The Declaration of Independence: Revolution. Evolution.

Those are the opening lines on the home page of the official website of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, established by Congress in 2016, to plan and orchestrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

As we “paused and reflected” on those lines, we wondered not only what “we the people” know about our nation’s past, but what we know about the Declaration of Independence itself, and the trajectory it has created for our nation, the world, and the future.

Based upon our research, we couldn’t find any studies of the citizenry’s knowledge regarding the Declaration itself. What we did find were three national polls that examined the connection between July 4th and the Declaration of Independence.

Those polls revealed that our U.S. citizenry, in the aggregate, would receive a very poor grade for its understanding of the connection between the Declaration and the 4th of July. Specifically:

• A Gallup poll conducted in 1999 found that 55% said that the 4th was the date of the signing of the Declaration; an additional 32% said that it was a date to celebrate Independence Day; and 76% correctly named Great Britain as the country from which America gained independence.
• A Talker Research poll found that 59% gave the correct answer; an additional 22% answered the establishment of the US as an independent nation; but, only 45% correctly answered “1777” as the year “the very first organized celebration of independence took place.”
• A Cato Institute survey found that a mere 53% knew that the American colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence to separate from Britain.

Those polls indicate that, for the majority of the public, the 4th of July is seen as more of a summer holiday to watch fireworks, cook on the grill, eat hamburgers and hotdogs, have a drink or two, and chill out with friends and family, rather than a time to remember the date’s historical importance in the founding of our country.

Camille Walsh of the State Policy Network validates this perspective in a 2024 piece, noting that “In 2024 and in 1983, majorities of Americans said most people were more likely to think of the Fourth of July as about fun and relaxation rather than historical reflection.” In 1983, a Roper/ABC News poll found that 82% said that the 4th was “more for fun and relaxation,” while a 2024 YouGov poll found a smaller 60% continued to feel that way.

The big shift from 1983 to 2024 was in terms of respondents who said the 4th was for “both” fun and relaxation and historical reflection. In 1983, only 7% said both, compared to 27% in 2024.

In 2026, we believe the 4th of July should be a time for both. We also believe that we should not limit our historical reflection to one day.

Given the lack of knowledge regarding the Declaration of Independence, we believe it’s essential in this semiquincentennial year to deepen our civic understanding of that founding document. And we believe it is imperative to understand what it has meant for the trajectory of this nation, the world, and what it can mean for its future.

We share our thoughts on those beliefs in this blog and our next, which will be posted on February 10.

Revolution

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, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, Walter Isaacson, journalist and currently professor of American History and Values at Tulane University, calls that sentence America’s mission statement. We concur.

Unfortunately, that sentence may be the only thing which most citizens remember or know about the Declaration of Independence. That’s unfortunate, because the Declaration in its entirety sets out the justification for the American Revolutionary War and, more importantly, for a democratic form of government. It goes beyond motivational language to detail the specific reasons for going to war — and provides a call to action.

The Declaration is not long. It consists of only 1320 words, and has five sections, summarized below:

• The introduction: which states that this document “declares the causes which Impel separating” from Great Britain.
• The preamble: which begins with the “We hold these truths….” sentence, and proceeds to assert that governments are established to secure the “unalienable rights,” and that if “any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it…”
• The indictment of King George III: which lists 27 specific grievances against the King, such as: “He has dissolved representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness the invasion of the rights of the people,” and “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.”
• The inability to reconcile: which discusses the unsuccessful and rejected attempts to secure assistance from the “British brethren,” who thus become “Enemies in War.”
• The conclusion: which declares that as a result of the foregoing, “That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all connections between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”

The Declaration was signed by the 58 representatives from the thirteen colonies/states comprising the Second Continental Congress. Those colonies/states, and the number of representatives from each, were: Georgia (3), North Carolina (3), South Carolina (4), Maryland (4), Virginia (7), Pennsylvania (9), Delaware (3), New York (4), New Jersey (5), New Hampshire (3), Massachusetts (5), Rhode Island (2), Connecticut (4),

The representatives at the Continental Congress appointed a Committee of Five to draft the Declaration. Its members included: Thomas Jefferson, Virginia; John Adams, Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman, Connecticut, and Robert R. Livingston, New York.

Thomas Jefferson actually drafted the initial version by himself, and sent it to John Adams and Benjamin Franklin for comments and edits. Walter Isaacson notes, in discussing his book in an interview with Savannah Guthrie of NBC Today, that in the preamble, Franklin changed “We hold these rights to be sacred…” to read “We hold these rights to be self-evident.” Adams inserted the phrase “they are endowed by their Creator.”

Jefferson drew upon the Virginia Declaration of Rights for the opening paragraphs of the Declaration, a previous proclamation that stated:

All men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

Jefferson chose to include “life, liberty, and the “pursuit of happiness” in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, but not “the means of acquiring and possessing property.”

There are a variety of explanations for why he did this. One is that Franklin joined him in emphasizing happiness over property.

Another, as Jeffrey Rosen, President and CEO of the National Constitution Center explains, in an article for The Atlantic, based upon his book, The Pursuit of Happiness, is that for the founders, happiness was not the pursuit of pleasure but of virtue, as defined by writers and philosophers such as Cicero, Epictetus, and John Locke.

This emphasis on virtue as the source of happiness highlights the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of what is written in the Declaration of Independence, the lives lived by the founders, and the context in the thirteen colonies at the time of its issuance, as well as the Revolutionary War period in general.

In an Atlantic article adapted from his book, Declaring Independence: Why 1776 Matters, Edward J. Larsson points out the ironic nature of the phrase “all men are created equal” in the preamble to the Declaration, noting:

Quite obviously, their conception of “all men” was not a complete one. For many prominent Patriots, it did not include Native Americans, enslaved people, and women. Jefferson freed only 10 of the more than 600 persons he held in bondage, and most of those freed were his own children by Sally Hemings.

Larson also observes, in the opening to his article, that “1776, began with virtually all of those living in Britain’s 13 North American colonies content to remain under royal rule so long as they could enjoy the basic rights of British subjects.” During the year, those opinions changed and the Declaration was signed.

The Declaration united all colonies in their resistance and desire to dissolve the relationship with Great Britain. But this was not the starting point for military fighting between the British and the Americans.

Significant battles had been fought in 1775, and were being fought in 1776. The Declaration made it clear that the military conflicts in colonies were not isolated events, and formalized the basis for a war between the 13 colonies/states, the “British Crown,” and the “State of Great Britain.”

Although the Declaration is the founding document for the United States of America, if the colonies had not won the Revolutionary War, it would have been no more than words on parchment. In their piece, Constituting Liberty: From the Declaration to the Bill of Rights, on exhibit at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Jeffrey Rosen and David Rubenstein observe:

The Declaration of Independence was a propaganda document rather than a legal one. It didn’t give any rights to anyone. It was an advertisement about why the colonists were breaking away from England. Although there was no legal reason to sign the Declaration, Jefferson and the other Founders signed it because they wanted to “mutually pledge” to each other that they were bound to support it with “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Their signatures were courageous because the signers realized they were committing treason: according to legend, after affixing his flamboyantly large signature John Hancock said that King George — or the British ministry — would be able to read his name without spectacles. But the courage of the signers shouldn’t be overstated: the names of the signers of the Declaration weren’t published until after General George Washington won crucial battles at Trenton and Princeton and it was clear that the war for independence was going well.

Those battles were won on December 26, 1776, and January 3, 1777 respectively. The Revolutionary War itself was fought from 1775, beginning with the combat between the British militia and the Patriot militias in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, and ended officially with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

What most Americans don’t realize is that the American Revolutionary War was as much a civil war between those living in the colonies as it was between the 13 colonies/states and Great Britain. Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt make that imminently clear in their masterful six episode film for PBS titled The American Revolution.

In the second episode, historian Alan Taylor states, “The greatest misconception about the American Revolution is that it was something that united Americans. It leaves out the reality that it was a civil war among Americans.”

George Will stresses the civil war aspect in his Washington Post commentary, on the American Revolution documentary, writing:

The war was, from Lexington Green to Yorktown, always a civil war (Washington: “A Brother’s Sword has been sheathed in a Brother’s breast”), with approximately one-third of the population Loyalists (about 50,000 fought for the king), one-third Patriots, one-third just wanting the war to go elsewhere. Benjamin Franklin’s son was a Loyalist. In some battles, almost everyone on the battlefield was an American.

David Smith, in his review of the film for The Guardian, stressed that “What had begun as a jumble of grievances levelled at London by far-flung British subjects in 13 fractious colonies soon descended into a brutal civil conflict, setting brother against brother and neighbour against neighbour.”

Based upon his interview with Ken Burns regarding the film, Smith writes:

For him, the revolution is a story that “for most of us is drowning in sentimentality and nostalgia and is incredibly superficial and doesn’t have the respect for what actually took place, and all the participants and the incredible violence of it. One of the casualties of that superficiality is that we’ve seen it in bloodless, gallant terms.”

It was, he contends, a revolution that proclaimed the world-changing idea of the unalienable rights of people; a brutal civil war, pitting Patriots against Loyalists; and a global war, the fourth in a series of conflicts between Britain, France, and Spain for the “prize of North America.”

Burns also wanted to rediscover the uncertainty out of the outcome. “There’s a lazy arrogance that the present always exerts on the past because there’s that confidence that we know exactly what happened. But good storytelling makes it contingent.”

Burns is correct that the outcome of the war was uncertain and contingent. Had it ended differently, the Declaration of Independence would have been meaningless and nothing more than a historical artifact.

It did not. As a result, the Declaration gave birth to a nation and a democratic form of government. The National Archives, in its opening to a History of The Declaration, states:

Nations come into being in many ways. Military rebellion, civil strife, acts of heroism, acts of treachery, a thousand greater and lesser clashes between defenders of the old order and supporters of the new — all these occurrences and more have marked the emergences of new nations, large and small. The birth of our own nation included them all. That birth was unique, not only in the immensity of its later impact on the course of world history and the growth of democracy, but also because so many of the threads in our national history run back through time to come together in one place, in one time, and in one document: the Declaration of Independence.

We will examine the impact of that document, here in the United States and around the world, and its current status in our second blog of this two-part series: The Declaration of Independence: Evolution. Devolution?