Although Americans govern themselves by the Constitution, they guide themselves by the Declaration of Independence. In this book, Alexander Tsesis, who teaches law at Loyola University-Chicago, presents a remarkable array of politicians, activists, and ordinary citizens who, since 1776, have invoked the Declaration as support for their causes. His examples, which span the political and intellectual spectrum, suggest how Americans of all stripes seek to enlist under the Declaration‘s banner. (Tsesis's examples also resonate with the late Philip S. Foner's classic anthology, We, the Other People: Alternative Declarations of Independence by Labor Groups, Farmers, Woman's Rights Advocates, Socialists, and Blacks, 1829–1975 [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976].)
Arguing that the Declaration of Independence “has been essential to the development and enforcement of norms within and outside the legal system” (2), Tsesis declares his intention to examine “the various ways that politicians, associations, groups, and individuals have relied on the Declaration of Independence to justify changing policies, laws, and customs” (ibid). Such a book would be a valuable scholarly contribution, extending the understanding of the Declaration offered by Pauline Maier's American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997) and David Armitage's The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Has Tsesis's book fulfilled its stated goals? The answer is mixed. The mosaic of examples of invocations, rewritings, and celebrations presented in For Liberty and Equality is dazzling, and in some ways remarkably reassuring. Tsesis's book confirms that what unites Americans is not race, ethnicity, language, or religion, but rather a shared constellation of political principles and ideas, given memorable and inspiring expression in the Declaration of Independence. Tsesis also shows that a central feature of American history is the perennial recourse to those first principles, renewing them when the times demand renewal.
And yet, Tsesis's harvest of historical examples and his interpretation of their evolving significance raise unanswered questions. Tsesis grounds his book on two assumptions: first, that basic American political ideas of liberty and equality have their roots exclusively in the Declaration of Independence, and, second, that the Declaration has timeless meanings known to and intended by its framers, and continuing to influence later generations.
The problem is that both assumptions are seriously flawed. The first begs a question addressed by most historians who have studied the Declaration: that of identifying its principal source or sources. Candidates include the work of John Locke, particularly his Two Treatises of Government (the position taken by Carl L. Becker); the communitarian political theory of such Scottish Enlightenment thinkers as Francis Hutcheson (the position taken by Garry Wills); and the history of Anglo-American constitutional argument, specifically in 1765–1776 (the position taken by John Phillip Reid and, in subtly different ways, by Pauline Maier). Tsesis is so focused on the shadow cast by the Declaration that he has little time for or interest in its background.
Tsesis's second assumption about the Declaration's timeless meanings collides with the history of the Declaration's origins and the evolving record of interpretation and reinterpretation of the Declaration's arguments. To cite one example, controversies surrounding Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration's draftsman (or author, as he styled himself in his self-composed epitaph), raise key questions about what Jefferson thought the Declaration meant for African-Americans and for women, or what Jefferson would have made of such invocations of the Declaration as that by the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 or by President Barack Obama in his second inaugural address in 2013. Insisting that the Declaration has timeless meanings guiding later generations inadvertently denies agency to historical actors who make the Declaration's words relevant to new contexts and problems.
Historians will find more reason for dispute than reassurance in Tsesis's account of the Declaration's origins. Tsesis's focus on the Declaration's “preamble” statements eclipses our need to understand why Jefferson structured his draft Declaration as he did: beginning with a justification for asserting the right of revolution (including the famed preamble statements), proceeding to an indictment of George III justifying that right's assertion, and, finally, grafting into the Declaration's conclusion the instrument of revolution, the resolution declaring independence adopted by the Second Continental Congress. Nor does Tsesis address the constitutional context giving rise to the Declaration, which was the Americans’ last word in their 11 year constitutional argument with Great Britain. Moving our focus to the underpinnings of Tsesis's discussion, Tsesis's endnotes provide no citations to standard documentary editions of primary sources for the Revolutionary era, a common failing of historical scholarship generated by legal scholars lacking familiarity with the products of what William Freehling aptly called the “documentary editing revolution.”
Tsesis's identification of the Declaration of Independence as creating a nation and its basis for governance, and his failure even to mention the Articles of Confederation, combine to raise questions about his reading of the Declaration's origins and original purpose. Further, although citing the Declaration as an influence on and model for state constitution making, Tsesis overlooks that the principles and language that the Declaration had in common with state constitutions were rooted in Locke's writings. Tsesis also overlooks the likeliest model for state declarations of rights: George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, also informed by Lockean theory and framed before the Declaration. Finally, Tsesis misses that, when state constitutions referenced the Declaration, as did New York's, they did so principally to make the case for creating a new state constitution.
In sum, For Liberty and Equality claims too much in seeking to expound what is central to the Declaration and its influences on American life. Frustrating and illuminating by turns, eccentrically researched and erratically documented, this book only suggests but does not provide what we need on this important subject.
