The Source of the Declaration of Independence

FREEDOM IS WHAT MAKES AMERICA AMERICA. AS WE APPROACH OUR NATION’S 250TH BIRTHDAY, WE SHOULD TAKE A RESPECTFUL LOOK AT WHERE THIS IDEAL OF FREEDOM CAME FROM.

- STEPHEN KIESLING

Thomas Jefferson was famous for borrowing big ideas and shaping them to his own purpose. His great buildings were Venetian, in the style of Andrea Palladio. His fine recipes were French, gathered by one of his slaves on a trip to Paris. His Discovery Doctrine, which opened the American West to conquest, was drawn from papal bulls of the 1490s. His Bible was his own edition, sliced with a razor to remove supernatural forces and to separate church and state. And then there’s his greatest contribution:

“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.”

Where did Jefferson borrow that?

Jefferson’s wonderful words empowered a glorious new nation, but we also know that he owned other people, and they lived as it pleased him. So, until about a year and a half ago, it was pretty much taken for granted that the ideas behind the Declaration of Independence were borrowed from European Enlightenment figures, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But then anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow published The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity, an enormously influential book that demonstrates that people with brains, creativity, and stories equal to ours have been creating different kinds of civilizations worldwide for more than 10,000 years. These two free-thinking academics assembled striking evidence that our ideals of personal freedom enshrined in the Declaration of Independence did not evolve in Europe but were inspired by European conversations with the Native Peoples of America.