The Declaration of Independence
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are created equal’’? We are left with the cryptic remark of Rufus Choate of
Massachusetts, one of America’s most eminent lawyers in the early nineteenth century, who dismissed the famous proclamation as a hodgepodge
of ‘‘glittering and high-sounding generalities of natural right.’’
The Preamble of the Declaration of Independence, it would seem, embodies a theory of government that does not withstand the test of modern analysis. There is no denying that it contains sweeping propositions
of doubtful validity. It must ever be remembered, however, that in politics what may seem true in theory is false in fact, and that the reverse is
equally valid: political doctrines, though philosophically suspect, sometimes have a life of their own. A more generous reading of the Declaration of Independence would be to look upon it for what it was, what it
became, and what its authors may or may not have intended: as a political manifesto, an impassional plea, or an overstatement, we might say, in
defense of certain ideals. Had the colonists rested their case on the English Constitution, the common law, and their colonial charters alone,
they would have made essentially the same claims in the preamble that
they made in the body of the document. The weakness of their philosophical argument, in other words, should not be allowed to obscure or
detract from the strength of their political and legal case against the British. They did not need to prove the validity of the natural rights theory
in order to validate their claim that they were entitled to certain prescriptive rights they had inherited from their ancestors.
The rhetoric of the Declaration served to inspire Europeans battling
privilege and autocratic government, and in due course the ideal of equal
rights inherent in the Declaration made slavery increasingly objectionable in the United States. In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858,
Stephen Douglas stated his belief ‘‘that the Declaration of Independence,
in the words ‘all men are created equal,’ was intended to allude only to
the people of the United States, to men of European birth or descent, being white men, that they were created equal, and hence that Great Britain
had no right to deprive them of their political and religious privileges;
but the signers of that paper did not intend to include the Indian or the
Negro in that declaration, for if they had would they not have been
bound to abolish slavery in every State and colony from that day? Re-