We hold these truths to be self -evident that
all men are created equal. It's probably, you
know, the most famous sentence in the English
language, maybe in all of history. It's the bumper
sticker for the American experiment, the bedrock
of the culture. But, you know, we usually just
sort of nod along with it. We don't really stop
to think about how weird those six words actually
are. It is so deceptive. We treat it like this
pillar of stone, something that has always existed.
But when you really dig into the origins, that
phrase isn't some static fact. It's a battlefield.
It's the result of fierce editing wars, ancient
theology, political maneuvering, and some truly
intense contradictions. And that is exactly our
mission for this deep dive. We are looking at
the biography of a single sentence. We've pulled
together a massive stack of source material here.
We're talking original historical drafts of the
Declaration, analysis from historians like Jack
Rakow from Stanford and Howard Zinn, and even
some obscure congressional resolutions, all to
figure out a central mystery. How could a document
declaring equality be written by slave owners?
And how has the mean... of all men changed from
a self -evident truth to a self -evident lie.
And, well, back again. It's a wild journey. It
really is. It's a phrase that has been weaponized
by revolutionaries, dictators, and civil rights
leaders alike. So let's start at the very beginning,
the authorship. If we played trivia right now
and I asked who wrote the Declaration of Independence,
everyone says Thomas Jefferson. They'd get maybe
half points for that. Jefferson certainly penned
the draft in June of 1776. He was absolutely
the wordsmith. The specific flavor of that sentence,
the philosophical punch of it, that owes a huge
debt to Benjamin Franklin. I love this part of
the research. It's the ultimate example of why
everyone needs a good editor. Absolutely. So
you have to picture the scene. Jefferson drafts
this thing. He hands it over to Franklin. And
in Jefferson's original version, he wrote, we
hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.
Sacred and undeniable. Wow. That feels heavier,
more religious somehow. Exactly. Sacred implies
the truth comes from God. It's dogmatic. It requires
faith. If something is sacred, you don't question
it, but you also can't prove it. Franklin took
pen, crossed out sacred and undeniable, and wrote
in self -evident. Why does that one word change
matter so much? Well, it changes the entire foundation
of the argument. Self -evident is a term from
the Enlightenment. It's the language of science
and reason. Think about geometry. A self -evident
truth is an axiom, like the whole is greater
than the part. You don't need a priest to tell
you that. You just look at nature and you see
it. So Franklin was basically saying, we don't
need the chirps to justify our freedom. It's
a scientific fact. Precisely. It moved the entire
argument from the pulpit to the laboratory. It
was a radical shift to base a government on reason
rather than divine right. But here's the thing
that really surprised me in the notes. We give
the founders credit for inventing this idea of
equality, but they didn't just pull it out of
thin air, did they? No, not at all. Not even
close. If you look at the lineage of the idea,
it's like a relay race that spans a thousand
years. You can go all the way back to Pope Gregory
the Great in the 6th century. He wrote in his
Morelia and Job that nature produces all men
equal. It's only sin that creates hierarchy.
So it actually started as a theological idea.
Right. And then it just it pops up in the wildest
places. Look at the peasants revolt in England
in 1381. There was this radical priest, John
Ball, and he used to preach to the crowds asking
when Adam delved in Eve's span, who was then
the gentleman. That is such a great line. Basically,
when Adam was digging in the dirt and Eve was
spinning thread, where were all the Dukes and
Arles? Yeah, exactly. He was stripping away the
social titles to say, look, underneath all the
clothes, we are the same. You see it again with
John Milton defending the execution of the king
in 1649. So by the time Jefferson sits down in
Philadelphia, he's tapping into a very deep,
very old well of thought. OK, speaking of tapping
into walls, we have to talk about the Italian
connection. This blew my mind. I had never heard
of Filippo Masaya before reading this packet.
Most people haven't, but he's crucial. Masaya
was an Italian physician and merchant who actually
lived right next door to Jefferson in Virginia.
They were close friends. I think they even started
a wine company together. So they're just hanging
out, drinking wine, discussing philosophy. And
politics. Yeah. Massey was, I mean, this guy
was all about liberty. He wrote a series of articles
in 1774, which Jefferson translated. And in them
he wrote, all men are by nature equally free
and independent. That sounds almost identical
to the Declaration. is incredibly close. So close,
in fact, that there is a joint resolution from
the U .S. Congress from 1994 of all times that
explicitly acknowledges Mazzei's influence on
the phrase. So you have this Italian enlightened
thinker whispering in Jefferson's ear, helping
shape the American creed. But this brings us
to the first major hurdle, right? If Mose and
Jefferson are throwing around phrases like equally
free and independent, how does that survive a
room full of slave owners? It almost didn't.
And this is where the legal nuance is just fascinating.
Just before the Declaration, George Mason. Wrote
the Virginia Declaration of Rights. He used that
Mose style phrasing. All men are by nature equally
free and independent. And the Virginia Convention
rejected it. They had to. I mean, think about
it. If you sign a legal document in 1776 Virginia
saying everyone is equally free, you have instantly
outlawed slavery. It would have caused a total
economic collapse of the colony. It was factually
untrue in their society. So Mason's draft was
a little too honest. In a legal sense, yes. So
Jefferson, being the lawyer he was, had to massage
the language. He changed it from being equally
free, which describes your current status, to
created equal. Ah. So created equal refers to
the moment of birth. It's an abstract concept
about your soul or your origins, not a description
of your actual rights in the real world. Exactly.
It was a brilliant and, yeah, slightly cynical.
piece of legal maneuvering. By making it about
creation, he allowed the delegates to sign it
without having to free their slaves the next
morning. However, and this is where the story
gets incredible, that abstract language didn't
stay abstract for everyone. We have to talk about
Massachusetts and the story of that. This is
one of the most powerful examples of words having
consequences the authors didn't intend. So in
1780, John Adams writes the Massachusetts Constitution.
And he puts in the phrase, all men are born free
and equal. Which was pretty standard boilerplate
by then. Right. But there was an enslaved woman
named Bette, who later became Elizabeth Freeman,
living in the household of a Colonel John Ashley.
The story goes that she overheard the men discussing
this new constitution at the dinner table. She
heard that phrase. Born free and equal. She's
serving dinner, just listening to them talk about
liberty. And she takes it literally. She walks
to a lawyer's office, a man named Theodore Sedgwick,
and basically says, I heard that paper says we
are born equal. If that's true, then I am not
a slave. And she sued him. She sued. The case
was Brahm and Bedvi John Ashley. And the court
agreed with her. The jury ruled that under the
text of the Massachusetts Constitution, slavery
could not exist. She won her freedom. That is
just profound. In Virginia, the words were a
loophole to keep slavery. In Massachusetts, the
same words were the hammer that smashed it. It
just shows that once you write an idea down,
you lose control of it. You can't dictate how
people will interpret it. But we can't let Jefferson
off the hook here. We're talking about interpretation,
but let's look at the reality of 1776. We have
the Great Contradiction. Jefferson owned hundreds
of people while writing this. It is the stain
on the document that never washes out. Yeah.
And it wasn't ignored at the time. It's not just
us looking back with modern eyes. Right. The
sources mention a specific passage in Jefferson's
original draft that was actually critical of
slavery. Yes. Jefferson included this long paragraph
that was a scathing critique of the slave trade.
He called it a cruel war against human nature
itself. Now, he blamed the King of England for
it. which was a bit of a deflection, but he clearly
labeled the slave trade as a moral evil. And
Congress just took a red pen to it. They cut
the whole thing. The delegates from Georgia and
South Carolina refused to sign if it stayed in.
And the New England merchants, who were making
a lot of money shipping those slaves, quietly
agreed. They deleted 168 words to save the alliance.
So they chose independence over consistency.
They chose a united front over human rights.
And the critics at the time noticed immediately.
There was an English abolitionist named Thomas
Day in 1776, the same year He wrote a letter
that just savages the Americans. I have that
quote right here. He wrote, The pen and the whip.
It's such a devastating image. And that tension
leads right into the modern debate we see today
between historians. You mean the difference between
someone like Nicole Hannah -Jones and someone
like Howard Zinn? Well, Nicole Hannah -Jones
with this. 1619 project, she argues that the
founders simply did not consider black people
to be part of all men. That the hypocrisy wasn't
a mistake, it was a feature. That the racism
was foundational. And John Hope Franklin said
something similar, right? That Jefferson never
meant it for anyone other than white landowners.
Exactly. And then Zinn adds the layer of sexism.
He points out that men was literally interpreted
as males. Women were, in his words, beyond consideration
for political rights. Although I have heard the
counter argument that men in the 18th century
was just a synonym for humanity. Linguistically,
yes. If you look at the dictionaries at the time,
man often meant mankind. But legally. Politically,
it absolutely meant males. Women couldn't vote,
couldn't own property in their own name if they
were married. So even if the word was inclusive,
the world wasn't. So we have this document that
is arguably a lie from the moment the ink is
dry. But here is the twist that really hooked
me in this deep dive. We assume the bad guys
in history, the pro -slavery faction, would just
pretend the Declaration supported them. But they
didn't. No. And this is a critical turning point.
In the mid -19th century, as the Civil War gets
closer, the defenders of slavery stop pretending.
They realize that the Declaration is actually
their enemy. They can't reconcile their worldview
with all men are created equal. So they decide
to attack the text itself. They went right after
the bumper sticker. They tried to peel it right
off. You have Senator John Pettit of Indiana
in 1853. He stands up in the Senate and calls
the phrase a self -evident lie. A self -evident
lie. That is bold. He's not mincing words there.
Not at all. And it gets worse. Look at Alexander
Stevens. He was the vice president of the Confederacy.
In 1861, just weeks before the Civil War starts,
he gives the cornerstone speech. This speech
is terrifying to read. It is. He explicitly says
that the American founders were wrong. He says
their idea of equality was a sandy foundation.
And then he says the Confederacy is founded on
the opposite idea, the great truth that the Negro
is not equal to the white man. So the Civil War
wasn't just a fight over territory or states'
rights. It was a fight over whether that sentence
in the Declaration was true or false. Exactly.
The Confederacy was an attempt to explicitly
reject the Declaration of Independence. So how
do we get it back? If the South rejected it and
the North was still pretty racist by modern standards,
who saved the phrase? Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln
is the one who dusted it off and repurposed it.
Yeah. He had a very, very interesting interpretation.
He argued that the founders didn't mean men were
equal in capacity like. We aren't all equal in
height or strength or intelligence. Right. I'm
never going to be equal to Einstein in physics.
Right. Lincoln said they meant equal in rights,
life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. But
he went further than that. He called the Declaration
a standard maxim for free society. A standard
maxim? What does that even mean? He meant it
was an aspiration, a North Star. He said the
founders knew they couldn't achieve perfect equality
in 1776, but they placed it there as a goal,
something to be constantly approached, even if
never perfectly reached. He turned it from a
statement of fact into a mission statement. That
feels like the bridge to the modern understanding.
But there's another historian in our stack, Jack
Rakow, who throws a curveball at this whole individual
rights thing. Rakow is great because he forces
us to take off our 21st century glasses. He argues
that when Jefferson wrote, all men are created
equal, he wasn't thinking about me and you as
individuals. He was thinking about peoples. Collective
groups. Yes. He was saying the American people
are equal to the British people. It was a diplomatic
argument for sovereignty. We are just as good
as you, so you have no right to rule us. Rako
suggests that the idea of individual personal
rights, that I am equal to you, is something
that Americans projected onto the document later,
over the next few decades. So we basically remixed
the song. We took a diplomatic letter and turned
it into a personal creed. And that remix went
global. The legacy of that one phrase is astonishing.
I was shocked to see Vietnam in the breakdown.
1945. Ho Chi Minh declares independence from
France. And how does he start his speech? He
quotes the American Declaration of Independence.
All men are created equal. Using America's words
to declare independence, essentially from the
West. From colonial power. It shows how universal
the language had become. But then look at the
flip side. Look at Rhodesia, what is now Zimbabwe
in 1965. The white minority government there
issued their own Declaration of Independence,
right? They did. And they modeled it almost word
for word on the American one. But they made a
very specific edit. They kept the structure,
but they deliberately cut out all men are created
equal and consent of the governed. Wow. That's
the exception that proves the rule. They knew
they couldn't say those words and keep their
apartheid system. Exactly. They knew the words
were dangerous. If you say them, eventually you
have to answer to them. And that brings us to
the man who made America answer to them, Martin
Luther King Jr. The ultimate closer for this
timeline. In his I Have a Dream speech, King
doesn't burn the Declaration. He doesn't call
it a lie. He calls it a promissory note. A check.
A check that had come back marked insufficient
funds. It was a brilliant rhetorical move. He
wasn't asking for something new. He was demanding
that America simply pay what it owed. He used
the founders' own words to hold the country accountable.
It seems like that is the recurring pattern.
The words are written, often by hypocrites, but
then the words take on a life of their own and
demand to be made true. That's the paradox, isn't
it? Self -evident sounds like it means automatic.
But history shows us that these truths are anything
but automatic. They have to be fought for. argued
over and constantly redefined. So if we look
at the whole arc from a philosophical edit by
Franklin to a legal loophole by Jefferson to
a rejected lie by the Confederacy and finally
a demand for payment by MLK, what are we left
with? We're left with a living document. The
definition of all men. who counts as a person,
has expanded. The definition of equal, what rights
you get, has expanded. And it hasn't expanded
by accident. It expanded because people like
Mumbet and Martin Luther King took the words
more seriously than the people who wrote them.
That's a powerful way to put it. They believed
the text more than the authors did. They really
did. Here's a final thought I want to leave everyone
with. We've spent this time talking about how
the definition of all men has grown over 250
years to finally include black people, women
and non -landowners. But history doesn't stop
in 2025. No, it certainly doesn't. So you have
to wonder, if we look back at 1776 and see these
obvious blind spots, what are the blind spots
today? Who are we currently excluding from all
men? And when people look back at us in the year
2076, will they think our definition of equality
was just as limited as Jefferson's? That is the
uncomfortable question, isn't it? The circle
of re is always trying to grow, but it's always
a struggle. Something to think about. Thanks
for diving deep with us. Always a pleasure. We'll
see you on the next one.