American History Hit - How Revolutionary was the Declaration of Independence?

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

In July 1776, a group of men in Philadelphia committed an unthinkable act: they challenged one of the most powerful empires in the world by signing what became known as the American Declaration of Independence.What had happened in the previous years that pushed them to such drastic action? What were the disagreements over the document's wording? And what movements and ideas were inspired by its message?To take us through this topic, we welcome back Michael Hattem, author of ‘Memory of ‘76: The Revolution in American History.’ His newest work titled ‘The Declaration of Independence: A Concise History’ will be published in the Fall of 2026.Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Produced by Tom Delargy. Senior Producer is Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. The morning of July 8, 1776, was bright and still in Philadelphia. Bells began to ring, beckoning across the town, a call to gather.

In time, a large crowd collected in the yard of the Pennsylvania State House, today called Independence Hall. A local official stepped forward, holding in his hands a document, a copy of the Declaration of Independence of the New United States of America. He read it aloud, his voice carrying across the yard. Those assembled leaned forward, listening closer as he recited the lines, asserting that the colonies now claimed a separate and equal station, listing their long set of grievances against the crown,

and finally declaring their independence. When the reading ended, the gathered erupted in cheers and hazzas all across the city as word spread. Bells rang out again, not an alarm, but celebration. Later on that day, the royal coat of arms, the symbol of the king's authority over the colonies, was reportedly torn down, removed from the statehouse and destroyed in a public bonfire. No longer were these people subjects of the British crown. They were citizens of a new nation. Now, once and forever, Americans. This is American history here to our faithful listeners, one and all. Welcome back. If this is your first time, glad you found us. I'm Don Wildman.

here to talk about American history. In July 1776, a group of statesmen gathered in a sweltering room in Philadelphia to commit an unthinkable act. Challenging one of the most powerful empires in the history of the world, they signed their names to a document that could cost them everything, their influence, their fortunes, their lives. But for these men, the risk was worth it. And this document would go on to become one of the most influential texts in human civilization. It was the unanimous declaration of the 13 United States of America, more commonly

known as the Declaration of Independence. What happened over the years prior to this day that pushed these men to such drastic action? How was this vaunted document even created? What entrenched disagreements over its writing influenced its structure, wording, and message? And what greater movements and ideas were inspired by this message? All these questions will attempt to answer in this episode, joined by our expert guest, Michael Haddam, author of Memory of 76, The Revolution in American History. His newest work titled The Declaration of Independence, A Concise History, will be published in the fall of 26. Michael Hadam, welcome back to American History Hit. Thank you for having me back now.

Let's take this conversation in three parts, if we will, what led up to the creation of the document, its origins and context, then its actual composition, the writing of the thing. And finally, its immediate impact and beyond, the legacy of the Declaration, all that and more. Before we begin, I want to ask you, was the Declaration of Independence truly that revolutionary and why? And the Declaration of Independence was absolutely revolutionary, first of all, because it affected, essentially, the first modern Republican revolution. Right. So by very definition, it's a revolutionary document. And then, of course, if you think about the sort of long-term influence of the American, American Revolution as sort of kicking off the, what historians called the age of revolutions, right? And that goes all the way into the 19th century and stretches all the way to South

America throughout Europe. So it's absolutely a revolutionary document both in its intent and its immediate origins, but also in its influence. And a large part of that has to do not just with the independence that it affected between these 13 colonies in North America and the British Empire, but the ideas that are embedded in the Declaration. And that's something that takes some time, as I'm sure we'll talk about, takes some time for those ideals to become the main way that the Declaration is identified and for their influence to spread, but it's a major part of its legacy. Well, Lincoln demonstrated it with the Gettysburg Address, and we are doing it in our own small way later on. This is a document that deserves reconsideration and

relevancy in every age that you approach it. So here we are at 250 years doing the same thing. So let's first rewind. Prior to 76 to the origins of this rebellious spirit that's been spreading across the colonies, really starts in the aftermath of the French and Indian War, the seven years war, 1754 to 63. The British Crown considers its steep war debt incurred in this back. for the control of North America, and they want to make that back. They need to pay that debt off. As a side point, before we get into this, I want to just point out, by the 1770s, this time period, we've got a population of about 2.5 million colonists up and down the eastern seaboard. Very significant when you consider about 8 million people live in Great Britain, England, Wales, and Scotland,

together. The empire worldwide, about 12 to 13 million. So our 2.5 million people is important. This is a large slice of the pie. And it's an obvious revenue source for the kingdom and a solution. So this is what we're talking about. The crown will pay off its debts by taking it from the colonists who do not appreciate this at all. What was their position? Well, I mean, in some sense, there is, you know, there is a debate that goes on in England about what is the best way to address this immense war debt. And the debt is so immense because it's not just necessarily a war for North America.

this is a global war, right? What one historian is called the global war for empire. So it involves, you know, the Caribbean, it involves India, involves places in Africa. So the word debt is immense. There's a debate in England about, you know, the traditional way that they would have and that they had tried to raise revenue, develop revenue streams, was by promoting trade with the colonies. And this had been the case for decades. there were no direct taxes. The revenue was generated by, you know, customs duties and things like that, but also, you know, the colonies as an outlet for British manufactured goods, right?

Over the course of the 18th century, the Americans are a huge market for British manufactured goods. So there's one side in England that says we need to continue to just do policies that promote trade and that will take care of the debt. But then there is a sort of another position, which is sort of what we might think of as an austerity position, which is we need to minimize our spending and we need to extract revenue from the colonies, right, as opposed to generating it through trade. And how do you extract revenue from colonies? You do it through direct taxes. And the main crux of the colonists issue with this approach is that it really had never been. done before. And, you know, there's an importance that is given to precedent and tradition because, you know, the colonies and England, for that matter, are sort of, it's a common law culture, right? So precedent and tradition really matter. And the fact that there was no precedent for these kinds of direct taxes like the Stamp Act or the Townsend duties, that's really the crux of the

colonist argument is you've never done this. And, you've never done this. And, you know, and, you're not. And, And so you can't do it. But of course, the people in Britain think very differently. And in their minds, they say, look, we've just won this unprecedented war. Our empire is now stretches across the world. And we have an unprecedented situation to deal with in terms of administering this new empire. And so if that takes some unprecedented methods, then that's fine with us. And so there's a real disconnect between the ways that both sides are looking at this.

There was the policy that had been followed, this independent policy of letting the columnists do what they did, make their money, create their new land for England, and then suddenly this independence was gone. Let's review these taxes. The Stamp Act of 1765, tax on printed materials, newspapers, legal documents, followed a few years later, Townsend Acts 1767. That's more specific to domestic items like glass paint tea. And these were enforced by British forces sent to occupy Boston. It all led to the Boston Massacre, then the T-Act in 1773, which of course leads to the Boston Tea Party. These raises and taxes cause discontent among the colonists, especially the T-Act, launches the Sons of Liberty's action. That's the Boston Tea Party. It's a back and forth in New England all this period of time, which really redefined the relationship between the colonies and the crown, in between his parliament, which is a really interesting conversation someday to have, is there were a lot of people in England who had problems with this situation, too.

Yeah, absolutely. What's fundamentally at stake is the nature of the relationship between the colonies and the empire, as you say, and more so than just individual taxes. That's what's really at stake, right, is not just their relationship to the empire, but also their sort of civic relationship to Native Britons. So if Parliament is willing to do things to the colonists, to legislate for the colonists in ways that they would not do for Native Britons back in the UK, that suggested to colonists that they were somehow second-class citizens within the empire. Yeah. Right. So I always think of the imperial crisis. It's both a political crisis,

but it also sparks a kind of identity crisis against for the colonists, you know, to say, look, if we're not going to be treated the same as Native Britons and afforded the same rights and same protections, you know, then maybe we need to rethink, you know, our situation here. Maybe we need to rethink just how British we actually are. Yes, exactly, which is an incredible thing to consider when you think of these times and how reliant they would be. And it just wouldn't even cross your mind that that would be going on until the, this time. I mean, that's how proud because of how proud they were after the seven years of war. They were, they'd never been prouder to be British subjects than in 1763. And so the real challenge

for any historian when it comes to the coming of the revolution and independence is to try to explain how do you get from 1763 to 1776 in only 13 years. Yeah. There's so much more that's going on philosophically and politically in the thinking dating way back in your. Europe. Specifically, I'm talking about the ideas of John Locke, the father of liberalism in England. He publishes in the late part of the 1600s, dies in 1680, Voltaire, Rousseau. All these guys are advocating for a new kind of thinking about government based on these natural rights of the individual. This is a new age, which eventually will lead to an even bigger revolutionary period in Europe, as you mentioned. But now it's taking hold in these colonies at the same time as

all this social unrest that's just pissed off people. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, this is the age of enlightenment, right? And a major part of the Enlightenment project, you might say, is rethinking the nature of government, origins of government, purpose of government. And this idea of, you know, natural law and natural rights has a long history that goes back to, you know, to ancient Greece and ancient Rome and developed among, you know, Christian thinkers in the medieval period. But it is really English writers and then in the 17th century and then European writers in the 18th century who really developed this notion and the idea that government is a part of a social contract. People are willing to give up certain rights to form a society and form a government and in

return for giving up certain rights, they are guaranteed basically protection of their property and they're guaranteed protection of their person. Right. And when the theory goes, when the government ceases to protect these natural rights and these natural laws, John Locke argued, then the people have a right to replace that government. And of course, that happened in England shortly after his lifetime in 1688 when James II is deposed, right? So there's relatively recent precedent, you know, for this way of thinking. But it's a, it's sort of out there in the ether of the age of enlightenment is this, you know, reconsidering of the meaning and purpose of government. It's Thomas Payne who really brings this to his new nation with a pamphlet called

Common Sense, published in 1775. It eloquently advocated for independence from Britain specifically to a wider audience of American colonists. And this definitely shifts the opinion in a pivotal way, doesn't it? Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that's most striking about Payne's pamphlet is his attacks on monarchy itself, right? If we think about the Declaration of Independence, it attacks George III, right? Specifically, it doesn't attack monarchy itself. And in all of the patriot literature and writings from this whole crisis in the decade before, there are no anti-monarchy arguments, right? That's not what they're doing. It's not what they're thinking. But pain, the thing that sets pain apart in some ways is his anti-monarchical perspective

and this argument that he makes about the sort of ridiculousness of hereditary monarchy. And he really, really puts it in stark relief in a way that resonated, as per its title, you know, resonated for many people as very much just an expression of common sense that hereditary government, whether it's a monarch or whether it's an aristocracy, that makes absolutely no sense in the context of this new enlightened age. Yeah. These days, we think of this. You know, when we hear of kings and queens as just sort of figureheads of whatever monarchy

they're part of or at least structure, this all has real precedent. And it's really Thomas Payne, who articulates it anyway. All these other guys are talking about it. But, I mean, for Americans, it's that time. Somebody was saying, this is a silly way to do that. I mean, using the word, it's also an unjust way in all kinds of eloquent fashion. How widespread, though, does that take in America? I mean, across the whole of the colonies, were the average colonists thinking of revolution,

or was it just a sort of vocal minority? I mean, if we're talking about like, so Payne's Common Sense is published in January of 1776. and it's often been portrayed by historians as sort of being, you know, one of the main factors in convincing colonists to support independence. But in the last 20 years or so, historians have come to understand that there's a groundswell for independence that's already, you know, that's already sort of bubbling up in late 1775. and then Payne sort of adds more fuel to that fire. And then what we see is that between January and, you know, the spring of 1776, we start to see towns and counties passing, you know, local resolutions calling on the Congress to move for independence.

And of course, the Congress was slow to move for independence because there's a strong moderate faction in the Congress that wants to exhaust all opportunities for reconnecting with Britain. And so in some sense, it is this popular groundswell in early 1776 that eventually pushes the Congress toward independence, you know, in a way that, you know, that they hadn't been before. Yeah, I like to think of it. I mean, remember, we're talking about what leads up to the Declaration of Independence here. And you have to think over these years leading up to this, you'd heard all about the, if you weren't really a revolutionary spirited person, you'd heard about the Sons of Liberty, you've heard the committees, of course,

everything had been going on during this time, but maybe not in your family, maybe not in even your greater reach, but it was definitely out there. Suddenly common sense comes along and you can read it, and it makes sense. There's understandable ideas in there, and that's really what, you know, strikes the fire, doesn't it? This is when things start to move towards things officially. Yeah, yeah. It is a very influential document. There's no doubt about that. Though interestingly, historians have in recent years done some work to try to understand just how quickly and how far common sense spread. And you might not be surprised to know that historians' current estimates of how widely it was published and republished and how far it was published is quite

under the estimate of pain himself. Okay, good. But it was actually very literate. The colonies were very highly literate. The colonies had a much higher literacy rate than England did. Yeah. And most of Europe. And also the thing that pain does, and one of the things that makes it

most more influential than a lot of other Patriot writings is his use of the Bible and his use of biblical references and allusions to the Bible because the colonies, you know, just as they were highly literate, they were also highly religious, right? And Payne made these arguments in couched them in religious illusions in ways that other patriot leaders, more enlightened patriot leaders, say like, you know, Jefferson or Franklin, who took an enlightened view of religion, a skeptical view of religion.

pain didn't do that, and that's part of why he resonated so much, you know, so much more immediately than the others. But you have, you know, hotbeds of loyalists, Philadelphia being one of them, and then up from New England, you got the more radical folks are up there. At some point in this period, we have about 40% of the colonial population is tilting towards revolution. That's not the majority. No, but I mean, you know, it's better than the, you know, what Adam's assessment was during

his life, he thought that it was one-third were for independence, one-third were loyalists, and the other third were basically neutrals. Interesting. We do think now that there was probably more for independence and potentially more that were just neutrals. But of course, it's rare that a revolution is ever instigated by a majority. Yes. Right? Like, that's a rare thing in human history. I mean, I think if, you know, even if you have a third, but if you have 40% of the population, that's quite significant. Well, one way or the other, war finally breaks out in the spring and early summer of 1775, Battles of Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill. And after this short break, we'll be back to talk about the actual writing and the signing of the Declaration. We are back with Michael Hadam,

author of Memory of 76, the Revolution in American History. Michael, when the Declaration was written in 76, fighting was well underway. So if this declaration didn't start the revolution, What was the real point of it at the time it was composed? Well, there's a question there, which is, you know, did what happened in April of 1775 at Lexington and Concord? Did that start the revolution? Or did it start the war? The war for independence.

And those two things are not necessarily the same thing in a lot of historians' eyes and certainly in the eyes of many participants. Benjamin Rush, John Adams all said the same thing, that the war and the revolution were two different things. but they had been at war with Britain for a year. And that very much complicated the efforts that were going on in the Congress to try to reconcile with Britain, because how do you reconcile while you're also effectively waging war and holding, you know, the King's troops at siege in Boston? So, but it is, it is the case that the declaration has, you know, had more purposes to it than just declaring independence, right? it's not the instrument of independence.

The resolution passed on July 2 that Richard Henry Lee authors. That's the instrument of independence. That's when independence happens. It happens on July 2nd. The declaration is, in some sense, you might think of it as a kind of PR document. It is sending out the news of independence. It's laying out the case, as we'll talk about, you know, for why independence and revolution is justified, but another major factor, a major purpose behind the declaration is that once the

colonists accept that independence is going to happen, which happens in June, they immediately know that they are going to need foreign assistance if they are going to win this war against the British Empire. And so on the day that the committee of five is established to draft the declaration, the next thing that the Congress does is create another committee that is supposed to explore the possibilities and the options for securing foreign alliances. So those two things are totally interconnected, both in Congress's eyes, but also in the document itself. But again, PR, you know, being sent to the French, essentially. The Spanish, too, of the Dutch, they hoped, you know. We did an episode that was really fascinating about a

spy, French spy, who comes very early in the process and meets with Franklin and another man at Carpenter's Hall and discusses this stuff trying to sort of feel out whether or not this is going to work. So people were very aware of this, Franklin, certainly, right in the hotbed of it all right there in Philadelphia. Thomas Jefferson famously drafts the document in the week leading up to July 4th. Why him? What were his particular qualifications? Yeah. So Jefferson is, Jefferson, well, Jefferson is part of a committee that's selected, and that committee is Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin, Roger Sherman from Connecticut, and Robert R. Livingston from New York. And Jefferson is chosen because he has a reputation at this point for his writing. He published a pamphlet in 1774 called a summary view of the Rights of British America, was a quite fiery pamphlet really taking both Parliament and the King to task. And that pamphlet, circulated in Philadelphia at the Congress before Jefferson even became a delegate. So he has a reputation there for being a supporter of independence and also a talented writer. And also he has

the added quality of being Virginia. Right? They thought, and I think correctly, that you couldn't have the Declaration of Independence authored by a New Englander. Because New England, Englanders, especially the delegates from Massachusetts, were not the most popular delegates in the Congress. And that's because they had been pushing for independence going back to 1775. And they had really sort of ticked off the moderates in the Congress. And so the idea was, one, you couldn't have a New Englander write the declaration, because there was already a sense among the moderates that New England was dragging us into, the rest of us, into independence, right?

But also, Virginia is the largest and the wealthiest of all the colonies. And so you want to have a Virginian, as John Adams said, at the head of this business. Had it been tried before this declaration idea? Did they ever meet and say, let's do this thing earlier than this period? Not in this way specifically, but there are some earlier moments that sort of function almost as signposts of a declaration or signposts of independence, and one of those is a resolution that's passed in May by the Continental Congress, which instructs the provisional assemblies in the various colonies, which had basically taken control from the royal governments, to start the process of creating a constitution for their states,

you know, and establishing constitutional law and order there. And so that is as much a signpost of independence as the naming of this committee. Once Congress issues that kind of resolution to the soon-to-be states, you know, the writing is on the wall for independence. And it's just a matter of getting all of the moderate delegates to eventually sign on because the vote has to be unanimous. Yeah. The famous antecedence of this document, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, very interesting to read that and see how closely it really mirrors the English Bill of Rights, ironically. Right. 1689, much of John Locke's philosophy, which Jefferson certainly would have been well versed on,

he really writes us over a period of days in that little room and I think Market Street in Philadelphia. Edits were then made to the draft by Adams and Franklin. Congress approved and rejected different sections. This is what's interesting. The body of this declaration up at the top, you know, that prose is different than the bottom two-thirds, just in appearance. And the reason for that is that most of this document are the grievances. There's 27 grievances against George III. Tell me about the grievances. We don't need to go through all 27 of them, but generally what were they saying? So the grievances are mostly aimed at either acts of parliament or acts by the ministry. So like the Board of Trade, right, the Southern Department for the Board of Trade, which was responsible for administering the North American colonies. And, you know, a lot of it is recapitulating things that had happened in the previous 10 years during what we call the imperial crisis, right?

So things like the things like the new taxes, things like the quartering of troops, things like unfair court proceedings and things like that that had happened up in New England with the with the vice admiralty court. So there's a lot of specifics in the previous years. but there's even some stuff that goes back even further. There is a interesting grievance that is complaining about laws that sought to limit immigration into the colonies, right? And part of that is what that was is laws were passed that that limited some migration from the German palatinates, which had provided large numbers of immigrants to the colonies over the course of the 18th century. and the colonies had become two and a half million strong, you know, in no small part due to immigration. And the founders at the convention, you know, understood that.

And so that was another grievance. And so a lot of these grievances are focused on specific things that had happened in the recent past. But the interesting thing about them is they are not specific. So they don't name the stamp act. They don't name the Townsend Act. They don't name, you know, the coercive acts. and the specific bills that were part of that group of legislation. Instead, it's very, it's unspecific, and in some cases it's a little bit ambiguous, you know.

And, you know, I think that that is, of course, intentional, but it also becomes a point of criticism for the declarations and the critics of the declaration end of independence, especially in England, you know, to say the reason that these grievances are so ambiguous is because they're essentially made up or they're, you know, their nonsense. And that's why they're, that's why they're so vague. But that's what the grievances are doing. The grievances are the case. If you think of this as, you know, a sort of legal case and most of these delegates are lawyers, right, to the Continental Congress. You know, the preamble is the is the lofty opening statement, right? And then the grievances is the laying out of the evidence.

Gotcha. Let's talk about that preamble, the famous line. 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. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the govern. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.

We should be walking around with those lines memorized. They are that profound, and that reductive is the wrong word. But, I mean, they take so much of the thinking of that time and distill them down to a really pithy paragraph. Yeah, I mean, that's, in some sense, that's Jefferson's great achievement. Yeah. Right. It's the way that he distills some of these core ideas of the Enlightenment, especially regarding government, into a few sentences. That sums up, you know, Enlightenment thought.

about the nature and the purpose of government. The thing about the preamble, and when we say the preamble, we're talking about the part that starts with, we hold these truths, right? There is a sort of introductory section before that, the famous when in the course of human events, you know,

becomes necessary to dissolve the political bans. And in that introduction, they say, you know, that the purpose of the, part of the purpose of the declaration is to declare the causes that impel them to this separation. to a decent respect to the opinions of mankind. So it's not just Americans.

It's everybody. It's the world that is, you know, the sort of intended audience, you know, as the introduction makes it seem. And then the other thing about the preamble is that the preamble is unnecessary for the moment. For this specific moment of July of 1776, the preamble is not necessary. What was needed was the list of the grievances and probably the introductory paragraph. If it didn't have the preamble, the declaration would have served the purpose that it was intended to serve in July of 1776, but it would not have had the subsequent impact on American history and on world history. Yeah, we wouldn't be talking about it today without those ideas. There were a lot of changes and edits being made.

I mean, the phrase self-evident was initially going to read. we hold these troops to be sacred. Sacred and undeniable. And Franklin is the one that crosses this out and replaces it with self-evident because his new nation in his mind and others was one to be founded on reason, not on the dictates of religion, which is also a big kettle of fish in those days. Well, that's why you see the only mention, the only sort of religious illusions in the entire document are this idea of the laws of nature. and of nature's God. And that goes, and that's a direct reference to the natural law ideas. Yeah.

But particularly Enlightenment era, natural law ideas. And then also the fact that men are endowed by their creator with unalienable rights. And that's the idea of natural rights that you are born with rights and they are not given to you by, they're not bestowed upon you by the government. Exactly. Right. But those are the only religious illusions. And they are not denominationally specific for a reason. There are obvious contradictions in these words that will play out until current times.

Jefferson was a slave owner, owned 600 enslaved people, as were many of the signers of the Declaration. Women, of course, had no legal rights. Native populations completely excluded from any of this. When you sit around, you're writing a book on this right now. How do you reconcile all of this for yourself? I mean, the fact that many delegates were slave owners, the fact that Jefferson himself was a slave owner.

you know, and then and then they wrote and approved these words. In some sense, you know, to me, that is just, that's an expression of what the historian Edmund Morgan called the American paradox, right? The coexistence of slavery and this ideal of liberty, you know, is something that has been rooted in, in, in, the United States, even going back to the beginning of the colonial period almost, right? So it's sort of, you know, it's, it is an, it is an expression of this, of this, I wouldn't say hypocrisy, though it is a contradiction. And it is a, and it is a paradox. And I think, you know, it's, in some way, in some sense, it's, it's, it's, it's incumbent on on Americans as part of their, you know, civic education to wrestle with that, with that paradox. I think that one of the, one of the,

the one of the things that in some sense kind of squares it for me is the fact that all of those groups that you just mentioned, African Americans, well, first enslaved persons, and then, and then later, you know, free African Americans, women, Native Americans, and many other marginalized groups over the course of the next 250 years, every one of those groups would adopt the declaration as part of justifying their cause for equal rights. and to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And so, you know, that has less to do with, you know, with the founders themselves than it does the document. But to me, it's the fact that the document has been used and redefined over, you know, the subsequent 250 years that

that kind of gives it really its most importance for me. Well, and the irony of it being written by a man who was enslaving and others who signed it speaks to the strange, double psychology of this document that very much is the psychology of America and evolving over time. And it's as if they almost said too much. And they wrote this ideal of existence, not realizing what they were writing and what they were signing, as if it was, you know, cart before the horse almost. And historically, that's exactly what happens. Yeah. You know, sometimes I'm asked by people, you know, did Jefferson or the other founders, you know, ever imagine that later on these marginalized groups would use the declaration, you know, to, to declare their

own, to support their own claims for rights. And the simple answer is no, right? They simply did not. But one of the things that makes revolutions messy and makes them interesting is that they always have unintended consequences. The intentions almost never play out as the revolutionaries expected. And so, you know, it's part of, you know, the unintended consequences of this revolution that they, that Jefferson made a decision, a conscious decision to include this preamble with its universal statement of human rights and of natural law. You know, he made a decision to include that because he felt it was necessary at the moment. But it turns out, you know, that it's actually been more sort of necessary in the 250 years since than it was at that moment.

Yeah. Founding document of the United States of unintended circumstances. We often talk about how dangerous it was for the founders. Is this true? Would they have suffered the worst possible fate? Yes, they would have. I mean, immediately after the declaration is passed, the British fleet shows up in New York, right? So getting ready for the for the Battle of New York and to take New York City. And as part of that, the two leaders, the naval leader and the army leader, the brothers Howe, right? Richard and William Howe are empowered on a sort of a reconciling mission, a treaty mission.

And they arrange a meeting with Adams and Franklin in New Jersey to say, look, the king is willing to pardon everything that you've done, right? But, you know, you have to, you have to, and we will rescind the previous legislations, all the things that they had complained about. But you have to sign these oaths and you have to, and the Congress has to rescind the declaration. And by that point, even just a few weeks later, it was not a possibility. Wow. Right. And if you think back to that King's proclamation for suppressing rebellion that is, that arrives in the colonies in December of 1775, right, before Payne's pamphlet, you know,

in it, you know, he says that the leaders, but also all the others who persist in, in this disobedience to the crown, you know, are going to be held guilty of treason. And of course, the punishment for treason is, is death by hanging. Hanging, loss of property, the ruin of your family. The quote that is attributed to Ben Franklin, whether he said it or not, is famous. We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately. Yeah, yeah. I think that's made up. I think that has to do with the snake diagram.

But anyway. It does harken back to that, Franklin being, you know, one of the earliest proponents of colonial unity. Yes. And the Congress was not a site of much colonial unity for much of its life until this moment of independence when they do vote essentially unanimously for independence. and so, you know, in some sense, a Franklin's statement is an expression of, okay, we have this moment of unity, but it needs to last now. Yeah. As you mentioned before, they approved this document on the 2nd of July 1776.

The final text is adopted the 4th of July and signed, but not all signatures happen at once. That's a fiction of that famous painting. Yeah. So after the break, Michael I are going to discuss the reactions to the declaration and how this will play. play out through history. All right. After the Declaration was published, Michael, there is a reaction, of course, from the British. Tell me what the Crown had to say about this.

I mean, the sense in England is one of, they see the Declaration as an expression of insolence, right? Like, there are a lot of people in England who had been annoyed with the colonists for a long time at this point, but also a good number of them who never really thought that they would actually go this far. And we have a couple of pamphlets that were written in 1776 in England, you know, criticizing the Declaration of Independence. And one is by John Lind, who was a barrister. And he, in the pamphlet, he refers to the Congress as a gathering of simple individuals. and he said that he tries to make the declaration seem like an affront to all Britons when he says that the declaration is an insult offered to everyone who bears the name of Britain.

And he says that the blow given by the Congress appears to be leveled at his majesty, but the wound was intended for us. So there is a real sense of people in Britain taking the declaration personally, as a personal insult, just like they took the colonists' resistance and protests against parliamentary legislation as sort of personal insults to everyday Britons. I've never really read anything about when English attitudes about the promise of North America, you know, like the resources of it and the great riches that were going to be made and all that stuff must have been an enormous school of thinking at that time in the middle 1700s. Absolutely. And I mean, it goes back to the 1700s because there was an enormous amount of literature that explored the natural history and the potential of North America and lots of literature aimed at trying to convince people to go to North America. So there is a really, really long tradition of that. But it's also the case that just that by the 1770s, the colonies of North America accounted for a significant. portion of the British imperial economy.

Yeah. Particularly by one providing, you know, raw, raw materials and then buying the finished goods that they were, that were manufactured in England. And so that's the, for the British, that's the thing that they're fighting to maintain. It's not an ideological war for them. They still want their war debt paid off. Yeah, it's a matter of maintaining this important part of our economy, basically. across the colonies, the challenge of getting this document out and proliferated amongst all is a matter of printing, which is laborious anyway, and then getting it printed into broadsides and into the newspapers and so forth.

I mean, tell me how long it took for people across all these colonies to understand what this document said. Yeah, that is a really interesting question. So the first printing of the declaration is done by John Dunlap, who's a printer in Philadelphia. He did a lot of printing for the Congress. And on July 4th, as soon as the document is voted on and finalized, it's sent over to Dunlap to make these broadsides that could, you know, broadside is a one sheet. It's just a one sheet publication. And that could be spread as quickly as possible. So those are made.

It seems like he only made a few hundred copies of those, and there's a few dozen that are still known to be extant. But the other way that they spread was the declaration spread was in newspapers. And interestingly enough, the first printing of the text of the declaration in a newspaper actually happens in a German language newspaper. Because of the large German population in Pennsylvania outside of Philadelphia, there had always been a few German newspapers. and it's one of the German newspapers that publishes the text of the Declaration First. The first English language printing happens in an issue on July 6th in the Pennsylvania Evening Post. And the reason that doesn't happen on the fourth or the next day is because colonial newspapers were only published once a week. And so for that reason, and for the distance that these broadsides would have to travel, you know, it took weeks.

it took weeks for people to get the news of the declaration all throughout the colonies, you know, especially if you think of, you know, up further north or further down south, you know, you're talking upwards of three weeks before people in Georgia knew that they were independent. You can find these historic land. I live in Westchester County north of New York, and you know that that declaration was read on the steps of a certain building in White Plains, New York. And that's a scene that played out everywhere. Exactly. All throughout the colonies.

The most famous reading is on July 9th, and the Declaration arrives in New York, and George Washington orders that all the troops are there because the British have landed on Staten Island and all the troops are in Manhattan. And Washington orders the new declaration be read to the troops. But it's not just the troops that turn out on the common to hear it. Lots of the inhabitants of the city also turn out. And it's such a rousing and inspiring reading of the Declaration that the people end up marching down from the commons down Broadway to Bowling Green, where there was a statue erected of George III. Just a few years earlier, sort of, it was commissioned after the repeal of the Stamp Act as a sort of sign of goodwill.

And they march down, they tear the statue down. and there's a sort of myth that it's then melted down and used to make bullets. But the other interesting thing about that is that the iron wrought fence that surrounded the statue on each pike had these little crowns. And the colonists used their bats, the sailor bats, you know, to knock the crowns off the fence. And that fence is still there at Bowling Green in downtown New York City. And you can see it and you can see where they knock the crown. off. Oh my God. I'm going right there to do this. It brings a sense of legitimacy to everything

it had been, you know, talk, talk, talk until then and a couple battles, of course. But we're now a legitimate force with ideas behind this cause. But also, as we mentioned before, it is an advertisement to foreign powers that we know what we're doing, or at least we have an idea behind what we're doing. And that is going to be invaluable. Yeah. I mean, you have to think about like, you the perspective of France or of Spain, these are absolute monarchies, right? They are actually the kind of monarchies that the Declaration of Independence, you know, criticizes George III for being, even though most, you know, most people in England knew that, you know, George III, that the monarch in Great Britain had been, his prerogative had been lessened over the years and, you know,

he wasn't really, that wasn't very powerful. But the, you know, but Louis the 16th, you know, was an absolute monarch. And so how do you appeal to an absolute monarch to support your Republican seemingly anti-monarchical revolution? So it's a very dicey situation. And it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen at least officially immediately, right? Like there are channels that get set up sort of illicit channels to funnel some money and some goods from France and Spain to the colonies to the continental,

Army, but it's not until 1777, late 1777, early 78, that we get the official Treaty of Alliance between the United States and France. And that's because it took, you know, the Battle of Saratoga, the victory at Saratoga, to finally convince France to openly support, you know, the revolution through this treaty. So it takes a while. Yeah, that it was worth the risk. But as you say they weren't interested in the political ramifications. They wanted to beat England and use this to their greatest advantage. The huge luxury of history is we're able to see the lasting effects of an important event or in this case a document. Let's talk about what later movements were inspired by this declaration. We mentioned, and people do not realize, most people don't understand

that the middle of the 1800s, 1848 is the famous year, which is the year of revolutions. All of that is led up to by the thoughts and, you know, philosophies that are behind our revolution. It's all kind of of a piece, really. Yeah. So the revolutions that we're talking about, of course, are the French Revolution. How was that declaration fundamental to theirs? I mean, the Declaration of Independence, the American Declaration of Independence is, you know, is a moment of inspiration for those in France who in the 1770s, you know, were, you know, the sort of the more,

the more urban and enlightened class of France, you know, who are these, these, you know, young, young people who were, you know, professionals and, and, you know, real, real proponents of the Enlightenment, but they weren't aristocracy or they weren't nobility, right? And so they developed, you know, critiques of the monarchy, critiques of the aristocracy in the way that the French government functioned. And the, the, The Declaration of Independence is, you know, it's, I would say it's like a light bulb going off for a lot of, they're not revolutionaries yet in France, but, you know, you might think of them as French radicals. But, you know, it makes those, the Declaration of Independence makes those ideals real in a way that, you know, reading, reading writings by, you know, in Enlightenment authors, you know, all of all of those texts are, you know, theoretical, right? They're always proffering theories of government or how government should work

or what, you know, what it means and whatnot. But the Declaration of Independence is one of the first times, you know, that this new Enlightenment thinking about government is actually made real, made tangible. And that has a real impact on people in France. And specifically you have, I mean, and interestingly, you have the French military here and all those soldiers. have gone home, you know, top the list Lafayette, you know, and, and, uh, and understanding that this all took place and that this declaration got read all over the place. Yeah. The Haitian revolution, quite a different set of circumstances, 1791 to 1804, it also drew on the ideas in America, which is ironic quality of men. This was really a Haitian, an enslaved revolution

against the French, but definitely drew strength from those words. All men are created equal. Latin American revolutionary leaders like Simone Boulevard, also inspired by it. And then most interestingly to me, because it's just a present, you know, more present to us, is the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, which happens with Ho Chi Minh. It's incredible how over these hundreds of years these words have resonated. Yeah, it's, it becomes a, you know, I mean, you mentioned earlier, like there were some earlier kind of examples, like the English Bill of Rights, but that they're not, those early examples are not exactly the same as the Declaration. Declaration becomes a sort of model for declaring independence. It becomes a sort of how to book or how do you declare independence in a way that is, you know, persuasive to the international community. And, but I mean, at the same time, you know, that, that's, that was also.

taking place, you know, in the United States in the 19th century, you know, by marginalized groups referring to the Declaration in justifying their causes like the abolitionists, like the women's rights movements, which was a precursor of the suffragist movement, like the first sort of nascent working class trade union groups in the 1930s. We're issuing the working man's declaration of independence. It happens in the United States in the early 19th century, early to mid-19th century, it happens all over the world. And, you know, that's a function of the nature of the document, the structure of the document, is that Jefferson's document in its form and structure and in its language was a lot of it,

all of it besides the grievances, essentially, is universal. Yep. Right? It's applicable to everybody. And everybody seems to have listened and used it for all it was worth. Exactly. Not only does it right across the firmament the highest ideals of human existence, but it also ironically shouts its own hypocrisy. And so therefore, it's double edge and it's able to be used in both senses and to good ends in both. It's so interesting that way.

I mean, I once heard the historian Annette Gordon-Reed talk about those contradictions or that paradox and say, all individuals, we all have ideals for ourselves that we don't always live up to, but we aspire to live up to them, right? And in some ways, I think that really gets at the crux of the document. Lincoln was one of the first to say this, too, I mean, the abolitionists and then later Lincoln built on it, but was the idea that the declaration, the preamble, was not meant to be a statement of reality on July 2, 1776. that it was meant to be an aspirational statement. And these ideals were ideals that maybe are never fully achievable,

but that the American experiment is about trying to more fully realize those ideals over time. Right. The best experiment is the one that still, you know, is the highest bar you may never reach. Yeah, yeah. That's, you know, the idea comes from the abolitionists, really, this idea of, you know, the unfinished revolution, right? Frederick Douglass in his famous July 5th speech in 1852. That's the idea. The idea is that you honor the revolution, not just by celebrating it, you know, but you honor it by by actually working towards more fully realizing these, you know,

founding ideals of liberty and equality. And that, that idea of the unfinished revolution really has gone on to inspire many, if not most of, you know, all of our most important social movements since the abolitionists down to the present. And it all started with this document we're still trying to figure out. Michael Haddam, author of Memory of 76, The Revolution in American History. His newest work will be entitled, The Declaration of Independence, A Concise History and published in fall of 26. How's that going for you?

That's going well. I'm putting on the final touches and looking forward to sending it off. Where can people keep track of that? Well, so that book is going to be published by Oxford University Press in the fall. So I imagine that by summertime, you should be able to find it for a pre-order on Amazon or wherever you get your books. Godless, we'll have you back here again, I hope. Thanks again. Thanks, Don.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode about the Declaration of Independence. If you want more context about these times when this was written, we've done a number of episodes in the past that will take you right there. French and Indian War with Dan Snow, episode 27. Boston Tea Party, explained, episode 127. The Truth about Paul Revere's Ride, episode 271. The Battles of Lexington and Concord, episode 238. The Battle of Bunker Hill, episode 288.

And French Spies in the American Revolution, episode 50. All of those will give you more background on everything we've talked about. I hope you enjoy.