Books that illuminate the spirit of the Declaration of Independence

The Latinate term for the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is “semiquincentennial,” which doesn’t roll off the tongue easily. (You can use the alternative Latinates “bisesquicentennial” or “sestercentennial” if you like, though these sound too much like something a college DEI office would make up.)

The nomenclature of our chronology is likely to be the least controversial aspect of the upcoming observance of our nation’s birth, as it promises to reignite old and inflame new controversies about the character of the American Founding and its key document.

These challenges come from both the left and parts of the right. The infamous 1619 Project of The New York Times regards the Declaration as deceptive propaganda to hide the true character of America as a “slaveocracy” rather than a democratic republic, while some conservatives, including, apparently, Vice President JD Vance, are uncomfortable with the “creedal” aspect of the Declaration’s most famous clause about the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.”

As was the case at the bicentennial in 1976, the pageantry on July 4, 2026, will include a large flotilla of “tall ships” — replicas of the grand colonial-era wooden vessels with elaborate rigging — sailing up the Hudson River into New York Harbor. It is likely that if Kamala Harris were president now instead of Donald Trump, the observance might feature a flotilla of slave ships instead, so ingrained has the repudiation of the American Founding become among the identitarian left. Don’t put it past Mayor Mamdani to attempt to slip some in.

In fact, the Declaration was controversial before the ink had dried in Philadelphia on that fateful July 4, 1776, and the debate over its proper understanding has raged unabated ever since. The charge that the principal author, Thomas Jefferson, was a slave owner is thought to discredit the Declaration on account of the obvious hypocrisy.

Contemporary leftist critics of the Founding think they discovered this glaring contradiction the day before yesterday, but it was pointed out at the time, by — among others — Jefferson himself. The great English critic Samuel Johnson slammed American professions about liberty by asking, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” His contemporary Edmund Burke, who was sympathetic to the grievances of the American colonists, disliked the Declaration for its radical potential, though he held back from public criticism, hoping the rebellious colonists could be persuaded to withdraw it and reconcile with Britain.

And the hypocrite Jefferson? He was wincingly aware of the defect of his own example, writing in 1781, in reference to slavery, that “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that his justice will not sleep forever.” His own efforts at enacting emancipation in Virginia in the 1780s failed, but why didn’t he free his own slaves, as some slaveholders did? In his case, it would have sentenced them — and himself — to destitution. Like all of us, Jefferson was born into a world he did not make, but it is the
conceit of dreamy college leftists to think all injustice can be instantly eradicated with a snap of the fingers.

And would it have been better for future generations if Jefferson had never written “all men are created equal”? Keep in mind that, in drafting the Declaration, Jefferson was writing for America, and not for himself alone. He, and his many like-minded successors, whose number include Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., all regarded the Declaration as a “promissory note” that ensured the principle of liberty would someday have to be extended to American slaves.

The earliest controversies over the Declaration in the immediate aftermath of 1776, both here and abroad, mostly concerned the audacity of declaring independence more than thinking through the implications of the famous second paragraph about inalienable rights and government by consent. This period was best explored in detail in historian John Hazelton’s 1906 work, “The Declaration of Independence: Its History.”

Many observers at the time of the founding and later thought the part of the Declaration about “self-evident truths” should be regarded as mere propaganda, perhaps meant to attract the French as an ally. It was left to George Bancroft, the first major historian of America in the mid-19th century, to shine a spotlight on the seriousness of the Declaration’s ideas in his eight-volume “History of the United States of America,” published in 1854 — just in time for Lincoln’s important use of the Declaration in his crusade to end slavery.

When Jefferson called the Declaration “an expression of the American mind” in 1825, he noted that it channeled, above all, the ideas of John Locke, the Enlightenment-era British thinker who not only remains a central architect of the classical liberal tradition, but is rightly considered “America’s philosopher.”

For a long time, the best exploration of Jefferson’s immense debt to Locke was Carl Becker’s 1922 book, “The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas.” Becker was a fine historian, but he was a Wilsonian Progressive (keep in mind that Wilson disliked the Declaration as much as he disliked the Constitution), and Becker marred the ending of his book by saying that “whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence was true or false is essentially a meaningless question.”

Why “meaningless”? Because Becker assumed that “progress” had made those old ideas obsolete. Yet when Becker published a new edition of the book in the fall of 1941, with the shadow of the European war lengthening across the Atlantic, he reversed course. He now said that “just now, when political freedom, already lost in many countries, is everywhere threatened, the readers of books would be more than ordinarily interested in the political principles of the Declaration.” Suddenly the old ideas of “the inalienable rights of men” were not obsolete after all. And Becker’s book remained the most influential book about the Declaration for much of the mid-20th century.

But there have always been many on the left who dislike Locke precisely because he is a primary theorist of capitalism — more so than Adam Smith, in particular because of his powerful support for property rights as a central pillar of all individual rights. Since property rights are a bulwark against socialism, the left has long wanted to find a way to diminish Locke’s status in American political thought, though generally with limited success.

Historian Claire Rydell Arcenas’ recent concise book, “America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life,” is an excellent survey of Locke’s powerful place in the modern American political tradition, but disputes the magnitude of his influence on both the Declaration and the Founding itself.

But the most ambitious — one might say audacious — attempt to read Locke out of the Declaration is Garry Wills’ 1978 book “Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence,” in which the author boldly proclaims that Becker’s account of a Lockean Declaration was wrong. Wills, a one-time conservative who moved sharply left, anchored the Declaration in several obscure thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment who were implicitly crypto-socialists. Voila! The left now had its own theory of “original intent” that promised to make socialism as American as apple pie and July 4 fireworks.

Wills is a talented writer, and his mesmerizing narrative took in a lot of people including many conservatives. It was left to historian Kenneth Lynn to summarize “Inventing America” as “the tendentious report of a highly political writer whose unannounced but nonetheless obvious aim is to supply the history of the Republic with as pink a dawn as possible.” The great Lincoln scholar Harry Jaffa was even more harsh, saying ” ‘Inventing America’ should never have been published” on account of its egregious errors.

Efforts to keep the anti-Locke project alive have persisted, but have been overshadowed by the much more radical (and even more ahistorical) 1619 Project. One of the best antidotes to the deliberate viciousness of the 1619 Project is Danielle Allen’s “Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality.” Allen’s book was published in 2014, well before the arrival of the 1619 Project; Allen, a liberal African-American scholar at Harvard, referring to “Our” Declaration conveys that it belongs to all Americans, regardless of race.

Without minimizing or excusing the obvious contradiction of slavery, Allen, in her elegant close reading of the text (especially her careful treatment of Jefferson’s famous draft paragraph attacking slavery that was edited out by the Continental Congress), shows why the famous phrase “all men are created equal” meant everybody — not just property-owning white men.

“Our Declaration” is a deeply moving book in places, and there is much else in this book of great charm and substance. Conservative readers will disagree with some of Allen’s analysis and propositions, but her larger point that the Declaration is something every American should revere is refreshing to hear from elite academia today, and worth putting on your reading pile ahead of July 4, 2026.

Steven F. Hayward is a visiting professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.