Here in Lake Chapala, Mexico, there is a group of retired expats in The Lake Chapala Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. This is from one of our members who presented a well-researched presentation talking about social justice and the 4th of July. It is worth watching.
Was the Declaration of Independence Based on a LIE?
For those who do not want to watch the video, here is the text of the talk:
By Roy Haynes, Lake Chapala Unitarian Universalist Fellowship,Jalisco, Mexico.
Introduction
“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.”
We are not here disrespect or offend anyone with our topic,merely just to look at the founding of the United States of America through a different lens; a difficult lens. For That’s what we as UUs do… ask the hard questions, and form our opinions…remembering that we ALL come from lots of different areas and backgrounds...And that we are not always going to agree on everything… and that’s OK.
Opening words
Our opening words are from President Theodore Roosevelt referring to the United States:
“This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for ALL of us to live in.
All Men are Created Equal
“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.”
So,what do we know about our founding fathers? Well, while the majority of the members of the 2nd Continental Congress were native-born Americans,8 of the 56 men for independence from Britain were born in the United Kingdom. There was a 44-year age difference,with the oldest being 70 and the youngest being only 26. They were a diverse group of white men, as were their religious affiliations. Among the 56 signers, there were Baptists, Quakers, Congregationalists,Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, and yes… even Unitarians and Universalists.
These words, written by Thomas Jefferson, are the summation of our American creed. We Unitarian Universalists sometimes note that, toward the end of his life,Jefferson said that he believed that Unitarianism would soon become the general religion of the United States. He was a bit overly optimistic! He wrote that because there was not a Unitarian Church close enough for him to join or he would have been a Unitarian himself. And so, although he never officially signed a membership book, Thomas Jefferson declared himself to be a Unitarian.
But let us also be cautious in our pride. Jefferson wrote brilliantly aboutliberty, and yet was a slaveholder all his life. Of the 607 men, women, and children Jefferson owned throughout his life, only 10 were freed on or before their death, at which time approximately 130 individuals had to be sold, along with Monticello, to pay for his debts. Jefferson’s notion of liberty, while visionary for his time, did not extend to all people. Yet many enslaved individuals knew of his stirring words and were inspired by the Declaration’s proclamation of equality. He understood that slavery was the one issue that could potentially tear the nation apart.But he could not bring himself to come to terms with his own participation in the great injustice of slavery.
When Jefferson included a 168-word passage attacking slavery in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, it initiated the most intense debate among the delegates gathered in Philadelphia in the spring and summer of 1776.Jefferson’s passage on slavery was the most important section removed from the final document. It was replaced with a more ambiguous passage about King George’s incitement of “domestic insurrections among us”. This left-out section of the original Declaration of Independence is one of the many, many aspects that has been omitted from American History taught in our schools.
Jefferson’s original passage on slavery reads as follows:
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred right of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Britain.”
“Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, bymurdering the people on whom he has obtrude them: thus, paying off former crimes committed again the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
Decades later, Jefferson blamed the removal of the passage on delegates from South Carolina and Georgia and Northern delegates who represented merchants who were,at the time, actively involved in Trans-Atlantic slave trade. When news of the Declaration of Independence reached New York City, it started a riot. By July 9, 1776, a copy of the declaration of Independence had reached New York City. With hundreds of British naval ships occupying New York Harbor, revolutionary spirit and military tensions were running high. George Washington, commander of the Continental forces in New York, read the documents aloud in front of City Hall. A raucous crowd cheered the inspiring words, and later that day tore down a nearby statue of George III. The statue was subsequently melted down and shaped into more than 42,000 musket balls for the fledgling American army.
In“Notes on the State of Virginia” Jefferson wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever…” He believed that to keep slaves in bondage, with part of America in favor of abolition and part of America in favor of perpetuating slavery, would result in civil war. Jefferson’s prediction was correct. In 1861, the contest over slavery sparked a bloody civil war and the creation of two nations- the Union and the Confederacy- in the place of one.
Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.
There s still much to do to fulfill all of the promises of our founding document.For over 240 years, the ideas of Thomas Jefferson expressed in the Declaration of Independence have ignited imaginations, inspired song and verse, aroused political campaigns, social movements, and revolutions around the world:
“Let Freedom ring”
“God bless America”
“We shall Overcome”
“We Hold These Truths…”
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.
Let’s consider the historic words of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. In his 1963, “I Have a Dream” speech, King observed, “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Reverend King knew something that recent generations of students rarely are taught anymore. First, we do not celebrate the Fourth of July because it is the day we declared independence from Great Britain. King understood that the Declaration neither justified nor ignored slavery. It condemned it, providing future Americans, as King attests, the moral compass by which to bring our practices better in line with the principle of human equality, which stands as the moral foundation of the Declaration and thus as the standard by which Americans have judged themselves ever since.
In his June 1857 speech on the Dred Scott decision, President Abraham Lincoln explained the conflict between the Declaration’s foundational principle of human equality and the practice of slavery at the time. Instead, the Declaration “meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.
He adds, “The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use.”
“Here”, says Lincoln, “is the deepest reason we celebrate July Fourth.”
—and Reverend King would make history with its “future use” of the Declaration's promise more than a century later.
A month prior to Lincoln’s address, famed abolitionist and former slave, Frederick Douglass, delivered a magisterial speech on the Dred Scott decision.Douglas says “the Constitution comes down to us from a slave-holding period and a slave-holding people. We are bound to suppose that blacks are debarred forever from all participation in the benefit of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”
Instead, Douglass demonstrates that a“plain reading” of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution shows them to include blacks in “in their beneficent range.” Like Lincoln at the time and Reverend King afterward, Douglass knew that the Declaration’s principles included rather than excluded the black race. The force of Douglass’s appeal consisted in exhorting white America to live up to its founding principles.
But today, many in our universities teach the historically and morally ill-founded view that equality can come only through rejecting our racist founding principles. Some think it will take more than that.
For example, Critical Race Theory CRT originated in the mid- 1970s as an academic movement started by legal scholars who sought to critically examine the law as it intersects with issues of race and to challenge mainstream approaches to racial justice. Here are the basic tenets of the theory broken down.
1. Race is a social construct.
2. Racism in the United States is an ordinary experience of most people of color.
3. Legal advances (or setbacks) for people of color tend to serve the interest of dominant white groups.
4. Minorities deal with being stereotyped often.
5. No individual can be identified only in one way. A Black person can also identify as a woman, a lesbian, a feminist, a Christian, and so on.
6. People of color are uniquely qualified to speak on behalf of other members of their group (or groups) regarding the effects of racism.
First, that white supremacy (societal racism) exists and maintains power through the law.
Second, transforming the relationship between law and racial power, and also achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination more broadly, are possible.
Instead of saying “Critical Race Theory”say “the truth about American History.” Then explain why you don’t want that taught to anyone ever.
Critics of critical race theory argue that it relies on social constructionism, elevates storytelling over evidence and reason, rejects the concepts of truth and merits, and opposes liberalism.
We hold these Truths PT2
Lincoln foresaw the disastrous effects thatwould follow the failure to teach our founding principles and racial injustices to succeeding generations. Who can doubt Lincoln’s premise that a self-governing people can maintain its liberties only so long as its citizens practice reverence for the principles that justify self-government? And who can doubt Lincoln, Douglass, and King’s demonstrations that the foundation of these principles is the Declaration’s argument for human equality?
In doing so, we would come again to understand why the global impact of the Declaration of Independence extends far beyond America’s borders. The ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence have been echoed in hundreds of declarations around the globe.
More than half the countries represented at the United Nations have a founding document that can be called a Declaration of Independence - from Venezuela, Armenia, and the Republic of Ireland to Yugoslavia,Korea, and even Haiti, the only nation borne out of a slave revolt.
We would come again to understand why Lincoln declared the nation built on the Declaration’s principles to be “the last, best hope of earth.” We could come again to understand why the future of our democracy depends on properly celebrating the Fourth of July with all the truths and falsehoods.
Today,so many of our rights, liberties, and freedoms that are supposed to come with our citizenship have been taken away, yet we continue to celebrate.
Amanda Frost writes in the spring 2021 edition of UU World:
“Is the United States of America the society that the Declaration of Independence proclaimed it to be, treating all as created equal and giving the people the power to choose their government? Does it welcome immigrants, as the Statue of Liberty’s upraised arm suggests?
Did it shed its reliance on race and caste with the adoption of the 14thAmendment’s guarantee of citizenship and equality for all born or naturalized in the United States, as the framers of that amendment intended?”
Abraham Lincoln understood that we had not lived up to the promise of the Declaration –we had not lived up to the statement that “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…” And Lincoln rightly opposed slavery – but even he struggled with the idea of full equality for African Americans.
After the Civil War many black and white Americans spoke eloquently for the rights of all men, regardless of color.
One of those rights was voting. In some states, even white men could not vote if they were not property owners. Many of our Founding Fathers wanted to restrict the vote to well-educated white men – they feared that “mob rule” would result if just anybody could vote.
But it took decades to give women the right to vote. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Tubman did not live long enough to vote. And it wasn’t until 100 years after the Civil War that we passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, finally getting rid of poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses that gave the illusion of being racially neutral, but had been deliberately designed, and had the result of keeping people of color from voting.
And the struggle is never over, because in recent years the Supreme Court has suspended parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and is once again allowing states to pass laws that give the illusion of racial neutrality. Voter I.D.laws are really designed to make it harder for black people, brown people, poor people, and students to vote.
We see daily the attacks on voting rights laws since the 2020 election… mainly because of another “BIG LIE”. I think some of us thought the struggle was over….
We did elect Barack Obama, a black man, twice…But we saw how quickly that “Hope”can be taken away in 2016.
We owe a great debt to our founding fathers. They were great people… with many flaws… as most of us have. They were NOT Gods; they were not without contradictions. They believed in the importance of religion as a force for social stability, but most had unconventional faiths.They believed in virtue, but many lived very complex private lives. They supported religious liberty and toleration and yet allowed states like Massachusetts to establish Unitarian and Universalists churches in towns, which were not the popular religions. They believed in liberty, but many kept slaves.
These complex people laid the groundwork for much good. And through all of the ups and downs, they helped to make America and its democracy great.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all women and men are created equal;that the laws of nature and nature’s God have given all of us inalienable rights. We, the people as citizens, even if we live in Mexico, are the rulers of the United States of America.
We all have the wisdom to live up to the promise of our founders, to maintain the blessings of liberty, justice, peace, equality under the law and religious freedom…and never take for granted the ability to keep America great and whole.
“The Greatest Lie Ever Told”
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 the seare Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”
I’ve been mulling over what freedom and equality truly are. What do they look like?And why do so many people still celebrate such a fraudulent day like July 4th?
“1776”and “All men are created EQUAL” …is this the official start of the BIGLie? Or is the landing of the firs tslave ships in the Virginia colony in 1619, the actual start of this big falsehood of equality that America would be founded upon.
We all know that in the United States of America of 1776, all men didn’t have the right to their own life, let alone liberty, or the ability to pursue happiness.In addition to African American being enslaved, many (as in the case of native American men) had their land stolen from them, women had no rights. For that matter, poor white men did not have the same rights as rich white men no matter how much the writers of history try to make us think they did.
The origin sin of slavery violated the core American Revolutionary ideal of liberty, equality, and freedom. One man’s liberty meant another man’s misery, I guess.
How could it be that in one breath, the nation’s founding fathers believe all men were created equal with the right to pursue liberty, and still believed it was alright to hold, sell, rape, breed, and work enslaved men and women of African descent against their wills in the next breath. The contradiction of liberty and slavery go hand with this experiment we call America. Sometimes I think America suffers from cognitive dissonance.
Celebrating America’s birthday and the illusion of freedom and equality that the founding fathers had for America is nostalgic for many people. It’s a tradition that has been passed down from generation to generation.
Growing up in Western Tennessee, my mother and my family celebrated it because everybody else did. It was seen as another occasion for the family to get together and share food. I guess celebrating the 4th of July symbolizes celebrating family more than anything else; certainly nothing about gaining independence from Great Britain... Frankly, my family could care less about that. We liked eating, barbecuing on the grill,consuming large quantities of alcohol, the gathering of family, and for some of us — we enjoyed a paid day off from work. And let’s not talk about the manufactured methods of “how” we’re supposed to celebrate the fourth of July.Tradition has us go buy a lot of food; red, white, and blue decorations;fireworks; and alcoholic beverages. Celebrating must be done a certain way or we’re disrespecting America. But...How can I disrespect a nation that has not seen me as fully equal since the day I was born, leaving me with no instruction manual on how to break the curse?
Hatred of “the other” is deeply embedded in U.S. history from its roots and the flowery language written in the Declaration of Independence cannot hide it.
When I was in the educational system growing up, American history taught us about the fantasy of America… not about the ugly truth and certainly not about ALL people’s stories.
For example, I didn’t learn the importance of the year1619 until 2019 when the “The 1619 Project” was published by the New York Times Magazine.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a journalist for the New York Times Magazine, aim for “The 1619 Project” was to reframe America’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States national narrative.
The project dedicated an entire issue of the magazine toa re-examination of the legacy of slavery in the United States on the 400thanniversary of the 1619 arrival of the first slaves to the Virginia colony,challenging the notion that the history of the United States began in 1776 or with the arrival of the Pilgrims. The1619 Project argued that the landing of the Black slaves marked “the country’s very origin” since it “inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years”. Hannah-Jones claimed “From slavery” and the anti-black racism it required grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional:
its economic might,
its industrial power,
its electoral system,
its diet and popular music,
the inequities of the public health and education,
its astonishing penchant for violence,
its income inequality,
the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality,
its slang,
its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatred that continues to plaque it to this day.
The 1619 Project’s narrative has and continues to receive much push back from conservatives who don’t want ALL of America’s history to be told. How can a country truly deal with its present if it can’t admit to its past problems -no matter how ugly they maybe?
The Greatest Lie Ever Told PT
America’s black population knows that freedom didn’t ring in 1776. It would take 87 years and a bloody civil war for most African Americans to gain their “Unalienable Rights”and another 100 years of courageous protests before those rights could be fully exercised. These rights of equality, we are still fighting for them today.
We(as Americans of color) are told that we should be happy, grateful, patriotic,and appreciative to the founding fathers, even if they helped to enslaved people, stole land, and indirectly cause the power of white supremacy to be embedded in the foundation of what America is built upon. Many people of color have been stripped of their history and forced to celebrate independence for some. Consuming stuff has replaced common sense. As long as it feels good and brings us good memories, it’s all good. That kind of nostalgia is dangerous. Its complacency has gotten us where we are today.
James Baldwin writes: “To be African American is to be African without any memory and American without any privilege.” As we see over and over again throughout history; not everyone in America is truly free and certainly NOT Equal.
For example, as a black person in America, I don’t have the freedom or liberty to go into certain stores to shop without being suspected of stealing. When I was young, I didn’t have the luxury of driving around in cars with my friends late at night without being seen as “Up to No Good”. We see on the TV news daily unarmed persons of color being shot and killed merely based on the color of the skin. That’s not freedom or equality that the founder fathers alluded to in the Declaration of Independence.
I say “Black Lives Matter” because “ALL” didn’t cover Black people when they said“All men are created equal”.
I say “Black Lives Matter” because “All” didn’t cover Black people when they said“With Liberty and Justice for All”.
I say “Black Lives Matter” because they’re still struggling with the definition of who is “ALL”
So,Was the Declaration of Independence based on a LIE? Personally, I say YES. Just because of that little word “ALL”. That’s why I think it is important that we know ALL the history of ALL people, the good, the bad… the parts we are comfortable with and the parts that challenge us. The United States as a country and we as a world must look our neighbors straight in the eye and say… Tell me your story so I can understand. Until we can know where we come from; we will never know where we are going. I think Dr. Maya Angelou says it best:
“Won’t it be wonderful when Black history and Native American history and Jewish history and ALL of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.”
“When you know better, you do better”
Our closing words are quotes from various Americans.
“ Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.” George Washington
“America will never be destroyed from the outside,If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves”. Abe Lincoln
“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” John Kennedy
“I think Patriotism islike charity- it begins at home” Henry James
“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official.” Theodore Roosevelt
“May we think of Freedom, not as the right to do as we please,but as the opportunity to do what is right.” Peter Marshall
“This nation will remain the land of the free- only so long asit is the home of the brave.” Elmer Davis