civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting very well gentlemen we are about to brave the storm in a skip made of paper how chill and God Only Knows I don't know how it shall end but this this was our beginning July 4th 1776 this was the moment that we became we about a month earlier Richard Henry Lee of Virginia or the following resolution before the Continental Congress quote that these United colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved a committee of five was appointed to draft a statement for the world to declare the reason for such an action Lee's resolution was debated and adopted by twelve of the thirteen colonies on July 2nd 1776 New York abstained and on the 4th the Declaration was adopted it was sent to a young Irish immigrant John Dunlap official printer of the Congress to be turned into about two hundred broadsides to be sent around the colonies 26 of these called the Dunlap of broadsides are known to exist today these weren't printed to sit in glass cases or hang on the walls of State these were printed to be read out loud to assemblies to committees on Town Hall steps to the commanders and troops who had already been at war for over a year copies were made for the colonists and German and French and one done the broadside was put on a ship to England where it be read by King George himself so whether we're celebrating the successes or examining the flaws of great democratic experiment this was the moment that they became our successes our flaws this is the reason I'm a little nervous investigating our literal founding document and there's one more reason that I hesitate to mention what I'm trying to do a levels check for a guest on this very show instead of asking them the industry standard question which is what did you have for breakfast I really like to ask what is the movie that you watched more than any other in your youth that you have a tape that got played more than any other in your household a video yeah oh absolutely are you serious yeah it is the greatest movie ever made let's be honest it is a major piece of propaganda that's Byron Williams we'll hear from him a little later he loved a major piece of propaganda but so did I God I've seen the movie 1776 a musical about our founding fathers singing and dancing their way towards the signing of the Declaration independence hundreds maybe even a thousand times my childhood wish was to one day play Ben Franklin old Ben F just like I was born to play that part so when working on this episode and I was able to get in contact with Danielle Allen one of the top declaration of independence scholars in the world i'm james bryant conant university professor at Harvard I'm a political philosopher so I'm a kind of all-around or a declaration of independence person history text the impact of it and so forth I held my breath and I asked her for thoughts on the movie do you have any feelings about the film 1776 and its accuracy of depicting this situation so I'm embarrassed to say yeah they're embarrassed I still have not actually seen oh I know I know of course she hasn't seen it cool people do not see it nobody's seen it well I've seen it after you made me see it alright I promise I will be more judicious about my use of clips from 1776 but a few sneak their way in I'm Nick Appetit a I'm Hannah McCarthy and today on civics 101 we are exploring the greatest breakup letter of all time the Declaration of Independence what it says what it doesn't say to start you should read it it's not that long it's short it's only 1337 words that's Daniel Allen again yeah it had the biggest possible of jobs it had the job of justifying one of the most consequential political decisions ever taken the decision of the colonists to declare independence from Britain and formally undertake revolution and we might take this for granted now there was no precedent for this it's never been done before no colony has ever broken from the parents in the world so think of that you're trying to justify the creation of a new nation you're trying to justify a war all in a little more than 1300 words you don't do that with small ideas you do that with big ideas big ideas like people have rights and the government should protect those rights yes and the biggest of all that if a government fails to do that the people have a responsibility to fix it but Daniel called this a theory of revolution so where do we even start well there are four parts of the Declaration there's a preamble a statement of human rights a long list of grievances and then the action Lee's resolution we therefore are doing this the question to answer for the declaration is what on earth could justify steps of that magnitude the rest of the Declaration is an answer to that question so I think it's good to start at the end because that way you know what question whole text is supposed to answer how on earth could you possibly make the case that it's reasonable to just call yourself a new nation that it's reasonable to declare yourself no longer loyal to obedient to your king if you're going to say that you're no longer beholden to the laws of your country you better have a pretty good reason there were good reasons and there were many there are 27 very specific grievances in the Declaration these are acts of the king that demonstrate his tyranny and therefore justify revolution conquered in Lexington the first battles of the Revolutionary War happened over a year before the declaration had been written but I want to take it back even further and start with civics teacher Cheryl cook Kalio who boiled it all down to one sentence no matter how hard they tried the English were never going to look at them as being equals many people don't think about the salutary neglect that happened in the colonies for the hundred and fifty years before we started to see the beginnings of unrest what is salutary neglect it was how England governed these colonies it wanted access to their raw materials but that is all they wanted nobody was enforcing trade laws nobody was mandating British rule the colonies were pretty much left to govern themselves they just ignored that the colonies even were there and so you had this large vast amount of land where people from Great Britain would come or people from England would come and recreate their lives and some would like in the beginning of that period as being a just a blank slate this idea that you could go in and create a government of course they did because they were three months away and 3,000 miles away from Parliament and so they were very used to direct democracy but then this system of salutary neglect has reversed in the 1750s when England needs a ton of money due to the Seven Years War this is a massive war and involves all the powers of Europe and this extends to the British fighting the French who were allied with the native in the colonies it's called the French and Indian War so England starts the tax and England starts showing up there is a whole kind of line of increasing hostilities that start happening this is Emma Bray she's the executive director at the American independence museum the British start coming to the colonies they're being quartered here and it's not like today where military troops are on bases or have their own homes provided for them they were being quartered within residents homes here in the colonies we're getting taxed on goods that we're producing raw goods that we're creating giving to England they then produce it and then we're taxed on them coming back to us everything is now getting taxed so it's not just your sugar it's your paper it's the stamp it's everything it's tea it's all of these commodities that you need to live and it's a certain point it just starts to become too much and people are starting to get fed up with it stop back stones and axe sugar ax t ax but it's more than just the money there are stories of individuals radicalizing one of the pieces of discontent was that colonial commissions were considered beneath any level of British Commission so if you were a colonel in the colonial army you were still considered to be below any British Commission that was fighting the French and Indian War Cheryl told this documented story of one lieutenant colonel who wanted a British Commission and was promised one by General Braddock head of the British Army in the colonies during a particularly bad battle I mean very fierce General Braddock was killed the Lieutenant Colonel steps up he led the surviving soldiers he his horse was shot out from under him twice he's got musket balls in his jacket I mean he has really become the epitome of what you think a good British Army officer would look like and he saved the day for those people that were trying to get away because many many many British soldiers were killed during this bad he thought this must be sufficient evidence to get that coveted British Commission so he traveled all the way to Boston and met with the acting general for the troops in in the colonies and asked for this commission and and said I was promised this by General Braddock and was pretty much laughed at maybe by now you figured out who this lieutenant colonel was for me that really was one of the scenes that caused George Washington to become radicalized if you asked me what turned people in New England from mere rebels and protestors into wanting independence I'd say Lexington and Concord this is woody Holton history professor at USC but if you ask me what turned white southerners from merely protesting to wanting independence the answer is this informal alliance that African Americans initiated with the British government you know that in South Carolina where I live now the the majority of the people were enslaved in Virginia where Jefferson and Washington were 40% of the people were enslaved enslaved Americans start seeing this battle between the groups that were later going to call loyalists and rebels enslaved Americans see that split among whites and they say you know in this gap between one group of whites and another group of whites that's an opportunity for us and they literally go and knock on the door of the governor's palace in Colonial Williamsburg to tell the governor you just give us our freedom and we'll help you win this war and he initially turns them away as do other colonial governors but they kept coming and eventually British officials who had very few white supporters started accepting these black supporters and in fact they issued Emancipation Proclamation is very similar to the one that Lincoln would issue that infuriated whites one guy referred to it as aiming a dagger at our throats through the hands of our slaves the Stamp Act was passed the course of Acts were passed you know at one point the colonial government tried to seat someone in Parliament and they were refused they sent an Olive Branch petition trying to work things out and the king responds by officially declaring the colonies in rebellion blows to persist in their treason the punishment shall be death by hanging you introduced this as a breakup letter Nick but it sounds like a messy bloody drawn-out divorce yeah you don't respect me I've tried hard to make this work we created a continental congress expressly to work with you and you have done nothing enough and we get to Lee's resolution and the formation of the committee of five to write a declaration so I've been taught that Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence but it was co-written by this committee yeah Jefferson wrote the Declaration to be sure but the committee made significant changes and you can even see copies of his first drafts with their edits on the committee of five were some big names you've probably heard before Ben Franklin John Adams Thomas Jefferson himself but also robert Livingston from New York and Roger Sherman from Connecticut their final draft was presented to Congress on June 28th where over 80 edits were made but then there were two final changes made to the Declaration after Lee's resolution had been adopted they were made on July 3rd the first was a removal of reference to the British people as they wanted to place the blame solely at the feet of the king but the second was a removal of a grievance that becomes a central plot point in 1776 he is waged cruel war against human nature itself and the persons of a distant people will never offended him captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere determined to keep open the market it was a stinging critique on slave trade i'm byron williams i'm an author national columnist adzick professor Wake Forest University and the host of the NPR affiliated the public morality the Declaration almost had a section that denounced the practice of slavery but it was removed the argument for that has been that the primary reason for coming together was independence they and they did not want to get bogged down in secondary issues slavery being one of them or and more to the point it wasn't a time to discuss the efficacy of Human Bondage if you will now you might think that this was a fight between the north and the south but it was actually a coalition of southern slave owners and northern merchants who profited from the slave trade this is a huge moment in the movie when South Carolina representative Edward Rutledge just takes the North to task feeling a bit 10 toward our slaves they don't keep slaves oh there will be considerable carriers of slaves to others it's first of all important to realize that already in 1776 opinion about slavery was split so the committee of five had drafted the declaration it was not composed solely of slaveholders Thomas Jefferson who chaired the committee was a slave holder John Adams was not he always thought slavery was a bad thing and never owned slaves Benjamin Franklin had been a slave owner in earlier in the 18th century but by this point he had liberated his slaves and had become somebody who was committed to abolition so the question of where slavery fit in the document was complicated in fact the phrase life liberty and pursuit of happiness is a compromise phrase that takes the language from the anti-slavery position the fact that the language is about happiness not property was an anti-slavery choice life liberty and property that's John Locke right that was his idea these things that is supposed to protect this is what you have a right to so how is striking property and making it happiness an anti-slavery pursuit all right so that word property and the desire to protect it had become code code for defending the institution of slavery so when you look closely at the text of the declaration you can see both the anti-slavery voices in the phrase the pursuit of happiness and you see the pro-slavery voices in that erasure of the text condemning creaking George for the slave trade but even with the clause about slavery removed that line that all men are created equal became a rallying cry for abolitionists after independence was declared so in January of 1777 Prince Hall a free african-american in Boston quotes from the language of the Declaration and submitting a petition to the Massachusetts General Assembly seeking the abolition of slavery and the language factors in four other abolitionists as well and by 1780 slavery's been abolished in Massachusetts Pennsylvania and Vermont so we fail to recognize actually that the Declaration of Independence was also the moment that the project of abolitionism crystallized in the u.s. so the document is not just about what slave owners wrote and thought it is also about what those who were opposed to slavery wrote and thought and we see it through the abolitionist movement you know - through Frederick Douglass and others and Angelina Grimke in people always pushing for this notion of freedom in soul to be a country that is formed on this idea and part of that idea is freedom the whole summoned bondage is incongruent that is something that Americans have wrestled with from Frederick Douglass to my 8th grade social studies class how on earth can a document say all men are created equal but not include women African Americans the native nations everyone else in the country Hannah one potential and disputed reason for this could be that maybe they didn't even really mean it woody Holton even called it a throwaway line the Yatta Yatta phrase all men are created equal is the Yaya de fer and of course it's I don't think it's that now that's how we can change the meaning of a document the fundamental right that the declaration independence asserts you know it's mostly just a list of complaints no one ever reads the complaints except NPR once a year but but it's but the fundamental right that they were contending for was the right of secession all of stuff about all men are created equal there say that's a build-up to saying well okay everybody's equal and we got certain rights and one of those rights is to create governments but then also to get rid of governments if we don't like them and we don't like the government of georgia third and Parliament so we're gone but before the year 1776 was out the mule Haynes who was an african-american soldier in the Continental Army wrote an essay unpublished at the time called Liberty further extended where he said hold on a second that phrase that you kind of rushed through mr. Jefferson all men are created equal let's stop and talk about that a little bit others did that as well culminating in Lincoln at Gettysburg saying this country was not formed by the Constitution it was formed by the Declaration and so what all of those Americans beginning with lamu Haynes in 1796 did was transform a an Ordinance of Secession into a Universal Declaration of Human Rights this relationship between the Declaration and slavery is frequently addressed but Daniel brought up a grievance that's very rarely talked about it was glossed over when I was in school it's not in 1776 and this is really for me the worst moment in the Declaration the one piece of the Declaration that still I think really hurts and this is where they say that the complained of the king has excited domestic insurrections amongst us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages sexes and conditions and that the the the treatment of Native Americans by the colonists really was was reprehensible and we still haven't fully acknowledged that fact whereas in fact you can see anti-slavery voices in the Declaration you can't say the same thing about the treatment of Native Americans you can't see a moment of sort of positivity in the Declaration on that front and for me there's a deep lesson there because it means that as we think about the values of the Declaration in the 21st century we have the job of folding into those values a true principle of inclusion a true principle that embraces all the peoples of this continent in a vision of how to achieve safety and happiness for all of us Thomas Jefferson said he wanted to write an expression of the American mind he achieved that in my view in a single sentence you know we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal endowed by their creator with certain a law right and among them life liberty and the pursuit of happiness so right there in that single sentence he enjoins liberty and equality it's part of the American narrative I mean I mean that is so right they're not based on religion not based on homogeneous ation liberty this idea that we would be a country based on liberty and equality that in and of itself is profoundly radical has not done has not been achieved before or since that a country would be formed on an idea and quite frankly I think it's a radical idea and the proof of how radical that the idea is we're still struggling with it in the 21st century I mean each day we can pick up a newspaper or go to our blog of choice and see where liberty and equality at some point are in tension and then that is the genesis of the Declaration so byron williams calls it a radical document woody holden has referenced it as an ordinance of secession jefferson called it an expression of the American mind and Daniel Allen says it's a masterclass in political philosophy and a universal declaration of human rights sounds like everybody is potentially correct here right yeah I watched this six-hour video of a panel talk at the National Archives and Daniel Allen was on the panel and what he Holton was on it and the two of them got into a disagreement about the Declaration and what he said to me well you know the thing is we were both right this this is a document that was built on tension and compromise and it meant something different to each man who signed it to each person who heard it to all who read it so we got ourselves a new country only question is how are we going to run it that's next time on civics 101 [Music] today's episode was produced by me Nick Kappa DJ with Hannah McCarthy our staff includes Jackie Hilbert Daniela Vidal Ali and Ben Henry Erika Janik is our executive producer Maureen McMurray is in charge of supplying both saltpeter and pins special thanks to loyalist scholar Maya jazzing off the declaration resources project at Harvard and the American independence Museum in Exeter New Hampshire super special thanks to Jessi Kratz historian at the National Archives she offered to torus around both the Archives and the Library of Congress and show us these documents in person we could not go because the government shut down music for this episode is by Blue Dot sessions Scott grant and Kevin MacLeod Cayenne GLE macaé beats and electro swing and from 1776 the greatest movie musical ever made civics 101 is a production of n HPR New Hampshire Public Radio [Music]