American Scripture

“I set out […] to tell the stories of Independence and of the Declaration of Independence when the Declaration was a workaday document of the Second Continental Congress, one of many similar documents of the time in which Americans advocated, explained, and justified Independence, the most painful decision of their collective lives.”

Here, Maier lays out her project for the book—to remove the aura of sacredness and untouchability that surrounds the Declaration of Independence and to remind readers that the Declaration began its life as just one among many similar political documents.

“How and why did the Declaration of Independence come to assume the role it has assumed in American society—a statement of values that more than any other expresses not why we separated from Britain, and not what we are or have been, but what we ought to be, an inscription of ideals that bind us as a people but have also been at the center of some of the most divisive controversies in our history?”

This is a question Maier will attempt to answer in the book. The final clause contains an antithesis through which Maier points to the complex, ambivalent role of the Declaration in US history: that it both binds Americans together and divides them.

“So confident were Britain’s leaders of their position that they were unable to take seriously the colonists’ efforts to devise a way of establishing traditional English liberties within an imperial context.”

Maier engages in narrative history here, telling the story of how a consensus gradually emerged in the colonies that revolution was necessary. Her sarcastic tone here suggests that the British leaders’ confidence was unjustified.