The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

This July 4th, Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Like so much else these days, the anniversary celebrations have become the subject of political debate, which distracts from the brilliance of the document itself and the noble, if unfinished, experiment it launched, one that has now endured for two and a half centuries.

So let's set the noise aside for a moment and travel back to Philadelphia in July 1776, where Thomas Jefferson drafted a sentence that historian and best-selling biographer Walter Isaacson calls The Greatest Sentence Ever Written:

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.

A Nation Built on Reason, not Birthright

Isaacson explains that the Declaration's goal was to herald a new kind of nation; one in which rights were grounded in natural law and reason, not birthright, church authority, or royal decree. The founders treated equality as self-evident: true by definition, because all people possessed the same natural rights and a government’s legitimacy rested on the consent of the governed.

Author Jonathan Turley makes a similar point in Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution. The Declaration spoke to the universal rights of all mankind, not just the rights of Englishmen, even as its authors excluded vast segments of the population from those rights in practice. Government's legitimacy, in this view, rested on its protection of those natural, Creator-endowed rights.

Breaking From Two Tyrannies

Thomas Paine put it plainly in Common Sense: the colonies faced two tyrannies, the king and the hereditary House of Lords, both of which elevated certain people over others simply by birth.

What made America different in 1776, and continues to animate the American ideal today, is the founders' stated principle that people hold the same unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of parentage or station. That last phrase, the pursuit of happiness, is really about opportunity: everyone's right to seek fulfillment and well-being, even when that promise has not been equally available to all. It's the foundation of the American Dream.

An Unfinished Promise

Living up to the promise that "all men are created equal" has been a constant American struggle. Historian Heather Cox Richardson notes that by 1863, Abraham Lincoln feared the idea was no longer self-evident. At Gettysburg, he reframed equality not as a truth requiring no defense, but as a proposition that had to be argued for, tested, and proven. How else could "all men are created equal" survive in a nation where half of whom were fighting a war to preserve human bondage?

Lincoln’s point is that equality isn't secured by words or ideals alone. It's a commitment each generation has to choose, and defend, for itself.

Celebrating the Experiment

This July 4th, let's celebrate the founders' insight that America should be a land of unequalled opportunity. Let’s celebrate the principle that people should be able to own the fruits of their own labor and pursue their own happiness because they hold the same inherent rights, even when those rights and opportunities have not always been equally protected. And let's recognize, as Lincoln did, that today's challenges are real and that it's up to us to ensure this nation, so conceived and so dedicated, long endures.

Happy 250th birthday, America.