Jill Lapore: What We Hold

[ancianita]

The New Yorker digital title: Was the Declaration of Independence Better Before the Edits?


Congress went through Jefferson’s version of the document, eliding adverbs, altering verbs, and slashing whole paragraphs. Historians have suggested that a passage condemning slavery was deleted because it was so patently hypocritical as to be embarrassing. Illustration by Robert Samuel Hanson


https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/11/why-the-declaration-of-independence-went-through-seventeen-drafts?_sp=eab43cb1-1cf1-4a82-b824-8072faab7a39.1778799325524

https://archive.ph/H4XTs

"Red-headed, spindle-shanked Thomas Jefferson was thirty-three years old when he drafted the Declaration of Independence, in 1776; he was so young and, as it turned out, so long-lived that he had another fifty years to think about what it meant. Over that half century, during which he served as a foreign minister, state legislator, governor of Virginia, member of Congress, Secretary of State, Vice-President, and President (twice), he was often asked why he held it to be so true as to be self-evident that all men are created equal and that governments are instituted among men to secure rights that include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Happiness! On these questions, he had a great deal to say. This year marks two centuries since Jefferson’s death and two hundred and fifty years since the United States declared its independence by issuing arguably the most important piece of prose in modern history. Jefferson thought that it began the world anew. What does it mean now that it’s old? ...

... He ordered that “Author of the Declaration of American Independence” be engraved on his tombstone, but did not wish it to mention that he was ever President. Again and again, Jefferson insisted that his purpose had been “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.” In sum, “neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind.” ...

“We can leave whenever we want” was the Confederacy’s six-word summary of the Declaration of Independence.
And that idea thrives in the fractures and furies that drive American politics in the twenty-first century, the hatreds and the violence, the appetite for division, and the ongoing campaigns—they have never stopped—for schemes of schism (the Republic of Texas, Greater Idaho, an independent California, a proposed state called Jefferson).
Disunion is as rich a vein in American political history as union is...

Abraham Lincoln tried in vain to disavow the Confederacy’s interpretation of the Declaration as rendering the Constitution meaningless. In his first Inaugural Address, on March 4, 1861, with seven states having already seceded from the Union, Lincoln proclaimed the essence of secession to be anarchy. But it was in a speech he gave less than two weeks earlier, on February 22, 1861, at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, that Lincoln sought to say what the Declaration really meant. “It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the motherland; but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time,” he said ...
It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men,” Lincoln went on.
And then he asked, “Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world, if I can help to save it. ... But if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.”...

He said he hoped there would be no war, and no bloodshed. And his hopes were dashed. But Lincoln was the Declaration’s most pitiless and most brilliant editor. At Gettysburg, fourscore and seven years after Jefferson drafted the document, Lincoln cut its principles down to ... ten words: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” ...Whether the principles of the Declaration, abridged or unabridged, endure is a question that only the course of human events will determine."

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America's best modern historian, Jill Lepore, illuminates so much more about the Declaration's history. She is always well worth reading.