(This essay is the first in a series of reflections on the meaning of the Declaration of Independence in honor of its 250th anniversary. The series will run until July 4, 2026.)
Many may find this “exposition’s” form strange; it might seem to them too strict to be edifying and too edifying to be strictly scientific. As far as the latter is concerned, I have no opinion.
—Anti-Climacus, The Sickness unto Death
When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood’s alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was nothing save blood had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to devour it. He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins there would perhaps be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. But they would not be this one.
—The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy
The reward for the effacing of ourselves before the altar of sentences will be that ‘incidentally’ (what a great word)—without looking for it—we will possess a better self than the self we would have possessed had we not put ourselves in service. Sentences can save us. Who could ask for anything more?
—Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence
We are approaching the 250th anniversary of this country’s Declaration of Independence. It is both an event and a document to be remembered. Yet our memory seems so frail, and the distance between then and now seems so great. The events that guide the way we live, write, and think are very different from the events that guided the words, thoughts, and choices of those Founders long ago. So what is there to remember? We need to “re-member” in an almost literal sense: to put ourselves back together, to make ourselves whole, as one American people, with the help of our deep past. But we’re not sure that’s possible. We don’t even assume there is one American people anymore. I say “we,” because all of us, left and right and center, share this suspicion, even as we don’t share much else. We seem united mainly by what we lack, by the missing answer to our question: what is there left of America, and of the American people?
It is in this shared mind that I write the following essay. For I too share this question. It seems to me that an answer can only be found by trying to re-member in that deep and literal way. That is the work I want to do in this essay. I want to dig deep without losing simplicity, so I can share what I find with my fellow Americans, that we might re-member together. Not that I expect total agreement. I only hope that if I write clearly and honestly enough, very different people will be able to join me in the work of re-membering.
What I’m struggling to write is that I want to get to the root of things, the root of where we Americans all come from. I want to be radical. That may seem presumptuous, but I mean it in a humble way. I mean to read the Declaration of Independence, for what it is, for me and for us, as a gift handed down for the task of re-membering.
If we are reading to re-member, and not to win a scholarly argument or score a political point, then we need to read in a certain way. In 1919, the theologian Karl Barth published The Epistle to the Romans, a commentary on the Apostle Paul’s New Testament letter to the Church at Rome. As one theologian famously put it , Barth’s book landed like a “bombshell which exploded on the playground of the theologians.” Barth was aghast at the state of the world, and he was brash enough to open up the Bible and simply think about what it had to say to him amid this world. In the wake of the economic, cultural, and spiritual devastation caused by the Great War, Barth could only read Paul’s Epistle as if for the first time. He broke every scientific rule that modern scholarship had made for him, desperate to find some answer.
Today I am doing something similar with a different text. I am a scholar by training, though my specialty, if I have any, is in theology and philosophy, not American history, government, or political theory. I have learned many methods for reading texts well. I have long had a personal interest in many of the theoretical and historical issues relevant to the Declaration. I’ve read many of the Founders’ writings, the works of American political philosophers and historians, and much else. But I am not an expert ‘in this field.’ And even as I’ve long prepared for this work, and even as I acknowledge that I could never have written this essay without the work of so many, I will not refer much to that outside preparation. I wrote the first draft of this essay by hand, on paper with pencil. Then I transcribed it onto the computer. All this means I have focused, both by hand and by mind, on simply and carefully reading the Declaration itself and recording the meditations it inspires, using the simplest language I can.
I admit this strategy opens me up to some quite reasonable suspicions. To name only a few: that my Barthian audacity is neither universally shared nor always right for the moment; that comparing myself to Barth is pretentious; that I will end up reproducing ideas that are hardly original to me; that it is blasphemous to treat the Declaration with as much esteem as Barth treated the Bible. I can only address these suspicions in the same way Barth did. In a time of great societal and personal frustration, I am simply trying to understand what, if anything, this text has to say to me, and to us. I am deliberately trying not to be original or inspiring. I am only trying sincerely to pay attention. And I am publishing this attempt because I wish the same sincerity in others who are stuck, like me. So I hope that how I write will be as appropriate as whatever I discover. And I hope my readers judge me with the same sincerity with which I am trying to read the Declaration.
I also write in the lineage of New Criticism, as that method was developed in the United States, in large part at my beloved alma mater Louisiana State University, long before I attended there. This method came naturally to me, because its respect for the integrity of the text and the text’s power to “self-interpret,” in a way—to speak from within its own arrangement rather than outside circumstance—resembles the way I was taught to read the Bible as a child. As I grew up, I found the same way put into practice by theologians like Barth, Søren Kierkegaard, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, albeit in a much more intellectually rigorous fashion that was attuned to issues of modern criticism. I then saw a similar style of reading put into practice by philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss on texts besides the Bible.
I do not take an “originalist” approach. I cannot read the original writer’s mind for his intentions. Investigating the general assumptions of his era, as evidenced by dictionary definitions of words or prevailing ideas and philosophies, would reduce his text to the opinions of its time, all while raising those opinions up on a pedestal. And although the writer’s own commentary on his text is obviously an important source of interpretive insight, relying on it alone would undermine the transcendence of the text over its author. Such transcendence must be recognized in the Declaration, since the very circumstances of its writing and the heightened political nature which the document now has efface any claim to ownership by any one author, even Jefferson.
Nor do I take a “progressive” or “pragmatic” approach, by which I mean adapting the meaning and usage of the text to our present needs, knowledge, consensus and tradition. Of course, my present context affects how I read the Declaration. But a great part of why I am reading the Declaration is that my context seems to be one where the present consensus has broken up. There is hardly a “we” capable of putting the Declaration to good use, at least not one to which I feel like I belong. And most of us are probably in the same position. The present time lacks the coherent set of shared assumptions and mores that make a progressive or pragmatic approach work. Ironically, it is the lack of a sort of conserved tradition which makes such progress untenable.
I. “When in the course of human events…”
The Declaration begins with a riddle for today’s readers. The Declaration is not just a text to be read by itself. Right away, it points to a moment in time beyond the text, “in the course of human events.” It is not timeless. We cannot understand the Declaration unless we understand the moment to which it declares itself. But of course we, as readers in 2026, are 250 years removed from that moment. So how can we understand it? And if we can’t understand it, how could we come to understand the Declaration?
The riddle is the gap between history and text. The Declaration, as a text, points beyond itself to history—not only the history of some drafters 250 years ago, but our whole American history as well. This is not a unique problem. It is a riddle about how we read anything that is very important to us and has the power to define who we are and may be, having declared who we have been.
Many have tried to give several answers to this riddle, and many of our bitterest rivalries have arisen from them. Some would say that to understand the Declaration, we only need to look beneath this text, to the history underlying it. So, study the events that led to the Declaration: the combination of political, economic, and ideological forces and interests that led to that momentary combustion. Then we will know the beginning of the United States, much like we know the Big Bang which began the Universe. This answer fails to remember that we are not reading a history textbook or watching a documentary; we are reading the Declaration. The drafters and signers did not see fit to tally votes and throw away the record. Instead, they wanted a document, with some character of timelessness or at least endurance, to bear record of this event—and they wanted this document to bear the record, not any other textbook or poem or other recording (which all, like books on the Big Bang, are also texts far removed from the real historical moment and would deserve just as much suspicion). We must understand that, while the Declaration begins by pointing beyond itself to a moment “in the course of human events,” it sets itself as the one means to understand that moment. It could be wrong. But to judge that, we’d have to understand the Declaration first. And to understand something, we must first attend to it in the way it wants itself to be understood. So, for the historical text of the Declaration, there’s only one thing to do: we must read it.
But to read the Declaration well, we must also avoid a second attempted answer to the riddle. This answer pretends that all we need is the Declaration: the text itself, by itself, acts as a compact treatise of the philosophy of American-ness. Now, the text may well prove to be such a document. But we won’t find that out if we assume history is irrelevant to the meaning of the Declaration. If we hold such an assumption, then I don’t know why we would assume the Declaration matters so much to us, being as it is a historical document. We could well philosophize about our American-ness by ourselves, if we liked. Many already do. But many of us don’t. Why? Because in reading the Declaration of Independence, we are immediately impressed by the weight of history upon us. ‘Immediately,’ because as soon as we take to mind the conclusion that we must read the Declaration seriously, we read: “When in the course of human events…” The Declaration reminds us always to keep history in mind.
II. “…it becomes necessary for one People…”
We now move from one riddle to the next. The Declaration not only challenges readers with the problem of how to relate history to text. It also raises the question of what makes the United States of America one people. It claims we are such a people. But how?
To put the question in a different way: Does this “one people” make the Declaration of Independence, or does the Declaration make this “one people”? That question cuts right to the heart of the matter—that deep question of Americanness. Is an American one who can claim lineage from those who acted so long ago? Or can anyone claim to be American by submission to, or agreement with, the Declaration? Is America organic, descending by nature, as it were, from ancestors to descendants, or is it constructed, having been founded by rational choice and sustained by will?
These questions matter greatly today, as they long have. “America is an idea”—“America is a creedal nation”—“America has the soul of a church”—these slogans capture the resolute feeling, long encultured, fertilized by Abraham Lincoln, planted by some Founding Fathers, that it is the Declaration which makes America one people. And these same slogans have come under attack by statesmen as highly ranked as the current Vice President. Recent anxieties, many of them genuine and heartfelt and rational, over globalization, technology, and mass immigration have inspired the second thought, long repressed, that America consists of a people in a particular place and time, planted in its own soil and set within its boundaries, before it should claim any ideas about itself with which any and all might agree. Even if these ideas are as august as those expressed in the Declaration, it was Americans who wrote them.
It does not take a theorist to understand the very real stakes of this debate. Today, you only need to read the news to see them.
How does the Declaration answer this very contested question? I think it will take the rest of this essay to find out. (The question is largely why I’m writing it, and I don’t yet know the answer.) For now, I want only to appreciate the gravity of it. The question attests to the need for roots as well as reason, openness as well as closure, depth no less than breadth. None of these longings should be met with disdain. We all have them. And we all naturally hope they might be satisfied, if not wholly then in part, by our country, nation, and people. But what is “our” people? That we so quickly ask such a question attests to the great danger, the quiet but present disharmony sulking in our air, that we are not one peopleat all, not today. But it also attests to the problem America has always had: we cannot easily answer the question of who we are, because we do not have a primeval, unthought origin—a common stock, a god-born myth, a language implanted from time immemorial, on which to depend. We aren’t Finns. We are a people, before we are one people, of questions, and so a people of crisis. Perhaps that is why the Declaration does affirm that, “in the course of human events,” it is “one people” which makes the Declaration. So the people makes the declaration after all. But they do so only when, in that moment in time, “it becomes necessary…” as a matter of crisis.
III. “…for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…”
Above I wrote that Americans are first, if they are anything, a people of crisis, and this is why. America was declared, and born, not in slow organic growth but out of decisive rupture. The bonds that make America “one people” are forged by dissolving the “political bands” that had connected them to another. None can deny that America is founded upon a breach. And just for that reason, the foundation of America is, then as now, unstable.
And yet this phrase must also be understood more subtly, without diminishing the harshness of it. The dissolving of bands is not arbitrary. The agency of this separation does not belong to the signers of the Declaration, nor even to the people whom they represent. The subject of this whole clause is not human at all. It is unstated. If the English language had such a form, we could say the subject is “the middle voice.” The action is done by those who are not themselves the chief actors. In this case, the one people must “dissolve the political bands,” but it is not the one people who has demanded it. Instead, it is the very “course of human events,” in which now “it becomes necessary” to make so harsh a break. The ‘agent,’ if we can even name it for now, is necessity.
That’s not just fatalistic nonsense or obscurity. We must keep this necessity in mind for many reasons. Among them: There is a tendency, in those who favor the rational and decisive nature of America’s founding, to give far too much credit to human agency. And often this credit esteems human will more than human reason, even when it thinks it means the latter. If we succumb to this tendency, then we undermine the importance of what some once called chance, others called Fate, and still others Providence, and all now at least admit as context or circumstance. The Declaration turns into an isolated manifesto of ideas, and America becomes a philosophical proposition only. But it was not only, or even primarily, ideas that created this “one people.” It was the course of human events which made it necessary for one people to arise out of its break from another. At the very least, this means the signers of the Declaration were not titanic. Before they found themselves free, they found themselves responsible. To whom? Bare fate, chance, necessity alone, Providence? The Declaration will answer later.
Until then, we must recognize, in the Declaration’s sense of responsibility to necessity, the consequence that America’s founding does share something with the other, comparatively more ‘organic’ emergences of other peoples. Both share the fact that they emerged not entirely on their own, neither by the whims of one Great Man nor by the collective power of one committee, nor the unity of one decisive spirit. Of course, some combination of all the above contributed. But the whole became, and remains, greater than its parts, and greater than its rational part. This is what I think people mean when they say ‘organic,’ in its best sense, in reference to nations and cultures. Not to banish human rationality and agency, but to understand that there is something higher than our arbitrary reason or will at work in shaping our community and our sense of who we are. We are creatures before we are creators, given before we can make or take. And it is this fact which puts us, beyond our consent, into a place and time we can call home, because it first called us.
The Declaration recognizes this given character of America. That is why it first names the necessity of one people—who have been made so not by whim or deliberation but by circumstance—to respond to the moment by dissolving “the political bands which have connected them with another.” Political bands—not fraternal or cultural, ethnic or racial or religious. For somehow, in some way at a point in time, there had already become two entirely separate people, not one. And now the Declaration of that fact is necessary.
IV. “…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…”
Now we are soon approaching the part of the Declaration that makes general claims about what’s what. I have cautioned against treating this work as a philosophical treatise, at least in too simplistic a sense. But such care can’t ignore the plain fact that the Declaration does state general principles about the nature of political life, ones which anyone can understand as long as he pays good attention. So now that we have come to such principles, let’s pay such attention:
“…and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station…” The Declaration holds to the principle of divided sovereignty of nations. It envisions a world of diverse peoples in diverse places, governed by diverse powers. Are these diverse peoples split along lines of ethnicity, language, or other boundaries of culture? Are the several powers republican, monarchical, local or imperial? The Declaration takes care not to say. And that is important because defining further would already constrict the great diversity envisioned. Only this does the Declaration clarify: the “powers,” however they may be constituted, are each entitled to a “separate and equal station.” A power is to be given its own station, and that station is to be equal to all the others. Now, if we remember the preceding clause, then we must acknowledge such a station is entitled to “one people” which, now by necessity dissolving its political bands with another, is assuming that entitlement. The station is for the people. The Declaration does envision that each people—in whatever circumstance that makes it one people—is entitled to its own separate and equal station of sovereignty among the powers of the earth. One people, one power. Here there is no other way to put it: it is a principle of nationalism.
Immediate clarification is in order. The Declaration does not demand every power be national-istic. It does not even demand that one people always and ever have its own national government. It has already admitted that this people had once shared “political bands” with another people, and only now times have demanded change. So, for example, if a people wants to join a union of nations for good reasons, let them. That would be their right—so long as they could retain, in such a union, their separate and equal station, that is, they could leave. The people retains its political sovereignty, and though it may arrange and align itself in whatever way with or without whomever else, it may never, or should never, give up that separate and equal status among others, which is its right.
We must appreciate this national principle because, as we shall see, it is the very basis on which the Declaration justifies the independent status of the American people before the other peoples of the earth. Far from tending towards isolation in all the worst ways, this sense of ‘nationalism’ makes common appeal to the unique—separate and equal—dignity of each people and each power of the earth. In calling the Americans one people, with its own power and entitlement to its own station, the Declaration acknowledges the right of every other people and power to do the same.
I have dwelt on the ‘separate’ part, now I must address ‘equal.’ We will deal with this word a lot. At the outset I must emphasize: we cannot think of equality here in the mathematical sense—the only way we seem to understand it nowadays, as if I were unequal to anyone not 5’8”, or any country of 10 million would be unequal to the country of 30 or 300 million. If the Declaration meant equality this way, we could never take it seriously because it would be false. We always see, by that measure, only inequality between every single organic creature. The Declaration does not mean equality in the quantitative sense for the simple reason that any numerically equal thing is not really separate from whatever is its equal. One is one. Two 5’8” people are the exact same statistic in a graph of heights. To be separate, one must be different, and so mathematically unequal, distinct.
So what then does the Declaration mean by equality of the separate and equal stations and powers of the earth? The Founders were not so foolish as to think the Russian Empire was equal in might or population to the British. And again, they well understood that “peoples” consisted of many different sorts. Not every people was ethnically monolithic. Some were. Others, like the British, were bound by island geography but contained Welsh, English, Scots, Ulster Scots. Others on the European continent lived even closer together to another rival people, and yet they saw themselves nonetheless distinct from them. So what made these members of the vast diversity of people equal? They are entitled to separate and equal status, not by might or ethnic homogeneity or even geography, but by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
At this point, my choice of how to read the Declaration is going to get most clear and crucial. How can we understand such loaded terms as “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” today? Especially since they meant so much then, and still much now, even as so much has drastically changed in the sense we have of these words, without our knowing the half of it. An “originalist” would argue we should understand these terms as the writers intended them. So that would carry us into the hard double-work of understanding the history of ideas and reading the minds of people we can no longer interview. A pragmatist or “progressive” would say we are free to understand these terms however we may need to now, and especially to do the good we want in order to make the world a better place. Alas, I’m at the point where I no longer even feel sure of who “we” are, let alone what we should do. I do know that “we” are hardly united in our ideas about Nature, Laws of Nature, or Nature’s God. Now all I have is the Declaration itself to read. So I choose (in a manner that will probably be called a “textualist” approach) to see what the text itself has stated so far, and will state later, about these majestic ideas.
What is Nature? Its Laws? Its God? So far, in just half a sentence, the Declaration has pointed to the “course of human events” in which “it becomes necessary” for “one people” to assume its own “station.” I have dwelt on the fact that all this occurs in a sort of middle voice. It is the “course” of events, even necessity itself, which is driving the action of the Declaration. So I will begin (but not end) answering the questions above in this way: “Nature” is that mysterious course of events, that flow of time, in which people come to be and pass away; it is history, in a deep sense, lived forwards and not looked at backwards. We’re always living in this history, but often we don’t know it, and usually we only come to know it when “human events” happen that force us to respond. We are not in control of this history. We are subject to time, and that is why we respond to it and not the reverse. I don’t mean anything too elaborate by this ‘definition’ of Nature. I only want to give it a rough-and-ready, familiar sense that we all understand without too much thought. We know we are subject to the course of events, human and inhuman. We sense that we are thrown into this moment. That’s all. And that’s all the Declaration has given us—so far—of what it means by “Nature.”
Even so, this ‘definition’ of Nature is not capricious. The Declaration does not think Nature is blind or random. Nature, though mysterious, is stable, at least enough to have “Laws.” And these Laws govern the allotment of peoples to their separate and equal stations of power, each in its time and place in the course of human events. These Laws are, apparently, clear enough to be perceived by any people willing to appeal to them before others, as the Americans are now doing. And these Laws are at least not evil. They aim, after all, for there to be separate and equal allotments for the peoples of the earth. If that is not an eschatological arrangement, it is at least a sort of ideal. It implies a certain sense of regularity, even justice, to Nature. Now what, specifically, are these Laws? The Declaration does not yet specify. But for now, I define them as the mysterious, but orderly, forms that govern the coming and going of peoples in the course of human events. And a people may appeal to these Laws of Nature before other peoples when the time to assume its own just portion of the earth has come. Therefore, the Laws of Nature are shared in some implicit sense by all, and owned by none.
So we have a mysterious process called “Nature,” its glimpses of just regularity governing apportionment of peoples the “Laws of Nature.” And now we come to “Nature’s God.” No word is so important or contested, if it should mean anything at all, as God. And our word is only a shadow of its substance. How could we even begin to know what “God” means, here in the Declaration or anywhere else? Again, we must be patient and let the words of the Declaration itself be our guide. The text will prove to put great weight upon “God,” albeit quietly. Already the Declaration had left us the question of who, or Who, is the agent directing the course of human events. Necessity, we briefly answered. Now the Declaration picks up again to answer further: that agent is not an impersonal fate, a scientific necessity, a lesser demon, a random chance or the powers of men—it is God. God is the Head of Nature and Nature’s Laws. God directs the course of time, with just enough consistency, and God entitles each people—including the American people—to its “separate and equal station among the powers of the earth.” Therefore, the ultimate general principle of the Declaration of Independence is theological. In appealing to its general idea of reality, what it thinks is so, the Declaration calls upon God and how God relates to people.
The reader may disagree about that, or even feel unsettled by it. At this point, all I hope to argue is that the Declaration, in describing the course of events and the Laws of Nature, intuits that there is something deeply personalabout how human beings are subject to history. We are not in control, but neither are we alone. There is Some Holy—What? Personal, Whatever or Whoever That Is—Who directs our history, mysteriously but not capriciously. Many of us may struggle to feel that way about our own lives, but history suggests most of us actually come to that feeling rather naturally. We often feel thankful, or we complain, about life—to Whom? We may not have a good idea, but we feel enough that Someone is listening. The Declaration, even if it makes no more of God than this (and I think it does), shares this general feeling. One reader may think that’s far too little to make about God. Another might think it’s already too much. But let us only start there, where the Declaration does.
To summarize: one people, the American people, has found itself “in the course of human events,” the flow of time (“Nature”), now existing as “one people,” by necessity dissolving its “political bands” with another. Now this people is assuming for itself the duties and dignities that are necessary to have a “separate and equal station” among the other “powers of the earth.” This people is “entitled” to such a station, because as one people, America recognizes the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” that entitle them to that privilege. This one people has its time, its place, its way of being—and the hunch that God is appointing this people to its status, as God does for all other peoples in their times.
Why put these points in so many words? We haven’t even finished the sentence yet! Now we can finish it.
V. “…a decent respect to the opinion of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
The forming of the United States, however much it owes to some arbitrary choices here, some coincidences there, motives as impulsive and base as any found in human history, is not unreasonable, at least according to these Founders. Revolutions, history shows, most often make for anarchy. The Declaration of Independence is enough evidence that America would not, should not, have such a making.
The Declaration appeals to the separate and equal status of its place within, not apart from, the powers of the earth—at least with respect of their “opinions.” America owes at least this “decent respect.” And this is not only a declaration to the people, the British, from whom the Americans are separating. It is for all “mankind” as well. The Declaration assumes all people are dignified and capable enough to hear the Americans’ case. In making such an assumption, the Declaration marks the character of the people who are doing the declaring. It shows what this people thinks about the nature of all other people. And it also inspires, because it assumes, a sense of decency in the rest of mankind.
This is very important. The ideas we’ve already met—the separate and equal status of nations, the entitlement of these nations by the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God, the implicit belief that necessity itself is calling upon this one people to answer for itself—these are not only ideas for anyone and everyone in a simplistic sense. They are, first, what hold the character of the American people together as one people. In declaring these apparently universal, general ideas, the Declaration is in fact declaring just as much what belongs to the American mind, or even soul, if we could use that word.
But just so, these unique aspects of the American soul extend to the American treatment of all others. This American mind, as we will soon see, holds there is a common humanity and a court of common opinion which both deserve respect. For a people to assume its separate and equal status, it owes all other people a public notification and explanation of so grave an act as the political separation which such assumption demands.
And yet, this court of common opinion does not rule over the actions of this one people. The “opinions of mankind” are not themselves the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” For the one people has already been formed by these laws and this God. It is already assuming its separate and equal place among the nations, and this is not primarily its own initiative, since it has become necessary to do so. The opinions of mankind demand only respect of notification. Unlike the Laws of Nature, they do not entitle.
This fact is so crucial because, these days, universal (read: scientific) consensus and laws of nature are so often confused for each other. And since there is no final universal consensus, those who commit such an error then commit the even worse mistake of thinking there are no laws of nature. Then, majority opinion is left as the only measure. And that measure is a tyranny of numbers, nothing more or less. The Declaration has nothing to do with that. It knows far higher laws, and a higher Judge, than opinion. In what follows, then, we must understand that the claims of the Declaration are not appeals to common opinion. Rather, they are declarations, even testimonies, before common opinion, of what this American people has as its cause to be one people.
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