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Jefferson wanted to be remembered for three things, founding this university
where we are today, his bill for religious liberty
in Virginia, and the Declaration of Independence.
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And of course, that's precisely what we do remember him
for. Well, Jefferson's authorship
of the Declaration has always been controversial.
Jefferson himself was a bit schizophrenic about the Declaration.
It did get onto his tombstone.
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My scholarly friends will know exactly what Jefferson was concerned about.
Jefferson thought he had gotten it exactly right in his draft of the
Declaration, but his colleagues in Congress thought some changes
would be advisable, and most of us agree today that those changes were good.
There were embarrassing things in the Declaration,
such as a complaint against King George the Third for imposing slavery
on the Chesapeake. Enriching slave traders by imposing,
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slaves on unwilling American planters.
It just didn't seem quite right to the many slaveholders who were in Congress.
It seemed, well,
projecting blame would be the way we describe it now in our psychobabble.
Why doesn't Jefferson simply say slavery is evil,
and we're going to do something about it.
But no it was George the Third who was responsible.
This notion of American innocence, American newness is
part of the whole idea of the founding.
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Yet in 1825, just before he died in 1826,
on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration, Jefferson writes
to Henry Lee, who's interested in doing some research
for a book he's writing about his father and
about the early period, about the founding.
And he asks Jefferson about the Declaration,
and Jefferson says, oh, it's not mine.
I don't claim any originality.
It was just as if I were channeling the common sense of the day.
It was there in the air.
I didn't have to ransack through books on my shelf.
This was not a learned treatise.
This is what everybody was thinking. That idea that everybody was thinking
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what the declaration says is probably the central myth of American history.
Because it means there was this moment, to use John Adams's image, in which
13 bells struck at once. He's referring to the 13 states.
And we imagine by extension that the hearts and minds
of Americans everywhere are rallying to the cause, because here at
last is a statement of what makes sense to ordinary
people about their power, about their rights, about where government comes from.
At last, we have done this thing, and
the American people were ready for this moment on
July 4th, 1776.
Well, that notion is one we're going to talk about
a little bit over the course of today's lecture.
That idea of a kind of consensus, of a convergence of views, at this
key moment, this founding moment, when we sloughed off the old and embraced the new.
We'll come back to this question of whether Americans really were united,
that there was this massive consensus in 1776.
Before we do it might be worth noting, we might think that Jefferson's a bit of
a megalomaniac to identify himself so completely with
the American people that they speak through him.
Well, that's up to your own taste
whether you take that modest view, the self-effacing
view, or the megalomaniac view. But neither one is accurate.
What I'm going to do today is to take you through the
run-up to the revolution to try to explain what the Declaration was all about.
And the big argument here is that American independence is an unintended consequence.
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So if we're thinking about
independence, it could be that the people
were all agreed on the need for independence
and that spontaneously they endorsed these declarations,
because there were declarations all over the country.
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It, it's just impossible.
It couldn't be, because that's not what the patriot movement was all about.
So we'll talk about the run up to
independence, and then, I think it's important to establish a context.
What was going on in 1776.
And then proceed to the idea of what kind of work does the Declaration do.
What is its function? My, radical revisionist argument
here is that you all spend too much attention on the first two paragraphs.
The ones you have committed to memory, as school children,
all about all men are created equal and government by consent.
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I think you want to look at the end of the Declaration.
I think you want to look at my neck tie.
It's these signatures that are doing the work of the Declaration.
Now there's a lot in between the beginning and the end, and we'll get to that later.
It's a big argument
Jefferson's making, because this is the deal.
Jefferson has to persuade.
He has to persuade his colleagues in Congress.
He has to persuade himself.
And he has to persuade this thing that didn't
exist before, the American people, that they were a people.
Professor Peter S. OnufThomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, Emeritus
