Dead Letters

The United States, like pretty much every nation on Earth, professes ideals that it has not, does not and/or will not actually live up to as a matter of day-to-day life. Part of this is that people often see themselves as being better about attaining their ideals than they really are, and part of it is that often, those ideals aren't about the people who set them down. Rather they're pot shots at other people. Take "In God We Trust." Rather than genuinely being an assertion of faith in some Christian idea of a divine plan that would create some or another outcome, it was intended as a means of differentiating the United States from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was, as a matter of state policy, atheist (due to that whole "opiate of the masses" idea).

The same can be said of a lot of the Declaration of Independence. While it's generally considered, in American folklore, to be an assertion of the rights of free people, it's really a wrapper for a long bill of grievances against King George III. Grievances that have, for the most part, been completely forgotten by Americans at large. Most people are in the United States are aware of the sentence: "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," and that's really about it.

For a while, there was some interest in one of the grievances that didn't make it into the final document, namely:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

The general complaint is that the signing of the Declaration was delayed by two days specifically to remove this mention of the transatlantic slave trade, this by way of explaining why John Adams had predicted that July 2nd would be the date that people would celebrate. While it's true that the South Carolina delegation had objected to anti-slavery language in the document, a number of other changes were made to the document.

In any event, the penultimate grievance in the document has become a new source of controversy:

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and 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.

(Note that this was also edited from Mr. Jefferson's original, in which it was two separate passages.)

Some Native American tribes and activists have latched into this statement as a way of pointing out that the "all men" who were "created equal" didn't include them, either.

The fact of the matter is that it didn't include a lot of people. The Declaration would likely have been a much more honest document had it read "all Englishmen," since that's pretty much what most of the people involved had in mind.

"There's this moment of shocking people to the realization of how racist the Declaration of Independence was toward Indigenous peoples," Joseph M. Pierce, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, tells Axios. He takes a selfie with the shirt every July Fourth.

But that shouldn't be shocking to anyone.

Part of the problem is the way history is taught in the United States. While students tend to learn history in primary and secondary school, those levels teach a fairly simple and superficial understanding of the subject. And part of that is teaching early American history in a way that implies that the Founding Fathers of the United States set up a system that more or less matches what we have now, rather than modern American government, and society, being something that they wouldn't recognize, and likely wouldn't consider either wise or legitimate.

But a lot of this comes down to an understanding that people who hold what we now understand to be racist viewpoints are bad people, rather than simply people. And that sets up a conflict with the heroism that is broadly ascribed to people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson et cetera, especially among Conservatives, who tend to link their understanding that the United States is exceptional now, to the idea that the people who founded it were exceptional then, rather than being, for the most part, wealthy people who had material interests to look out for.

Native Americans, like Black people before them, are going to have a hard time making a dent in the heroic, romantic story that's in place concerning the founding and building of the United States, because most people, frankly, don't care. Some people are invested in the story, and what they believe it says about themselves, but for most people, it's simply an old story, about people long dead.