Declaration Of Independence Analysis

The Declaration of Independence, Congress, and Presidents of the United States:
As Circumstances Have Permitted, 1776-1976

Charles A. Kromkowski
University of Virginia

With surprisingly few exceptions, students of the Declaration of Independence, the United States Congress, and the U.S. Presidency have failed to recognize or to appreciate the enduring yet dynamic relationship between the document and these two national institutions. This oversight, in part, reflects the incomplete and still contested integration of the Declaration of Independence into American political and social thought. The oversight also reflects the limitations of conventional scholarly perspectives that narrowly recognize and assess the Declaration as a singular
The first obstacle is the massive number of times U.S. Presidents and, especially, Members of Congress have publicly referred to the Declaration of Independence since 1776. The prevalence of these references and their intended public uses reflect deeply upon American political culture and its political vocabulary, but it also demands an honest admission that this particular historical reconstruction is selective and, by design, open to fuller development in the future. Fortuitously, many references and uses of the Declaration can be excluded from this analysis without apparent loss because most appear to lack a sufficient substantive depth or political consequence to warrant more detailed consideration. George W. Bush’s First Inaugural Address, for example, includes the following ceremonial reference to the document: “After the Declaration of Independence was signed, Virginia statesman John Page wrote to Thomas Jefferson: “We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong.” Other inaugural addresses and innumerable speeches by Members of Congress employ the Declaration in similarly fleeting ways and, therefore, they also can be temporarily bracketed from further
These differences emerged again and again during subsequent years as the great ideological and ultimately sectional interests struggled both mightily and subtly to reconcile their political positions with the ideas and language expressed in the Declaration. In his first Inaugural Address in 1825, for example, President John Quincy Adams auspiciously trumpeted: “The year of jubilee since the first formation of our Union has just elapsed; that of the declaration of our independence is at hand.” Adams’s “jubilee” year reference, however, suggested more than an occasion for an especially festive celebration. Within the Christian tradition, jubilee years were called periodically as opportunities for deeper spiritual reflection, pilgrimage and penitential acts. And as historian Andrew Burstein notes, the jubilee reference certainly would also have been understood as an allusion to the Hebraic ideal of releasing enslaved persons from their bondage every fiftieth year (Adams, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1825; Burstein, 2001, pp. 4,