This Fall, I’ll Teach My Students the Declaration of Independence Their Textbook Won’t

It is July, and I am already preparing my college syllabi for the coming fall semester, where I will again be teaching my American politics course. As usual, I cover the American founding and the Declaration of Independence. This year, the 250th since 1776, I am pausing longer than usual over one phrase.

Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal and endowed with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is the most radical sentence in the history of self-government. It is also a sentence written by a man who owned the people who waited on him. My students, most of them Minnesotans who have never been anywhere near Philadelphia, deserve to know both halves of that truth.

The textbooks tend to give them only the first half. Open almost any mainstream American politics text, and you meet the founders as the civic mythology prefers them: Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison rendered as marble, their contradictions sanded smooth. The books are not wrong about what these men accomplished. They are incomplete about who else was in the room and about how many Americans the founding’s promise was never meant to reach.

So I tell my students who else was there. The first person to die for the cause that produced the Declaration never got to read it: Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Wampanoag descent who had likely escaped slavery, was the first of five men shot dead by British soldiers in Boston in March 1770. We remember the Boston Massacre; we less often remember that its first martyr was a Black man. As the Continental Congress proclaimed universal liberty in Philadelphia, several delegates had brought enslaved attendants with them. Jefferson himself was attended in the city by Robert Hemings, an enslaved man whose humanity the very text Jefferson was drafting implicitly denied. A decade later, when the Washingtons kept a household in Philadelphia as the nation’s capital, at least nine enslaved people lived and worked there, two of whom escaped rather than remain.

And it was not only the enslaved who were written out. Women were everywhere in the Revolution and nowhere in the republic it produced. Abigail Adams, who ran the family farm for years while her husband was away making a nation, argued that the legal subordination of women was an injustice of the same kind as the colonists’ subordination to Parliament. Mercy Otis Warren wrote propaganda that helped move a colony toward rebellion and then the first major history of the war. Phillis Wheatley, enslaved, published a book of poetry that refuted the era’s claims about Black incapacity. Deborah Sampson enlisted in the Continental Army disguised as a man. Elizabeth Freeman, enslaved and illiterate, heard the Massachusetts constitution read aloud, decided its promise of equality applied to her, sued, and won her freedom. None of them could vote in the nation they helped create.

Nor could the working people, the shoemakers and sailors who made the Revolution in the streets before it was made in Congress, and who found within a decade that the new government protected property more reliably than persons. When Daniel Shays and four thousand veterans marched because the courts were foreclosing on their farms, the founders answered not with relief but with a stronger Constitution built in part to prevent such uprisings. The Native nations whose land the republic claimed were not consulted at all. That last omission has a particular weight here in Minnesota, a state whose own founding came at the direct expense of the Dakota and Ojibwe and whose history carries the same gap between proclaimed ideals and lived reality that runs through the national story.

I say this not to indict the founders or to call the founding a fraud. The genius of the Declaration is that it set a standard its authors did not meet, one later generations could hold the country to, as Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton both did. What worries me is the opposite impulse, increasingly loud in our politics: to varnish over these faces rather than reckon with them, to treat the naming of them not as scholarship but as grievance. Earlier this year, the federal government stripped the slavery exhibit from the President’s House Memorial in Philadelphia under an executive order against history that “disparages” Americans. That gets it backward. Recovering those faces is not an attack on the American project; it is the most patriotic thing a teacher of American politics can do, because it takes the Declaration’s promise seriously.

So this fall, when I open the semester in St. Paul, I will do something my textbook will not: I will name them, all of them, and ask my students why “We the People,” the phrase that opens the Constitution a decade later, did not yet mean everyone. That distance between the words and the reality is the actual subject of American politics, and it is the inheritance my Minnesota students are being asked to take up.

Two hundred fifty years on, the honest answer to Jefferson’s promise is: not yet, and not for everyone. That is not a reason to abandon the promise. It is the reason to teach it, completely, to the next generation, who will have to decide whether to make it real.