notes, documents, and dates from a lifetime of reading about the United States
The documents themselves, or the parts of them worth carrying around. Added to the site in the spring of 2020, when everyone was home and everyone was reading history.
Most of these texts are in every school anthology in the country, and every year at least one student would ask me where the actual words were, not the summary, not the textbook's two-sentence excerpt with the ellipsis in the middle of it. So here. The rule for this page is the rule I used in the classroom: quote the document, then get out of its way. My commentary comes after each passage, clearly separated, and it is worth exactly what you paid for it.
For clean full-text copies, the National Archives and the Library of Congress are the two places I send people. Everything below is quoted accurately; the spelling and capitalization are kept as they appear in the standard modern transcriptions (18th-century spelling would add charm and subtract readability, and we would all spend the hour on "chuse").
Passed by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. The drafts went through eighty-six recorded changes, and the committee edited Jefferson's text with what I can only call enthusiasm. The two passages that carried the future were these.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
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.
The Declaration of Independence, in Congress, July 4, 1776
Note what the first paragraph actually is: a manners paragraph. A "decent respect to the opinions of mankind" means the document is written for an audience, and the audience was not primarily the king. It was France, and Holland, and anyone else who might bankroll or recognize a rebellion. The list of grievances that follows (twenty-seven of them, mostly accurate, one or two unfair) is a legal brief, built to prove the "causes which impel them" in front of that audience.
And the second paragraph, the one on the wall, was mostly written by one thirty-three-year-old Virginian. The "self-evident" phrase replaced "sacred and undeniable" in a draft edit. Franklin's suggestion, probably.[1] For the next two hundred and fifty years, every expansion of the American promise (abolition, suffrage, civil rights) has consisted of people holding that sentence up and asking the country to read it again, more slowly this time. Lincoln built the Gettysburg Address on it. Douglass built a career on it. It is the most consequential sentence in American English.
Then, the ending, which students always want to skip to:
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
The Declaration of Independence, closing lines
That is a sentence with interest attached. Several of the signers lost property; a few lost their lives; one was hauled before a British court in his nightshirt. The mythology has done some embellishing over the years (the "they signed their own death warrant" school of filmmaking), but the pledge was real money and real risk, and the men signing it were, by and large, the comfortable ones.
Written in a closed room in Philadelphia through the summer of 1787, signed September 17, ratified by 1788. The most-quoted single sentence first:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Preamble to the Constitution, 1787
"More perfect" is not a flourish. The Articles of Confederation, the first attempt, were a mess on purpose: the country had just escaped one strong central government and was in no mood to build another. The Preamble is a repair job, and "the People" (not "the States") is the bolt the repair hangs on. Then the two working parts of Article I, Section 8, the engine room of the whole government; you can teach half a semester of law from these thirty words:
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 (the Commerce Clause)
The Congress shall have Power… To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 18 (the Necessary and Proper Clause)
Almost every argument about the size of the federal government since 1790 has been an argument between those two clauses and the Tenth Amendment. From the amendments, the ones I quote in class until the students can recite them back in self-defense:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
First Amendment, 1791
No person shall… be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Fifth Amendment, 1791 (in part)
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Thirteenth Amendment, 1865
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
Fourteenth Amendment, 1868 (in part)
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Nineteenth Amendment, 1920
Notice the pattern in the amendments after the Bill of Rights: the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth (1870, the vote "regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude") were the second founding, the war's settlement written into text. The Nineteenth took another fifty years of agitation after that. The Constitution gets amended by people who were told the amendment was impossible, which is worth remembering every time someone tells you an amendment is impossible.
Delivered November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the soldiers' cemetery at Gettysburg, after a two-hour speech by Edward Everett. Here it is entire; you have walked past it on a wall somewhere.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863
Three remarks, and then I will get out of its way, as promised. First: "four score and seven" is eighty-seven, which puts 1776 in the sentence without naming it, and puts the Declaration's "all men are created equal" in the second breath, which was the whole argument. Second: five manuscript copies exist in Lincoln's hand (he gave them away; the Bliss copy, which I have followed above, is the standard one).[2] Third: the world did note and did remember what he said there, so the one factual prediction in the speech was wrong, and it is the only part I am glad he got wrong.
From the first women's rights convention, held at Seneca Falls, New York, July 19–20, 1848. Read the second paragraph next to the Declaration's and hear what they were doing; it was not an accident, it was an argument:
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls, 1848
Two words inserted, and a century of consequences. The convention's resolution on the franchise passed by the narrowest of margins (Frederick Douglass argued for it), and the movement kept that list of grievances going for seventy-two years, until the Nineteenth Amendment above. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was thirty-two; she would work on it for the rest of her life, die in 1902, and miss the amendment by eighteen years. That is how long these things take, when they take at all.
Written by Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1963, in the margins of a newspaper, in a cell, in reply to eight white clergymen who had asked him to wait. One line for the pocket, out of a long letter that deserves the whole hour:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963
Every one of these documents works the same way, when you line them up like this: someone holds the country to its own sentence. 1776, 1863, 1848, 1963, each pointing back at the last one. The archive is not a museum. It is a toolbox, and people keep reaching into it. That was the point of making students memorize where the box was kept.
Sources on this page: National Archives transcripts for the founding documents and the amendments; the Library of Congress for Seneca Falls; the King Institute at Stanford for the Birmingham letter. Spelling follows the modern transcriptions.