Truth and Lies About the Declaration of Independence: The Battered Spirit of '76

"Bribery and Corruption... Monopoly... wickedly acquired with impunity... lost to all the Feelings of Humanity." Sound familiar?

Department of Homeland Security paramilitary during ICE raids in Los Angeles, California in June.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in what is now the United States. With it came the launch of an armed revolution against distant fascist leaders and a struggle between true reformers and reactionaries who would ultimately lead the budding nation further down the path of imperialism, slavery, land theft, and elite domination.

Today, the U.S. government is using the 250th anniversary as an opportunity to peddle facile propaganda in service of nationalistic fascism. As a law firm which has been educating communities about the truth of U.S. “freedoms” for thirty years, we’re here to set the record straight.

Welcome to CELDF’s America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective: an ongoing series this year.

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To put it bluntly, the story of the Declaration of Independence is misremembered by many historians and mistaught to most Americans. It’s unlikely that narrative will be improved by the official “America 250” celebrations scheduled for this year.

“The story of America makes everyone free,” says a quote attributed to Donald Trump on the White House America250 website. But which story is that? The romanticized version created by Ken Burns for the now defunct Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the video series version that conservative Christian Hillsdale University was commissioned to create for the White House, or something closer to the truth? To get closer to the truth, we’d have to include the story of Native Americans, whose lives and culture were obliterated to make room for the “American experiment.” And what about the epic drama of the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans, whose labor accounted for the wealth and political clout of the plantation gentry who stole it? More to the point, how can any but the true version of our story free the minds of Americans who have been lied to about everything?

To get closer to the truth, we’ll have to correct the often-repeated lie that 2026 marks the 250^th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America. It’s just not so. This year Americans will celebrate the anniversary of the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence, which announced the violent rebellion of American colonists against the oppressive rule of the tyrannical British empire, the same empire that sent many of the colonists or their predecessors to North America in chains or in peonage by debt.

There are important conflations of fact regarding this celebratory year that we need to get clear about. First, to state the obvious, the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence are not the same. Not in purpose and not in effect. This year we aren’t celebrating the establishment of the centralized government crafted during the summer of 1787 in secret meetings held by self-interested land speculators and entrepreneurs collectively known as Federalists. The 250^th anniversary of that counter-revolutionary moment will come in 2039. The Federalists’ DEI-free constitution was ratified in 1789. It’s what MAGA is all about celebrating, but they’ve got their dates mixed up.

To try and begin to set the record straight, let’s start at the beginning with the first words of the Declaration of Independence:

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.

That lower-case united is not a typo. As we see, the decision to secede from the empire was agreed upon by the thirteen “States of America,” which were united in purpose but not as a single nation. If we were to dust off our text books from elementary or high school we would be reminded that the first constitution of the United States was the Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1777 but not ratified until 1781. No nation was created by it. Rather, a “league of friendship” among the liberated colonies was formed in which each of them maintained their sovereignty and separate nationhood. That first decentralized constitution was overturned unconstitutionally by the Federalists, and the rest is, as they say, history. But it’s an untold history, of the subversion of the original intent of the American revolutionaries. But for now we’ll stay with the story of the Declaration of Independence. Let’s begin with those intentions and aspirations.

Appropriately, we begin with the man who inspired the Declaration of Independence with the words We have it in our power to begin the world over again. The year is 1776; the date January 10^th, and the recently arrived English commoner Thomas Paine has published his blistering critique of the British government with the intent to foment revolution. Yes, you read correctly, Thomas Paine not Thomas Jefferson.

In his eighty-page pamphlet Common Sense he describes how the unwritten British constitution institutionalized a hierarchical class system that will-nilly privileged an ensconced aristocracy of meritless descendants of the Norman king known as “William the Conqueror” who in 1066 lowered the defeated British inhabitants to the status of rightless commoners. In the mid-1600’s they rose up to behead King Charles I, only to be betrayed by the elite leaders of the rebellion and returned to their status as peons.

By 1776 the reinstatement of the hereditary ruling class in England had been accomplished and royalty reestablished its iron-fisted reign over the empire’s American colonies after an interregnum that had created a temporary power vacuum. During that time, colonial towns and counties experimented with democratic systems of community self-government, and they liked it. Go figure, right?

Back to Thomas Paine, he arrived in Philadelphia in November of 1774 with a plan to set the record straight about why the people of America had a fundamental right to throw off the yolk that London imposed on colonial communities. He was aware that radicalized commoners in the colonies had recently engaged in direct actions and skirmishes against the British.

Common Sense was addressed to “The Inhabitants of North America.” When it appeared in print it became an immediate best-seller. About 120,000 copies sold out in the first three months of publication, in a population of three million.Thomas Paine and the Promise of America author Harvey J. Kaye suggests that the pamphlet, if sold to an equivalent portion of the population today, would have reached 15 million copies. Its effect on the minds of commoners in the colonies was electrifying. Prior to its publication only a small minority of colonists were in favor of independence from Britain.

As copies of Common Sense circulated from hand-to-hand, sentiment for revolution solidified. Commoners (everyday people like you and I) became clear-eyed about how they were enslaved to Parliament’s (the equivalent of Congress) whims, which quite frequently harmonized with the whims of the East India Company (think Exxon, Meta, and Amazon) and its investors. Community animosity for the corporation came to the surface three years earlier along the eastern seaboard.

The Alarm Number II was a 1773 broadside posted by the Sons of Liberty in New York. It proclaimed that “the East-India Company obtained their exclusive Privilege of Trade . . . by Bribery and Corruption. Taught by the Monopoly of Trade they had wickedly acquired with impunity from their Countrymen, they were lost to all the Feelings of Humanity, and monopolized the absolute Necessaries of Life . . . at a Time of Apprehended Scarcity.” Sound familiar?

Two months after The Alarm II was posted in New York, Sam Adams and his Massachusetts branch of the Sons of Liberty dumped the East India Company’s tea into Boston Harbor. Nine days later, radicals in Philadelphia stopped an East India Company ship from unloading its cargo and turned it away from the city after allowing the captain to load provisions of food and water.

But it was Tom Paine’s Common Sense that really brought simmering resentment and occasional violent confrontations with British soldiers to the point of open revolution. The colonies had assembled a Continental Congress, which met in the same building as the Pennsylvania Assembly, the colony’s governing body. But there was no unanimity among the delegates in Congress about severing ties with the empire. Pennsylvania, with a colonial assembly controlled by Quaker merchants, opposed anything but conciliation with the Crown, for fear of losing their trade advantages with England and harming profits.

250 years ago, with revolution in the air, colonists from the back-country counties of Pennsylvania descended on Philadelphia, surrounded what was then known as the State House, and is now called Independence Hall. The Quaker Assembly majority were terrorized by radicals who demanded they send instructions to the colonial Congress to declare independence of the 13 colonies from the empire. Day after day, under threats of tarring and feathering, fewer Assembly members took their seats. Eventually the commoners elected their own delegates and they sent word to Congress that Pennsylvania favored revolution. The floodgates opened. The rest of the colonies joined the cause.

So what are we celebrating this year? The signing of the Declaration? Shouldn’t we look into it to learn first-hand what we are cheering for? Let’s do that now and let’s start with a quick appreciation of the famous and inspiring lines that read:

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.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .

Although Thomas Jefferson was tasked with writing the draft declaration, he had help from Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and behind the scenes Tom Paine, who was the source of inspiration for its purest sentiments. Inspired by Paine’s Common Sense and first-hand confrontations with the Crown’s colonial governors, town assemblies throughout the colonies had sent delegates to the Continental Congress with demands for severance from England and lists of grievances against the king. In the second part of this remembrance, we’ll focus on the persistence of those grievances and how they are still with us, unsolved by ratification of the Federalists’ U.S. Constitution. The rational causes for revolt enumerated in the Declaration are less familiar than the inspiring and aspirational language that adorns its opening paragraphs. Let’s have a look at them more closely.

The abbreviated list of unalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration - life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - were consciously altered from their elitist version that comes from enlightenment writers John Locke and Thomas Hobbs. Those philosophers put property among the trinity of primary rights. But rights in property didn’t motivate working people the way it did European upper class patrons of philosophers who rationalized empire’s elbows on the table approach to everything. The Declaration’s words were written to harmonize with the aspirations of American commoners who Tom Paine encouraged to enlist to fight the coming war with England. And so the words “the pursuit of happiness” were chosen to replace “property.”

Confidence in the justice of their cause can be felt viscerally in the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” But that confidence was betrayed when “all men” who were said to be “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” came to mean white men with wealth in the practical real-world effects that emerged from the Federalists’ constitution thirteen years later.

Not counted among “all men” were, of course, all women, and all men who were dark-skinned, Indian, landless or in debt. Native Americans were singled out as beyond the reach of unalienable rights when, in a complaint to the king from the frontiers of the colonies, it was said that he “has endeavoured 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.”

Ironically, it was George Washington, during his command as a British officer in the French and Indian war, who earned the epithet Conotocaurius (Town Destroyer) by the Seneca people for his merciless killing of women, children, and non-combatant men as he roamed through the North East Territory with his gullible militiamen.

It is also worth noting that Tom Paine insisted that revolution accomplish the eradication of slavery, but when the Continental Congress reviewed the Declaration that Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin had agreed upon, declaring slavery an evil imposed on the colonies by the empire, they found that the mention of slavery would be a poison pill that would cause Southern colonies to reject the call to war with England. And so we are left to doubt their sincerity when they chose to include the words “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .” Clearly, the consent of the enslaved had not been secured.

We don’t know if there was discussion at the drafting of the Declaration about the fate of women in the America-to-come, but we do know that when John Adams joined his Continental Congress compatriots in Philadelphia to graft their priorities for independence into the Declaration, his wife Abigail sent him a letter from their home in Massachusetts saying:

“I long to hear that you have declared an independency -- and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex. Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness.”

We also know that eleven years later, when John Adams joined his Federalist compatriots in Philadelphia to put their class priorities into a frame of government, that the rights of women, of indentured servants, of men with dark skin, of Indians, and of men of small means got less than a passing thought. Only by the obstinacy of the opponents of the Federalists’ proposed constitution were the first ten constitutional amendments, the Bill of Rights, added to the constitution two years after it was ratified.

More tellingly, none of those Anti-Federalist rights protections - not free speech and assembly, not jury trial or the right to confront one’s accuser, not religious freedom nor protection against self-incrimination were extended to anyone who did not already enjoy them before adoption of the Bill of Rights. No, after adoption of those amendments women remained rightless and propertyless; enslaved people remained property; the federal government continued its genocide against Indians; the labor of debtors remained the property of their creditors. Every possible hair-splitting subdivision of humanity not born male, white, and wealthy has had to struggle and fight and get crushed and get up again generation after generation to have their rights nominally recognized in law, if not in practice.

We cannot escape the conclusion that the American Revolution failed to achieve the goals of the ordinary people who conceived of it as a path to social justice, fought for their liberty and unalienable rights, and won the war but lost the revolutionary changes they were promised.

How do we know this? Because after the inspirational language in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence noted above, the causes that drove the colonies to revolt are listed. There are 27 grievances listed as justifications for the colonial exodus from governance by the British empire in the second half of the document.

What were those grievances? Which of these complaints were corrected by the revolution and subsequently solved institutionally by adoption of the Federalists’ constitution? And what were the specific changes in governing they fell short of achieving? Did independence from Britain resolve all the grievances colonists had against the empire? You may be surprised by the answer.

Join us again for part two of this essay this Friday, here on CELDF’s Truth and Reckoning.