Creating the world’s oldest modern nation

The United States is the world’s oldest modern nation.

That’s because our country was the first to create itself with a written constitution approved by elected representatives of the people — in other words, through democracy.

In 1776, when the Second Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia approved the Declaration of Independence, that democracy was a far cry from what we have today, of course. It took many, many decades before true participatory citizenship was extended to anyone other than white men of substance.

We still haven’t perfected it.

But the words of the Declaration of Independence, which we commemorate this week, have for 238 years served as the pole star in our drive for true equality of opportunity: “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 . . .”

The Declaration is the purest statement of that ideal ever written.

It was “a bridge too far” for most Americans, then and for a long time afterward. For instance, Thomas Jefferson, the primary author, in his original draft had also included language condemning British support of the slave trade.

But slavery was the third rail of politics even way back then, and the Continental Congress delegates removed the slave trade reference.

It was one of 86 changes to the document, made by the other four Declaration committee members and the delegates, before it was finally approved; Jefferson’s original draft was shortened more than 25 percent through that process.

Jefferson was deeply conflicted with regard to slavery. His writings and correspondence reveal his true distaste for the institution. But his Virginia plantation lifestyle, in the final analysis, trumped his belief in human equality, and he never brought himself to free his many slaves.

Nearly all his Southern peers and colleagues shared that addiction.

Consequently, neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution, adopted 13 years later, mentions slavery explicitly. The Constitution, especially, could be ratified only because it was essentially a compromise among many competing interests: large states vs. small states, merchants vs. farmers, and particularly slave states vs. “free” states.

The sad truth is that the birth of the nation would have been aborted if slavery had been forbidden by the Constitution.

And yet ...

The ringing endorsement of equality in the Declaration over the years has been the clarion call to action for progressive movements: for pre-Civil War abolitionists, the women’s suffrage movement, the Freedom Riders and the black voting rights movement of the 1960s, immigration reform today, and many reform and revolutionary causes around the world.

Makeshift reproductions of the Statue of Liberty in China and elsewhere in more recent human rights pushes worldwide prove the power of the idea.

It’s hard, and scary, to imagine what modern civilization would be like had Jefferson and his brave congressional co-conspirators not pledged their lives, their fortunes and their “sacred Honor” in Philadelphia in their Declaration of Independence more than two centuries ago.

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Jefferson Bee & Herald
Address: 200 N. Wilson St.
Jefferson, IA 50129

Phone:(515) 386-4161