“a people fostered & fixed in principles of liberty” While “absolute despotism” is a more emotionally charged claim against a tyrannical monarch and therefore suited the original document’s aims perfectly, “arbitrary power” might now resonate with American citizens subjected to the rapidly proliferating regulatory whims of unelected, unaccountable executive branch czars (and Justices who craft new legislation).ģ. We can credit this revision to Benjamin Franklin who changed the words “arbitrary power” to “absolute Despotism” when referring to the “long Train of Abuses and Usurpations” perpetrated by the Declaration’s main adversary, King George III. “pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to subject them to arbitrary power” Reminding us that we are born equal and independent could have gone a long way in ensuring that, since they are both the necessary conditions of man, equality and liberty were not so intensely at odds in modern public policy.Ģ. We are equal in our ability to make choices specific to our own experience to have the best lives possible. We are not equal in individual gifts or talents. Too often it is forgotten in our society of exalted diversity, achieved at times through enforcement and compulsion, that we are equal in our freedom. It feels strange to think that it was once there. If anything, it disrupts the echo of a memorized refrain in our heads that jumps right to the next clause about unalienable rights. Yet omitting “independent” from “all men are created equal” doesn’t seem like that profound of an alteration. The same phrase “equal and independent” was also in the first sentence, being eventually changed to read as “the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”Īfter the Civil Rights era, no one would argue that “separate and equal” carries the same connotation as “equal and independent” when referring to a group of people’s station in society. “all men are created equal & independant”Īside from the fact that I am personally gratified to know that Jefferson spelled “independent” as I insisted until high school that it should be written, the loss of that second modifier in the final version is subtle. Here is a look at four that bear some relevance in contemporary America:ġ. However, several other seemingly insignificant phrases were also changed or deleted in the course of revision. When the Continental Congress ratified it on July 4, 1776, the passage in which he called the trade of human beings “execrable commerce” and an “assemblage of horrors” was gone from the document. Many people may be familiar with the section on slavery that was cut from what Thomas Jefferson labeled his “original Rough draft” of our nation’s Declaration of Independence.
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