This past Fourth of July, I picked up a book that had been sitting on my to-read pile for weeks: Walter Isaacson’s “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written,” which references the famous second sentence of our Declaration of Independence. Isaacson’s book is a thin volume of 67 pages, but more than long enough to deal with what its title announces.
Having read the book, I can offer some thoughts. Here is that sentence: “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.”
I’ll quickly mention and then move on from the racist and sexist terminology, appropriate to its time, of “men” meaning literally folks of that gender, white, and propertied.
Isaacson’s point is right. This sentence expresses an idea which in an age of hereditary rulers was truly revolutionary when generally, and certainly in Europe and here, governing power was based on blood, inherited from one generation to the next. So when that sentence was composed the colonies, along with England and other members of the British commonwealth, were ruled by George III, who held that title because of his blood connection to previous Georges as well as the whole line of British monarchs.
To be sure that system of inheritance did not guarantee peaceful transitions from one monarch to another as that blood stream was anything but a straight line with different families claiming to be the rightful ruler at any one time. What was clear, however, is that no matter how those families might fight each other, and they most certainly did, no one not connected in some way to the various royal blood lines could claim to govern.
The sentence Isaacson focuses on rejects the bloodline argument by declaring that all people (his men) have “unalienable rights” that must be respected by whoever happens to be the ruler at that time. That sentence, perhaps in an even more important way is followed by the insistence that goes on to say that governments rule with the consent of the governed, an idea for which there was ancient precedent in the city states of ancient Greece where, in fact, the people did govern themselves, at least the adult male people of a certain status.
Our declaration leads toward that idea of people governing themselves, prepares for it, but doesn’t quite get there. What it does do, and which the remainder of our declaration states, is that the current monarch, George III had failed to respect those unalienable rights and thus the colonies could, and should, separate themselves from his rule because, to put it plainly, as the rest of our declaration declares, his actions have violated the terms of his rule.
So, if that famous opening does not quite say, “power to the people,” it does lead in that direction. For if a monarch’s power is not absolute, if the people can separate themselves from it, because the monarch, in this case George III, has violated the necessary trust between ruler and those being ruled, the people can, and should reject the governance of that monarch.
What follows such a separation is not spelled out in our famous document. Establishing that next step was a complicated and arduous process leading to the formulation of our Constitution, which indicates how the people shall govern themselves in a system that already included 13 separate governmental entities each responsible for a certain geographical region.
Arguably the creation of that document, with a nod to Isaacson’s choice sentence, deserves, at least, equal respect.