Ideas have histories; and no idea has a more complex history than liberty.  Hegel wrote that history is the history of liberty.  If true, then the history of the United States must be one of the most important chapters.  Although this nation’s history has been periodically marred by visceral attempts to assert that one ethnic, religious, or racial group was more American than another, to be an American does in fact mean that one belongs to a community that is unified by an idea: liberty to pursue the good life is an unalienable right. The United States was the first nation to be founded not upon myth, conquest, or accident—as most others have before—but upon a demand for the protection of that cardinal right.

The origins of the United States are not obscured by the vagaries of the ancient past.  We do not reach back to a Herodotus-type history, where fact and fiction are blended to both inform, entertain, and impress.  The United States was founded in the bright light of recent history.  We know who the founders were, what they wrote, who they read, and—as tenuous as it might be for one person to ever claim this about another—what they were thinking.  So in celebration of the day that congress approved the Declaration of Independence, I thought I would share Thomas Jefferson’s final thoughts on what the Declaration meant.

Weak from the accumulating maladies of old age and just two weeks before his death, eighty-three-year-old  Jefferson wrote his last letter.  It was a letter to regret an invitation.  Poor health caused him to decline a request to attend a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to be held in the city of Washington.  As Jefferson would occasionally and wonderfully do in his letters, in this polite correspondence he veered into the loftiest reflections on the nature of human existence and why the Declaration must always be remembered.

Monticello June 24. 1826

Respected Sir

The kind invitation I receive from you on the part of the citizens of the city of Washington, to be present with them at their celebration of the 50th. anniversary of American independance; as one of the surviving signers of an instrument pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world, is most flattering to myself… May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government. that form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. all eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. the general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view. the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god. these are grounds of hope for others. for ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.