access to the laws of reason, and those laws included the moral laws. Natural rights were not the gift of any government, but the rights that flowed distinctly to the human persons who were part of that creation. Those rights remained the same in all places and times where that nature remained the same, and men could be distinguished from animals. 

And yet it became so tempting over the years, for writers bent on deflating, to argue that the God of the Declaration was not the God of the Bible. Well, it may not have exactly named the God who died on the cross, or the God who told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. But what was at work was truly an understanding of natural theology that encompassed the Jewish-Christian tradition: “The light of nature showeth that there is a God.” As Spalding observes, this proclamation was not from a manual of natural law, but from the Westminster Calvinist Confession, revised in 1788. He points out—in a way that recalls my beloved late friend Michael Novak—that the God engaged in the Declaration was the Lawgiver, the Supreme Judge, and the Executive. What was engaged here, as Spalding says, was “the reason of revelation”—not the opposing of reason and revelation. 

The reference to nature’s God should be read, then, “as man’s rational understanding of a general revelation that remains open to further revealed truths.” And the conclusion is inescapable: This is the Jewish-Christian God, not the God of the deists. That makes a profound difference as the signers closed the Declaration by pledging their support “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.”

The most poetic and penetrating account of the Declaration came of course from Lincoln, during the crisis that tested anew that first principle of this republic. Lincoln took note of those newcomers who had come from Europe and bore no relation of blood to the families who had fought in the revolution. But when those people viewed America through the lens of the Declaration—when they read that “all men are created equal”—then “they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and 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 that Declaration.” 

The Declaration, as Lincoln said, was the “electric cord” that connects the generations. To grasp that principle was to grasp the moral ground of our common citizenship. 

Lincoln, in that speech in 1858, would recall that earlier generation, who “fought for the principle that they were contending for.” They were, said Lincoln, “iron men.” But rather than let that line slip away, Spalding shows how that image was made real by narrating what happened to those men who signed the Declaration. 

They didn’t sign the document and retire to their studies. They and their sons fought in the war. Abraham Clark’s two sons were beaten and starved because their father would not recant his signing of the Declaration. Some had their houses and estates destroyed: Lyman Hall’s home and property in Georgia were confiscated and burned. Robert Morris, acting as the superintendent of finance for the Continental Congress, used his own credit to secure supplies, and his adventures in speculation had him ending up in debtors’ prison. These men were not pundits or high kibitzers. They stood up and paid some dreadful prices. They were indeed “iron men.” 

Spalding concludes with the hope that we have a generation in our own time able to respect again the sacrifices made in that earlier day—that “there are among us still men and women, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, made of iron, willing to support this Declaration and mutually pledge [again] to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.”

A guild of academics has spent stirring hours in teaching the American Founding, with close, searching readings of the Declaration of Independence. But even they will find that Matthew Spalding has managed to make portions of that text clearer than ever before, with historical detail that fills out the dangers, made darker at every turn, for the men who put their names to that document. He has given us, withal, a work of art, a book deftly written that can endure with the Declaration it celebrates.