America’s universal document: a curious history

Paul Lay: Welcome to The EI Podcast. I’m Paul Lay, senior editor at Engelsberg Ideas. Today I’m delighted to be joined by Michael Auslin, a distinguished fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, who has written widely on US foreign policy, particularly on Asia, geopolitics, and the intellectual history of the United States. In light of America’s 250th anniversary, which we’ve just marked, his latest book, National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America, engages with current debates about US identity, democracy, and America’s role in the world. Michael, welcome to the podcast.

Michael Auslin: Thank you for having me, Paul.

Paul Lay: The Declaration must be just about one of the most studied documents in history. Apart from the obvious, that it’s the 250th anniversary, what made you write this book now? Why did you feel the Declaration, rather than, say, the Constitution or the Civil War, deserves this renewed attention? Why does this document deserve its own biography?

Michael Auslin: The truth is, I wanted to read this book and no one had yet written it. Shockingly to me, despite dozens of books on the Declaration, on the founding moment, the Revolutionary War, and the like, no one had written a complete history of America’s founding document, not just at its birth or moment of dissemination to the world and Americans, but throughout our entire history. That’s where I started: if no one’s written this, I suppose I’d better write it myself.

But I also stumbled across the idea about two years ago when I realised we were coming up on the 250th anniversary. I remember the 200th and the excitement surrounding it; even though it was a very difficult time coming out of Vietnam and Watergate, there was still enormous excitement. This time around, the lead-up to the 250th seemed so much more conflicted. We’re a very divided society now, though admittedly we were divided in 1976. We had a deeply unpopular president who’d just left office two years earlier. Now we have a polarising president: people either love him or hate him.

There seemed to be parallels to 1976, and yet I wasn’t seeing the historical treatment of our history or the Declaration that I remembered from the last go-around. So I said, well, if I’m going to do this, I’d better do it quickly.

What it turned into was a full exploration of the American story through the Declaration’s history. Things you mentioned, the Constitution, the Civil War, immigration, civil rights, World War One, World War Two, the Cold War, it’s all in there, but through the lens of the Declaration. I honestly didn’t realise the Declaration was so central to all these issues and debates. It became a journey of discovery for me, as much as telling the story simply because I wanted to know it.

Paul Lay: It was a complete revelation to me, so much of it. I thought I was reasonably familiar with the history of the United States, but a lot of this was completely new to me. And it’s rather a picaresque tale in parts. I get the sense that it’s very personal for you as well.

Michael Auslin: It was. You get to a certain stage in life and you start looking back, trying to understand your own life within the context of your society and your nation. Like everyone else, we love to talk about ourselves and what we’ve been through. But I certainly felt that compared to when I was a kid, our history seems much more contested today in ways I didn’t agree with. It seemed people were contesting it for contestation’s sake rather than for legitimate historical reasons.

Now, that’s not to say you don’t keep looking back at your history and reassessing it. But there was an attitude of: the more we can tear down, knock off a pedestal, make controversial, the better. I think that does a disservice to the historical profession because that’s not always what the history itself indicates.

One of the great themes of this book was that I believe the Declaration is our great statement of unity. That doesn’t mean we haven’t been divided or aren’t divided now, or that there weren’t terrible things that needed remedying – of course there were. But the more I looked at how the Declaration played out in our history, the more I came to appreciate what I saw as its message of unity. A message I didn’t think I was superimposing on the past, but rather one that Americans at different points in time openly adopted, reflected on, and referred to, wanting to be part of this great nation.

Today we often think of ourselves as warring tribes with no agreement among us, everyone wanting their own special privileges and carved-off enclaves. But when you go back through the most contested issues of our history (slavery, women’s rights, immigration), what I found was that all these groups were attempting to become fully American, not to separate themselves from the broader society or the great stream of American history, but to say we have a right to be part of it and participate in it. And what they always referred to repeatedly was the Declaration.

I learned from them that division was not the normal state of the American polity, no matter how divided we were. What was always in the foreground was this hope to make, as it’s put in the Constitution, a more perfect union, a more inclusive union, a union of opportunity. While those debates and battles were fought on constitutional and legal grounds, the spirit behind them all was the Declaration.

That became a fascinating and inspiring part of the American story I wanted to tell. I’m unabashed about it: I love America. Even though I fully recognise we’re not perfect. To say something is great doesn’t mean it’s perfect. It doesn’t mean it hasn’t had traumatic problems that needed solving and doesn’t have problems today. But if you hate your country, hate your neighbours, hate your fellow citizens, where do you go? What’s the answer?

Instead, what I found was that at all these points in our history, people were referring to the Declaration as the great hope. Frederick Douglass ended his famous 1852 address by saying: but I don’t give up hope because of the Declaration. That was incredibly inspiring to me. I wrote this book so that perhaps the kids of my generation – those of us who were young in 1976 – could love the Declaration as well, learn from it, and try to make a better, more perfect union.

Paul Lay: I wonder if we can go back to the beginning of all this. Let’s look at the atmosphere in which the Declaration came about. Go back a little further to the Seven Years War and how it led to the Revolutionary War. What was the flavour of that time?

Michael Auslin: The vast majority of British Americans in our 13 colonies didn’t want to leave the Empire. They were proud of being British. They were proud of being Englishmen with ancient rights that they exercised on this continent through their own representative assemblies – what they called their constitutions. The salutary neglect, as Edmund Burke put it, of the Crown and Parliament toward the colonies allowed them to be fully British and also fully American.

That began to change, ironically, with the spectacular victory in the Seven Years War – which, by the way, was started by a young Virginian named George Washington. Acting as part of the Virginia militia under British orders, he ambushed a French and Indian patrol and then lost the ensuing battle. But the war itself was a spectacular victory that secured the North American Continent for the Crown and Empire. It should have been the height of America’s participation in imperial affairs.

But the cost was immense. They now had to maintain and expand garrisons to protect those expanded borders to the West. We often think about this in terms of the Atlantic, but what really concerned the colonists was the West – an untamed, unsettled continent stretching, they didn’t even know how far. It turned out to stretch about 3,000 miles. They had no idea. But they knew they had to garrison against the Indians and French, who still controlled parts of the continent.

So the Crown decided the colonists should pay a bit, which wasn’t unreasonable. But the way it was done was tone-deaf, insulting, and ultimately became unreasonable. In a very short period – a decade – an irrevocable rift had opened between London and its colonies.

We have to remember the colonies were completely separate from each other. They weren’t sovereign in their own view, but they were completely independent of each other, not of the Crown, but of each other. Someone in Massachusetts was as different from someone in Virginia as they were from a Frenchman or Spaniard. They’d almost never interacted beyond some trade and information exchange.

But it was the increasingly heavy, unnecessarily heavy hand of London that began to push them together. We’re familiar with ‘taxation without representation’ as the rallying cry. But behind the scenes – and often in front – there were numerous attempts to repair this relationship. The colonists, fully aware of their weakness, smallness, and distance from the Metropole, were trying to figure out ways to respect their own sense of rights and liberties while contributing to Parliament and Crown. They wanted to acknowledge what happened in the Seven Years War was legitimate. They weren’t ignoring it. But it didn’t work out that way.

A combination of pride and arrogance on both sides of the Atlantic ultimately led to what became a period starting in 1774 with what the colonists called the Intolerable Acts – imposed on Massachusetts after the Boston Tea Party. These really brought the colonies together. You could have a Virginian, a Cavalier like Patrick Henry, state: ‘I am not a Virginian. I am an American.’ And then, most famously: ‘Give me liberty or give me death’, which was a bit histrionic. And yet they had been pushed into this corner.

By the time of Lexington and Concord, even as they hoped for reconciliation, there was a dawning dread that they might have to go their own way – an inconceivable step. No one had done it. How could you separate from the most powerful empire of the time? Could you survive? Would you be at the mercy of other great powers like France and Spain? And yet, step by irrevocable step, they were pushed to it.

By July 2nd, 1776, the effective political opposition realised independence was now inevitable. The real issue was no longer whether you’d be independent, but how you’d be independent.

Paul Lay: The subtitle of your book is very interesting. It says the Declaration ‘made’ America, not that it ‘founded’ America. That’s a bold and stronger claim. I wonder if that distinction is an important one and what you mean by ‘made’ rather than ‘founded.’

Michael Auslin: I firmly believe the Declaration made America. Without it, nothing else could have followed. There’s a strong academic argument that the Constitution of 1787 refounded the United States – essentially a second founding. From an intellectual angle, that’s not incorrect. But when you look at the Constitution, the debates over it, and the inclusion ultimately of the Bill of Rights, all of that derives from the Declaration – from what was stated implicitly and explicitly in it.

Back then, nobody paid attention to what we pay attention to today. The great lines, what Walter Isaacson called 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 inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ – nobody paid attention to that. They ignored it. They ignored the ending where the signers pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour.

What they focused on were the 27 grievances, the charges. Many of those who drew it up were lawyers. Thomas Jefferson was a lawyer. They felt you had to lay out the case for why you’d taken this step. And the Declaration did not claim independence. Independence had already been declared two days before. It was an administrative announcement: this is what we’ve done, not through this document, but through our vote. This is not the instrument of our independence; it’s the instrument that explains our independence.

So it was the grievances that mattered to them. The Declaration was explicitly written not to be a governing document. It didn’t say what type of government should be set up. That was left to the Committee for the Articles of Confederation, and those proved too weak. 13 years later – actually 11 years later – you had the Constitutional Convention.

But at the convention, the spirit of what the Declaration showed – how an illegitimate government should not act (the Crown and Parliament) – indicated by implication how a legitimate government should act. That’s what the Constitutional Convention tried to grapple with: How do you form that legitimate government?

Several prominent voices from 1776 warned in 1787 that they were heading toward the very type of system they’d rebelled against – a centralised government taking away liberties. Some of the strongest voices from 1776, like Patrick Henry, refused to sign the Constitution. They became Anti-Federalists, refusing to approve it. Even the inclusion of the Bill of Rights – directly coming from the spirit of the Declaration’s grievances – did not sway the Anti-Federalists.

Without the Declaration, we wouldn’t have had the Constitution. We wouldn’t have had the Bill of Rights. We wouldn’t have had the idea of amendments.

But there’s something deeper. About 40 to 50 years after the Declaration was signed, it becomes an object of inspiration for those trying to reform a rapidly growing, slowly industrialising, expanding country. New questions emerged: What did Jefferson mean by ‘all men are created equal’? The Declaration didn’t talk about slaves or blacks. It wasn’t talking about women. It wasn’t talking about American Indians. Did it include immigrants? What about the new types of immigrants beginning to arrive in the 1830s and 1840s – those driven by the European revolutions of 1848? Suddenly you had Central Europeans, Hungarians, Poles – people who’d never been part of this country before.

New questions had to be tackled by a country that, 50 years later, was changing dramatically. The American story is one of constant change within a defined framework. That defined framework was the Declaration and then the Constitution.

At each stage – whether it was utopian socialists in 1826, women suffragettes in 1848, or abolitionists in 1852 – they began asking: What did the Declaration mean? How do we live up to its promises without wholesale overthrow of the system, but rather through expansion of it? That’s what truly made America. Those debates continued through the 19th and 20th centuries and quite frankly, to the 21st century.

Paul Lay: When you talk about the grievances, it reminds me of how we look at Magna Carta, which is rooted in specific grievances now long forgotten, but which has this patina of universal principles. There’s something similar about how the Declaration evolved.

Michael Auslin: The Declaration of Independence in 1918 was called by Winston Churchill one of the three great title deeds of the English-speaking world, along with Magna Carta and the 1689 English Bill of Rights. So there is a direct connection. Churchill drew this out: what had been a treasonous document in 1776 by 1918 was one of the fundamental building blocks of the English-speaking liberal world – one of the three great title deeds.

Paul Lay: For those less well versed in the American Constitution and its foundational documents, could you unpack the difference between the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the Declaration?

Michael Auslin: The Declaration was the statement justifying the vote for independence in 1776. It had no governing mechanism. It had a forward-looking element stating that the 13 now sovereign, free, and independent states – formerly colonies – could do all the things other states could do: conclude treaties, conduct trade, and govern themselves. But how they would do it as a united nation was left open in the Declaration. There was no indication of the structure or type of government to be set up. That was the charge of the committee to come up with Articles of Confederation, a loose alliance among these 13 free and independent states.

Those Articles came into force in the early 1780s, by 1781. But they were far too weak for forming a nation. There was great fear these United States would become disunited – breaking up into blocks: northeast versus south versus mid-Atlantic. You couldn’t create a nation-state that could deal with the exigencies of a world of imperialist powers: Great Britain, France, Spain, and others.

So the Constitution was written essentially to refound the United States as a much more centralised federal unit, with great tension between the federal government and the sovereign states. The states preceded the federal government. The Constitution sets up the framework for that government. Its articles focus on the structures of government: the executive branch (the president and associated departments), the legislative branch (Congress), and the judicial branch.

Importantly, Article One deals with Congress because it was seen as the most important branch – closest to the people, reflecting the will of the state. The president wasn’t supposed to initiate legislation; he was to execute what came out of Congress. The Senate, initially and until amended, had senators chosen by state legislatures – reflecting state interests. The House of Representatives reflected the interests of the people at large.

The judiciary was just one court, the Supreme Court. That’s the only constitutional level of the judiciary. Everything else we see today, district courts, circuit courts, developed over time. Similarly, the extraordinarily powerful presidency we see today, with powerful and often independent executive departments, wasn’t in the original Constitution.

All of that evolved because of the ability within the Constitution to amend and expand the powers of the presidency. And the first expansion of government power was the Bill of Rights – the first 10 amendments – designed to protect individual liberties. The concern of the Anti-Federalists was that individual liberties weren’t protected enough. You were centralising government, even with balances of power and three branches. There was still fear individual liberty would be taken away.

The first 10 amendments are the famous ones: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, right to bear arms, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, freedom of the press, right to trial by jury, no religious test for office. All designed to protect individual liberties.

Seventeen more amendments came after that. While still preserving rights – abolishing slavery, ensuring equal voting rights, equal rights of women, equal rights of minorities and blacks – the expansion of amendments has generally expanded government power to enforce those rights. Even if it didn’t say the government can do more, to ensure these rights are protected, the government and particularly the executive has been given extraordinary powers of enforcement.

That’s been an incredible debate and balancing act: if you’re trying to expand individual rights but give more power to the government to do so, how does that potentially threaten individual rights? We see that in what’s now an over-half-century debate over civil rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was expanded in 1965, 1968 with the Fair Housing Act and Voting Rights Act. Even acts that didn’t rise to the level of individual legislation, like President Nixon’s final desegregation order of schools in the South in 1972-73, all had the potential to impinge on other rights and liberties, like free association. If you say a group can’t choose its own members because that’s discriminatory, you’re potentially imposing on the rights of others.

This has been our eternal balancing act, all framed in the spirit of liberty that comes from the Declaration. The Quartering Act was such a bone of contention because your house should be your castle: no one should come in without your consent, and in that house you should be free from unreasonable search and seizure, which is in the amendments. But all of that comes from what was originally expressed in the Declaration. You can fast forward to the late twentieth century and look at these debates, but understand that the spirit goes back to 1776.

Paul Lay: So you have the physical expansion of the United States to its geographical extent, and the United States is one of the greatest products of the Enlightenment. You have not only geographical expanse but an expanse of expansive ideas not limited by time or space. The Declaration appeals to the opinions of mankind, which is a universalist claim. I presume it was one of the first documents aimed at winning a battle for international legitimacy, which has carried on ever since.

Michael Auslin: In Vietnam, we had to win the hearts and minds. John Adams later in life wrote that at the time of independence, only one third of Americans were in favour. One third opposed, they were loyalists. And in good American fashion, one third had no opinion; whichever way it went was okay with them. We forget we were born out of division. This idea that in July 1776 every American was on board with independence is completely wrong. This was our first civil war, a tragic one. Tens of thousands of loyalists left, lost their properties, lost their livelihoods. They’d been in America for generations. They were as American as anyone else. They were either driven out or chose to leave.

The Declaration was partly designed to give hope and comfort to the patriots: you’re fighting for a reason, your homes are being burned for a reason. This is the reason. It was also designed to sway the undecided, maybe we could get them on our side. Come to the right choice: support independence and freedom. Perhaps peel off some of the loyalists.

The document was designed to win hearts and minds, to give firmer base for a cause that in the summer of 1776 looked very grim. We were losing badly. If not for repeated missteps by British generals – particularly William Howe and others like John Burgoyne – this war probably would have been over quickly. There were multiple opportunities, particularly in New York in fall 1776, where the rebellion could have been crushed. There were multiple stages where a decisive blow could have been delivered.

So the Declaration was this rallying cry through the war, to state that even though ‘these are the times that try men’s souls’, as Thomas Paine put it in the winter of 1777, there was a much grander goal for all of it.

Secondarily, this was designed to win hearts and minds abroad: ‘A decent respect for the opinions of mankind.’ It was translated right away into German because of German Americans, making its way to Germany. It was translated into French, helping sway the French to support us more openly. They’d been supporting us surreptitiously, but Americans had ‘to fish or cut bait’. You can’t ask for support if all you want is to become part of Britain again. So to get the support needed to win the war, you had to state the end goal: independence.

Then in the subsequent decades, the success of the revolution and the Declaration makes it a rallying point for those beginning their own efforts at remaking the world – ‘starting the world anew’, as Thomas Paine put it. First with the French in 1789, though their revolution spins off the rails – most Americans look upon it with horror, not what our revolution intended. But significantly, through the Latin American revolutions: Mexico, Colombia, Peru, all those states in the 1810s and 1820s. They’re reprinting, debating our Declaration alongside the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

Very few of these revolutions rise to the level of our Declaration. Their own declarations rarely have the philosophy Thomas Jefferson put in. That’s the irony: what was ignored in 1776 by the 1820s becomes the defining element of the American Declaration. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’, consent of the governed, ideas of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, pledging to each other lives, fortunes, and sacred honour.

By the way, I believe that last part was written as a unifying element. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’ – not just Congress or Thomas Jefferson, but we the American people through our representatives – crucially, pledging to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour. The signers did. They didn’t pledge it to the new nation or to their sovereign and free and independent states. They pledged to each other, even though these were very different men: Puritans versus Cavaliers versus backwoods farmers versus rich merchants. But they pledged to each other. It was a unity claim.

When the Declaration is translated abroad and adopted or influenced so many revolutionary movements, often that part is missing. It’s still one group against another. It doesn’t often rise to the level of the Enlightenment philosophy. America is probably the greatest example of Enlightenment in action, realised in the real world. Henry Steele Commager, a very famous mid-20th century historian, wrote an entire book stating that the Enlightenment was born in Europe but realised in America.

Fascinatingly, it is realised as the country expands. You mentioned geographical expansion. The Declaration is an enduring, ever-present element of that expansion across the continent. George Washington was worried that communities west of the Appalachian Mountains, which separates the East Coast from the Midwest and precedes the Rockies, would have good reason to separate. They’d be drawn to the Mississippi Valley where their trade would go, making them likely to join France or Spain, whoever controlled the area.

Part of the constitutional settlement was the idea you could have new states created. This is particularly expressed in the Northwest Ordinance, before the Constitution, that you can create new states out of territories if they meet certain conditions. The political institutional structure expands as the nation expands. Uniquely, those new states, if they met qualifications and Congress agreed to make them states, would be equal to all other states, equal to Massachusetts, equal to Virginia. It didn’t matter Virginia was settled in 1607 and Illinois would become a state 200 years later in 1818. Illinois would be equal to Virginia. That’s what really kept the Union together.

At each stage, these communities immediately adopted the traditions and history of the states from which many settlers came. But they read and celebrated the Declaration of Independence in tiny communities on the Great Plains or Mississippi River, stating: we have not just the same rights but the same responsibilities as our older brethren back East. The Declaration follows the frontier.

Paul Lay: As the American people go on this journey over the last 250 years, what becomes the American people? The document itself goes on an extraordinary physical journey. Could you give us a brief history of the actual document’s journey?

Michael Auslin: I’ll try to be brief, though that’s not always my strength.

First, what we think of as the Declaration is not the famous one in the National Archives today. We’re recording this on August 3rd, 2026. Yesterday, August 2nd, marked the 250th anniversary of the signing. It wasn’t signed on July 4th. It didn’t exist on July 4th. What existed on July 4th evening were what we call broadsides.

One of them, on my left shoulder, was printed on July 4th, about 200 copies, sent throughout the colonies. It’s called the Dunlap broadside from printer John Dunlap. Only 26 remain today. What you see behind me in the middle is the engrossed Declaration: the handwritten, inscribed version. It wasn’t even conceived until mid-July and wasn’t ready for signing until August 2nd. It was a process that didn’t happen at once. It took weeks and months, and in some cases signers claimed it took years to put their signatures on it.

When that beautifully written document was signed, it was simply rolled up. It was a state paper of Congress. Nobody knew it existed. Then in 1789, when the Constitution came into effect and the federal government formed, it was transferred to the State Department.

From the moment of signing, that beautiful parchment was at risk. As Congress fled the British between 1776 and 1801 – 25 years – the Declaration had 18 different homes. It wasn’t moved carefully. No special protection, cases, or climate control. It was simply thrown into sacks or chests, put on carts, rumbled around on terrible roads with humidity, rain, and cold. It was terribly beaten up. In fact, it shouldn’t exist today. It’s a miracle it does.

If you go see it, and I hope everyone who listens has the opportunity this year, you’ll see it’s in terrible condition. You can barely read it. Partly this was how it was treated in those first 25 years, partly because it became so popular in the 19th century.

After 1814, it was saved by the skin of its teeth from being incinerated when the British burned the White House complex, including the Department of State. It was roughly thrown into a linen sack, carted 40 miles away, and thrown into a cellar. It remained unguarded in the summer heat for weeks until we were certain the British had left Washington, DC.

When this story became known, Americans were fascinated the Declaration survived. They asked: why did it survive when no one even knew this parchment existed? It was kept as a state paper. Then people wanted to see it, so it was unrolled and rolled, unrolled and rolled so many times that in 1841, Daniel Webster, the famous Secretary of State and more famous as senator, sent it to what was becoming our National Museum, our equivalent of the British Museum, so people could finally see it. Then it hung in sunlight and faded more.

It wasn’t until 150 years after it was signed, in 1951, that the Declaration received its first truly scientific treatment: a scientific case with climate controls, special environment with helium, humidity sensors, all the protections we have today. It took 150 years for this document to be properly protected and cared for.

Paul Lay: Those who have seen it know there’s a sacred element to it. It feels like, and I’m sure it is, particularly for Americans, a kind of religious experience. Whatever the truth of this Enlightenment document, its words had wings. I think you’ve convinced us of that, Michael. And I think you’ve also convinced us that the Declaration of Independence really did make America. It’s a remarkable story.

I recommend Michael’s book, National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America. It’s out now and a terrific read. I think we’ve given you a flavour of Michael’s thinking today. Thank you very much, Michael Auslin. It’s been a great pleasure to listen to your thoughts.

Michael Auslin: It’s been my pleasure, Paul. Thanks so much for having me.