You probably recognize few quotations more quickly than “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,” from the Declaration of Independence. The sentence within which those words appear has been called the greatest sentence ever written.
It comes up because Duke is bringing precious, centuries-old copies of the Declaration – from the collection of Duke alumnus and former board chair David Rubenstein ’70 – to Duke and Durham as part of We the People, Duke’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.
To start you thinking about the Declaration, we’re going to play grammar detective, but we’re not going to focus on the words you know. When considering the Declaration, Duke associate professor of history Reeve Huston starts his students earlier in the document.
“That’s the first question I ask my students sometimes,” he says of the Declaration’s only slightly less famous first sentence, beginning “When in the course of human events. …” He asks the students to ferret out its subject and verb, a seemingly simple ask.
“It takes them a while,” he says. “There are so many subordinate clauses.”
The answer, should you be wondering, is “respect” and “requires,” and we will allow you to privately wonder what it must have been like for political actors to believe that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” could “require” behavior.
Huston asks students to parse that sentence specifically to draw their attention to the words that are not its subject or verb – things Thomas Jefferson and his collaborators cleverly slipped into dependent clauses. The colonial leaders, that is, treat their right “to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them” as a given – as requiring no defense.
“That’s pretty radical,” Huston says. English radicals had traditionally held that right to rebel, he says, but “that was a right that assumed an ongoing organic tie between the king and his subjects.” You could fight for your rights, but that didn’t mean you could just decide you were prepared to do without a king. And the colonists did more, he says, than take the right to leave the British as a given. They also shifted the terms of the debate: Their right to separate themselves from a repressive government was presented as not a British but a human right. This assertion came after Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet “Common Sense,” published in January 1776, which advanced that revolutionary idea.
“Now, suddenly, these official bodies [the colonial legislatures] are claiming, ‘We don’t base our claim of rights on the rights of Englishmen – we base them on the rights of men,’ with all the ambiguity of that term.”
Pretty revolutionary stuff. Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English, is currently at work on a book considering human rights, and she quotes the ideas of Raphael Lemkin, who is known for coining the word “genocide” and drafting the Genocide Convention after World War II. Lemkin, a Polish attorney who fled the holocaust and joined the Duke law faculty, wrote that a declaration of rights is aspirational, like an engagement. A working document (in Lemkin’s case the United Nations Genocide Convention and, for our purposes, the U.S. Constitution, which followed in 1787) is more quotidian, like a marriage.
So at an anniversary like this July 4 – and a moment when some would say we’re having difficulty living up to our marriage vows – it’s natural for us to turn back to our engagement, our aspirational document. Wald notes that Abraham Lincoln did just that when, in an even more fractious time, he spoke at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
“The Declaration was the statement of principles that everybody wanted to live by, and everybody wanted to claim that – north and south. So of course Lincoln is going to refer back to the words of the Declaration,” those fourscore and seven years previous. Just as we do now.
And those words can be uniting. Wald points out that before Gettysburg people commonly referred to “these” united states – the states were still seen as something of a confederation, not yet a single unit. And, in fact, the facsimile copy of the Declaration that will visit Duke shows that even in its title, the word “States” is capitalized while “united” is not.
Wald too directs her students to the construction of that first paragraph, pointing out like Huston does that the authors hid the most earth-shattering actions outside the main noun and verb of the sentence. “The beauty of that language was we have to convince all these European nations that they don’t have to worry about rebellion,” she says. “We’re only doing this because, ‘in the course of human events, it becomes necessary.’ The passive construction of that: We’re not choosing to do this; we’re being forced to do it.”
Lincoln, by the way, wasn’t the first to refer back to the Declaration to remind Americans of their best selves. Huston points out that the three copies of the Declaration visiting Duke were printed in 1818, 1819 and 1823 – part of the “era of good feeling” you may recall from history class, when, after the disastrous War of 1812, the Federalist party collapsed.
There was a “retreat from partisanship and popular mobilization among the national political elite,” who hoped to create “a politics of elite-directed, fully consensual nation-building,” Huston says. “What could better promote national unity than reprinting the founding document?”
Two of the visiting documents are from competing entrepreneurs who rushed to prepare copies of the Declaration – one with fancy headlines, another with portraits of the founders – to take advantage of the surge in patriotism. The third is an exact facsimile engraved in 1823, commissioned by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, whose father, John Adams, was one of the signers in 1776.
You can do your own parsing of the language of the Declaration of Independence in person this fall. The copies will be displayed at the Durham Main Library Sept. 8 through 20 and in the Nasher Museum of Art Sept. 24 through January 3, 2027.
A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that you go see it.