Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. When Thomas Jefferson was chosen to draft the Declaration of Independence, he had an exceedingly difficult task ahead of him. The 33-year-old planter, who had left law practice just before Britain’s imperial crisis began in earnest, needed to do nothing short of lay the groundwork for a new nation. He had to explain in both philosophical and legal terms the Second Continental Congress’s decision to break away from Great Britain, provide a list of grievances against the Crown that justified complete separation as a remedy, and plant the seeds of diplomacy for the fledgling country. His job was to place the newly formed United States of America among “the powers of the earth.”In the course of writing a document capacious enough to do all of that, Jefferson formulated the Declaration’s second paragraph, with language that has become its most quotable passage: “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.” Those words, now held as perhaps the world’s most important statement of universal human rights, were so powerful that they are often described as the “American creed.”But those words also created a glaring contradiction. Of the estimated 2.5 million people living in the American colonies, about 500,000 were enslaved people of African descent, the majority of whom lived in the southern colonies. About 200,000 lived in the largest colony, Jefferson’s Virginia. At the time Jefferson wrote that part of the Declaration, he owned nearly 200 people at his home plantation, Monticello, and other sites. While working on the document in Philadelphia, he shared rooms with his enslaved valet, Robert Hemmings, the 14-year-old half brother of his wife, Martha.In the centuries since, Jefferson’s Enlightenment-influenced flourish in the Declaration’s second paragraph has occupied an ever-greater space at the core of American law and culture. Over that period, a question has recurred: Did Jefferson really intend his statement of equality to apply to everyone?Two hundred and fifty years on, however, it’s time to move past the fixation on Jefferson’s intent. It was never realistic to think that the meaning of a document suffused with revolutionary possibilities could remain within the parameters of Jefferson’s personal beliefs, however we might divine them. Through the exertions of Black Americans and others concerned about progress toward a more just society, the Declaration has been given life and purpose beyond what we take to have been its author’s sight. Perhaps their intentions are what matter most now.For the substantial number of Americans who have wished over the years to exclude Black people from the polity, Jefferson’s intent has always been paramount. As one argument goes, Jefferson and other members of the founding generation did not think African Americans were equal to white people; therefore, they were not endowed by the Creator with the rights that European Americans claimed in 1776. This particular message has been delivered in the United States in countless ways in everyday life and in powerful venues at crucial moments.[From the June 2021 issue: Annette Gordon-Reed on Black America’s neglected origin stories]Notably, the idea that Black people were simply not part of the Declaration’s “all” was at the center of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. The infamous 1857 ruling held that people of African descent were not citizens of the United States. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney looked to his version of history and found that “neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.”Taney’s decision was more than a statement about how legal status determined the right to citizenship, or, we might say, the right to be called an “American.” It was one thing to explain why the enslaved, treated by law as property, were well outside civic equality. It was quite another to do what Taney did in extending the prohibition to free Black Americans, who, by 1857, could have been the product of generations of legally free people who had paid taxes, fought in American wars, and, in some cases, voted and held office. In Taney’s formulation, even people born of white mothers and Black fathers in states that determined a child’s status by that of their mother were ineligible to be citizens. Taney’s issue, of course, was race. For him, being white was the basic requirement for being an American.Taney’s was not the only view on the Court, however. Writing one of the two dissenting opinions, Justice Benjamin Curtis corrected Taney’s flat assertion that no state had ever treated Black people as citizens, listing several states that had done so. Curtis entertained the question of the Founders’ intent in the Declaration warily. But he insisted that the Declaration “would not be just to them, nor true in itself, to allege that they intended to say that the Creator of all men had endowed the white race, exclusively, with the great natural rights which the Declaration of Independence asserts.” The Founders could not have marked God as having played favorites in that way.The Dred Scott decision ultimately helped tilt an already deeply fractured nation toward all-out war. Six years after Taney delivered his verdict on Black citizenship, Abraham Lincoln weighed in. At Gettysburg, Lincoln referenced the Declaration’s dedication “to the proposition that all men are created equal” as the basis for the country’s “new birth of freedom,” made possible by the sacrifice of soldiers in the Army of the United States.After the Civil War concluded, the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to settle the matter. All people born in the United States—enslaved or free—were citizens entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizenship, the right to due process, and equal protection under the law. The amendment effectively killed the notion that one had to be white to be an American. Or it should have.Those who are ambivalent about, or even hostile to, the concept of Black people as equal American citizens tend to bypass this most transformational period in American history—the Lincoln presidency, the Civil War, the postwar amendments to the Constitution, and Reconstruction—to promote the founding era as the one true source of our present-day civic conventions. This creates the opportunity, for those who want one, to adopt Taney’s understanding of the connection between race and citizenship: What many white Americans may have thought about Black people’s humanity in the 1770s should bind us today and, presumably, forever.One of the many maddening things about the institution of American slavery is that we know far more about the views of white politicians and planters than we do of the enslaved people they lorded over. The contemporaneous thoughts and feelings of individual enslaved people are mostly lost to history. We do not, for example, know what Robert Hemmings thought of the Declaration’s pronouncement about equality: whether he ever wondered at the fact that the man who wrote those words had enslaved him, or that he and five of his siblings shared a father with Jefferson’s wife.In his first draft of the Declaration, the depths of Jefferson’s contradictions are even clearer. In one passage that was later deleted by delegates to the Second Continental Congress, Jefferson referred to enslaved Africans as a “distant people” whose “sacred rights of life & liberty” had nevertheless been violated by King George III’s insistence on keeping the slave trade open. In whatever way slavery began in the American colonies, by the time Jefferson wrote those words, generations of Black people had lived there, and a number, like Hemmings, shared a lineage with Europeans. They could not be considered a “distant people.”We do have some direct evidence of what other African Americans of Hemmings’s time, enslaved and free, thought about what the Declaration of Independence, and indeed the Revolutionary War, had to offer them. Even before July 4, 1776, the chaos of the conflict between Great Britain and the Americans created opportunities to change the status quo. Many enslaved people threw themselves into the mix. They left plantations, including some of Jefferson’s outlying farms, and joined the British, who promised them freedom if the men became soldiers. Some men of African descent made a different choice, joining the American military effort in exchange for their freedom. Others were coerced. They shed blood for the new nation, and one—Crispus Attucks—is often regarded as the first man of any race to do so.Although not themselves guaranteed equal legal protections, African Americans were part of Anglo-American culture, and understood how the law shaped their society. From the moment the Declaration was presented to the people, Black petitioners relayed their ideas about what role the document should play in their lives and the life of the United States. Several of those appeals reached the public sphere and attracted notice in their time and ours.In January 1777, African Americans living in Massachusetts wrote the first known post-Declaration petition to a legislature to abolish slavery. The petition speaks of the “unalienable right” to freedom, “which the great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all Mankind,” and makes an explicit connection between the struggle against Great Britain and Black people’s struggle for freedom. Were they to move against slavery, legislators would no longer be “chargeable with the inconsistency of acting, themselves, the part which they condemn & oppose in others.”Among the petitioners, some of whom signed with an X, was Prince Hall, the founder of America’s first lodge of Black Freemasons and a noted antislavery activist. By some accounts, Hall had been born in Barbados and had come to Boston in his late teens. A literate man, he became extremely active in Boston’s small Black community, working on many fronts to improve the lot of African Americans. He complained about injustices done to them and argued for educating Black children. But he didn’t think the United States was the only answer for Black people. Before and after the Revolution, he and other Black men in the state urged the Massachusetts legislature to provide funds for those who wanted to emigrate from America to Africa.The anti-slavery activist Prince HallFollowing the American victory over the British, a Black man writing under the name Vox Africanorum sounded the same theme as Hall and his fellow Massachusetts petitioners. Vox Africanorum took to the pages of The Maryland Gazette to compare the situation the Americans had faced in the confrontation with King George to the circumstances that Black Americans faced in the new country. He then suggested that those in power should attend to the truth of the Declaration’s words about liberty and equality. The writer refused to mount an argument for Black humanity, stating that even entering such a debate would mean that America “has already forgot those exalted principles she has so lately asserted with her blood.”So began a long tradition of using the contradiction between the ideals expressed in the Declaration and the reality of the treatment of African Americans to appeal to the consciences of white people. Vox Africanorum, Hall, and like-minded petitioners were, in effect, daring white people to say that Black people, also created by God, were not “people” in the same sense as they were.[From the March 2021 issue: Danielle Allen on Prince Hall, American revolutionary]Early Black petitioners were also helping create a new way of thinking about what it meant to be an American. With the destruction of ties to Great Britain, through a document that set forth principles justifying the establishment of a new nation, the people in the 13 colonies—very different societies each—took on a new identity. Tying that new American identity to the belief in the language of the Declaration made sense in a place that was more religiously, racially, and ethnically diverse than Great Britain. Anyone who arrived on American shores and committed to the country’s ideals could become an American. The principles that propelled the colonists to rebellion would hold their union together.We can see the aspirational aspects of these interpretations in Jefferson’s own correspondence. In 1791, when he was secretary of state, he exchanged letters with Benjamin Banneker, a free Black almanac maker and astronomer from Maryland. Banneker had written to Jefferson to share the new almanac he had produced and to make the case against slavery. He reminded Jefferson that, once, the “Arms and tyranny of the British Crown were exerted with every powerful effort in order to reduce you to a State of Servitude,” which the white colonists had designated a form of “slavery.” Then Banneker quoted Jefferson’s words—“We hold these truths to be Self evident”—back to him.The letters exchanged between the two men were made public and created something of a sensation, in part because of Jefferson’s polite response to Banneker, in which he signed off: “I am with great esteem, Sir, Your most obedt. humble servt.” Critics ridiculed Jefferson for the salutation, for the suggestion that he and Banneker were on equal terms as correspondents.[From the December 2019 issue: Annette Gordon-Reed on Thomas Jefferson’s doomed educational experiment]Banneker’s approach to Jefferson and the Declaration was mild compared with the metaphorical hammer that would be dropped 38 years later. In 1829, at the dawn of the Jacksonian period, David Walker, a Massachusetts clothing merchant and abolitionist, released his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a pamphlet exhorting Black people to fight for their freedom. Walker’s Appeal purposefully used the contradictions of the founding generation to shame white readers and hopefully inspire Black recipients to rebellion. In one of the most frustrating near misses in history, Walker published his Appeal three years after the Sage of Monticello’s death, and was robbed of the possibility for a direct confrontation. Nevertheless, he conjures Jefferson as a rhetorical foil, describing him as having “gone to answer at the bar of God, for the deeds done in his body while living.”Walker wrote in the tradition of the Revolutionary pamphleteers, whose calls to arms were answered in the Declaration. If his own embrace of violence inflamed white people—and it did—then their very reaction proved his point. “I ask you candidly,” Walker wrote, “was your sufferings under Great Britain, one hundredth part as cruel and tyranical as you have rendered ours under you?” If White colonists had had the right to rebel against British tyranny, as the Declaration said, then Black people had the right to rebel against the tyranny imposed by slavery.One would love to have Jefferson’s response to Walker’s pamphlet. He had predicted that, one day, enslaved people would rise up to strike a blow against slavery, which was part of the reason he came to favor a policy of emancipation and expatriation. Black people’s actions during the Revolution had made it clear to him that if the opportunity arose, Black men would fight for their freedom. In later life, when talking about the dangers of postponing emancipation and expatriation, he predicted their response: “One million of these fighting men will say ‘we will not go.’ ”By the end of his life, Jefferson had heard from enough individuals from different backgrounds, races, and religions to know that what he had written in the Declaration spoke to people’s aspirations for equal treatment and personal liberty. Indeed, he noted as much in a letter written just a month before he died, on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration, predicting that the ideas in the document would someday apply “to all.” Following Enlightenment principles, Jefferson believed (maybe too much) in the notion of inevitable progress. Succeeding generations would be “wiser,” he said, and the new information and ideas they possessed would bring changes in attitudes. The tenets of the Declaration would be a useful guide. It is a safe bet, however, that Jefferson would have seen Walker’s Appeal as coming too soon, because it would have immediately disrupted life as he knew it.By the time Walker wrote his Appeal, the country’s relationship to the institution of slavery had changed. When the Massachusetts petitioners made their case in 1777, and when Banneker wrote Jefferson in 1791, they had reason to believe that change through legal and rhetorical avenues was possible. Influenced by the rhetoric of the Declaration and overall talk of liberty, states in the North had begun to abolish slavery. Although Jefferson’s Virginia had not gone nearly that far, it did liberalize the laws of emancipation in 1782, allowing enslavers to free people without having to get permission from the government.But over time, as the Revolutionary generation in the South gave way to children and grandchildren, any qualms about slavery faded. Members of the founding generation had often portrayed slavery as a necessary evil, but their descendants, who were beginning to see the enormous potential profits in the cotton-planting economy, saw slavery as a positive good. And they began to define and defend their way of life in opposition to that of the North. Once the Missouri Compromise of 1820 formalized the division of America into slave and free states, the sectional conflict over slavery became more intense.The Jacksonian era saw the militant assertion of a right to a white man’s government. States that had given a modicum of civil rights to free Black citizens began to retrench. In the early 1800s, some states removed voting rights for Black men. Even Pennsylvania, which had been a seat of abolitionism, amended its constitution to make clear that the franchise was open only to “white freemen.” Walker had every reason to write about the Declaration from a position of anger and despair.By 1852, when Frederick Douglass gave his famous speech commemorating Independence Day, titled “What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?,” the battle lines over slavery had been sharply drawn. There was an organized interracial effort to oppose the institution, arrayed against a faction of white southerners who were vocal and implacable in their defense of slavery. The abolitionist movement, of which Douglass was a shining star, also had global momentum: Four months before Douglass’s speech, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin to much attention and acclaim—and vilification, from the South and its supporters.In tone, Douglass’s oration sits somewhere between Walker’s incendiary Appeal and the more measured passion of people like the Massachusetts petitioners, Vox Africanorum, and Banneker. No doubt to please his largely white audience, Douglass began on a note of praise for the “fathers of this republic.” After these preliminaries, he moved into familiar territory, launching an extensive and devastating critique of the gap between the ideals the Founders claimed for themselves and the circumstances of Black people. “I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary!” Douglass exclaimed. “Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.” He continued with an indictment: “This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”At this point, Douglass sounded as pessimistic in his assessment of the situation as Walker had, without the intimations of violence. But then he offered a bit of hope. “Notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented,” Douglass said, “I do not despair of this country.” He told his audience that he drew encouragement from the Declaration of Independence itself, from the self-improving tendencies in its institutions, and from the public sentiment of the moment, in which slavery had been thrown into crisis. Douglass and his forebears had helped manifest that crisis by using the Declaration as both a shield and a sword. He had hope, and it had been granted to him by Prince Hall and David Walker as much as by any Founding Father.Hope has been at the center of the efforts of marginalized people who have used the Declaration to make their way into full American citizenship: hope that the document’s inclusive message could overcome the reality of a society sundered by the doctrine of white supremacy. From Hall to Douglass, Black American freedom seekers were never ignorant of the reality of race. They knew that their arguments would be seen through the prism of their country’s racial hierarchy. They were counting on the idea that a nation born of aspirations could improve. Once slavery was over, Black and white citizens could begin the process of becoming Americans together.That short-lived process started in earnest during Reconstruction, as abolitionists, Radical Republicans, and the formerly enslaved themselves struggled toward a multiracial society based on the ideals announced in the Declaration. White southerners, unrepentant and unwilling to share power or social position, mounted a second rebellion to attack Reconstruction, and this time the federal government capitulated. With the establishment—and federal endorsement—of Jim Crow, the South once again built an order based on Roger Taney’s logic.It took a concerted, decades-long effort during the 20th century to bring the hope engendered by the Declaration’s ideals back into the discussion of Black America’s fate. The architects of the legal strategy for the 20th-century civil-rights movements followed in the footsteps of African Americans who’d seen opportunity in the Declaration.This was the spirit that animated Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, given at the culmination of the March on Washington in 1963. King spoke in the tradition started by the Massachusetts petitioners who attempted to hold Americans to the standards of their country’s creed. He did so at a time when the so-called second American Revolution was raising the same type of hope as the first. When the civil-rights movement finally compelled the federal government to act, the Declaration was the rhetorical dynamo. In a 1965 speech to Congress in favor of the Voting Rights Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson referenced that American creed. “Those words are a promise,” he said, “to every citizen that he shall share in the dignity of man.”A great deal has happened since those heady days. Johnson’s speech was not the end of the debate, but rather the beginning of a new chapter. Even as the 1960s civil-rights legislation was being signed into law, a counterrevolution was born, one that we now see in its maturity. As happened during the Age of Jackson, and the period of Redemption after the end of Reconstruction, the part of the citizenry that has resisted the equal citizenship of Black Americans is in political ascendancy. Although hope is always embedded in the Declaration itself, imbued by the struggle of those who’d once been held as property, we should recognize that just as freedom is part of the nation’s heritage, so is racism. Politicians have always known the value of stoking anti-Black sentiment as a means to gain power.We approach the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States with much less reason to hope that the country’s long-standing racial problems will be mitigated, or that they will not, in fact, ultimately destroy the experiment the Declaration set in motion. As devotees of the Enlightenment and believers in the scientific method know, sometimes experiments succeed, and sometimes they fail.This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “Whose Independence?”