Jefferson wanted to be remembered for three things, founding this university where we are today, his bill for religious liberty in Virginia, and the Declaration of Independence. And of course, that's precisely what we do remember him for. Well, Jefferson's authorship of the Declaration has always been controversial. Jefferson himself was a bit schizophrenic about the Declaration. It did get onto his tombstone. He was proud to be known as the author. Yet at the same time when he wrote his autobiography in 1821, he indicated an author's irritation with his editors. My scholarly friends will know exactly what Jefferson was concerned about. Jefferson thought he had gotten it exactly right in his draft of the Declaration, but his colleagues in Congress thought some changes would be advisable, and most of us agree today that those changes were good. There were embarrassing things in the Declaration, such as a complaint against King George the Third for imposing slavery on the Chesapeake. Enriching slave traders by imposing, slaves on unwilling American planters. It just didn't seem quite right to the many slaveholders who were in Congress. It seemed, well, projecting blame would be the way we describe it now in our psychobabble. Why doesn't Jefferson simply say slavery is evil, and we're going to do something about it. But no it was George the Third who was responsible. This notion of American innocence, American newness is part of the whole idea of the founding. So Jefferson thought we could have gotten things better. What we see as improvements he sees as degrading his original thoughts. Yet in 1825, just before he died in 1826, on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration, Jefferson writes to Henry Lee, who's interested in doing some research for a book he's writing about his father and about the early period, about the founding. And he asks Jefferson about the Declaration, and Jefferson says, oh, it's not mine. I don't claim any originality. It was just as if I were channeling the common sense of the day. It was there in the air. I didn't have to ransack through books on my shelf. This was not a learned treatise. This is what everybody was thinking. That idea that everybody was thinking what the declaration says is probably the central myth of American history. Because it means there was this moment, to use John Adams's image, in which 13 bells struck at once. He's referring to the 13 states. And we imagine by extension that the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere are rallying to the cause, because here at last is a statement of what makes sense to ordinary people about their power, about their rights, about where government comes from. At last, we have done this thing, and the American people were ready for this moment on July 4th, 1776. Well, that notion is one we're going to talk about a little bit over the course of today's lecture. That idea of a kind of consensus, of a convergence of views, at this key moment, this founding moment, when we sloughed off the old and embraced the new. We'll come back to this question of whether Americans really were united, that there was this massive consensus in 1776. Before we do it might be worth noting, we might think that Jefferson's a bit of a megalomaniac to identify himself so completely with the American people that they speak through him. Well, that's up to your own taste whether you take that modest view, the self-effacing view, or the megalomaniac view. But neither one is accurate. What I'm going to do today is to take you through the run-up to the revolution to try to explain what the Declaration was all about. And the big argument here is that American independence is an unintended consequence. So if we're thinking about independence, it could be that the people were all agreed on the need for independence and that spontaneously they endorsed these declarations, because there were declarations all over the country. It, it's just impossible. It couldn't be, because that's not what the patriot movement was all about. So we'll talk about the run up to independence, and then, I think it's important to establish a context. What was going on in 1776. And then proceed to the idea of what kind of work does the Declaration do. What is its function? My, radical revisionist argument here is that you all spend too much attention on the first two paragraphs. The ones you have committed to memory, as school children, all about all men are created equal and government by consent. I think you want to look at the end of the Declaration. I think you want to look at my neck tie. It's these signatures that are doing the work of the Declaration. Now there's a lot in between the beginning and the end, and we'll get to that later. It's a big argument Jefferson's making, because this is the deal. Jefferson has to persuade. He has to persuade his colleagues in Congress. He has to persuade himself. And he has to persuade this thing that didn't exist before, the American people, that they were a people. That's going to lead to our conclusion. We talk about the idea of an American people. The real work of the Declaration of Independence is to invent a new people, a people that did not know it had existed until this moment.
