Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

The Declaration, and Allen’s reading of it, relies heavily on natural imagery, especially water imagery and navigation. The image of human events as a “river” informs both Allen’s reading of the text and her use of John Locke to argue that humans have the capacity to interpret their lives and make judgments about the future. Human beings are part of nature, in Jefferson’s argument, and have a drive to survive and pursue happiness. This motif is also implicit in the Declaration’s criticisms of the king: Tyranny is unnatural to human flourishing, and thus the colonists are justified in their decision to revolt.

Allen refers repeatedly to contract law as well as marriage and divorce to understand the goals of the colonists and the arguments of the Declaration. Lee and Adams argued that the king had already dissolved the governmental bonds between his institutions and the colonists by making war on them, and they used this reasoning to continue their push for independence. Allen refers to the actual divorce decree of Prince Charles and Princess Diana as evidence that the colonists are engaged in a well-established social project of dissolving old bonds and making new ones. The colonists seek the consent of their fellow citizens to form their new relationship, and they appeal to the world to witness their project, which Allen likens to a marriage, “Just as when a couple says, ‘I do,’ the words of the Declaration make a new reality,” one in which colonists “have pledged one another their lives, property, and honor. In this the Declaration sounds something like a wedding” (94). Similarly, Allen unpacks the etymology of the word “endowment” (from “dowry”) to explain that natural rights are something people cannot be separated from, just as women’s property accompanied them into marriage. This comparison of the Declaration’s project to everyday occurrences advances Allen’s goal of demonstrating the text’s accessibility—indeed, its universality. It is also an example of The Transformational Power of Language, as wedding vows, like the Declaration, are an unusually literal instance of language constituting an action.

The role of religion in the Declaration is a recurring theme in Allen’s discussion of the document as democratic writing. Jefferson’s fellow committee members were more explicit about God as a source of rights and moral justification than he was. Some of the founders, like Adams, were Christians, while others were deists. To prove that the Declaration is in fact for everyone, Allen must establish that belief in God is not necessary to accept its arguments about humanity, nature, and government. She points out that “nature” in the Declaration could be created by God or via the Big Bang—neither changes that humanity is part of nature and that humans are naturally social beings who seek social organization to protect themselves.