The Science of the Declaration

Appreciating an endangered legacy

By Ted Widmer

A couple thoughts heading into our 249^th Fourth of July, since the great day in 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was approved (most of the founders signed it after the fact). It is worth commemorating its creation as a daring miracle of both literary art and science.

First, we should remember the sheer courage required to sign the Declaration. By doing so, the 56 signers were publicly listing their names at a time when English justice included the threat of being rounded up and deported for swift, severe, and often sadistic punishment—or as the Declaration says, “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.”

But the founders were not intimidated. They were men of conviction. Their entire lives had been shaped by the joys of reading, writing and speaking, and the work of preparing the Declaration involved all three. As John Adams wrote, “Let us dare to read, speak, think, write…Let every sluice be open’d and set a flowing.”

The Declaration was both an intellectual and a political achievement. No nation had ever been invented with a proclamation of rights, or with the shocking idea that governments derive their powers from a thin abstraction called “the consent of the governed.” Nations had never been invented on the basis of an “idea” at all. They had simply evolved, after centuries of fighting between warlords, into domination by monarchs who tried to persuade the people that they had a divine right to rule.

That belief was going wobbly in the late 18^th century—particularly among scientists and other pragmatic thinkers, who believed in gathering factual evidence to prove their theories right or wrong. The founders were nothing if not realists.

To a surprising degree, the authors of the Declaration were trained in scientific thinking—particularly the Declaration’s main author, Thomas Jefferson, and his two chief editors, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. The document’s creation was an exercise in enlightenment even before Jefferson put pen to paper, with all three men exchanging views about the purpose of the document, its expected line of reasoning, and the facts that would be needed to lay the evidence before a candid world.

John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 (detail).

The necessity of evidence—of proof—pervades the Declaration. It begins with an opening paragraph justifying its existence, by arguing that it is proper for a people separating from another to explain themselves. Specifically, they should “declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” Those causes are detailed with precision in 27 specific indictments of King George III.

Central to the indictments is the charge of a recent assault on America’s rights. These rights are not presented as abstract. They are concrete, and they belong to the signers—to all people, in fact. They are enumerated in the most famous sentences in the Declaration:

“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.”

These sentences have a strong scientific pedigree. The very word “self-evident” radiates a scientist’s confidence. The truths in question are not merely “evident,” they are “self-evident”—so obvious that anyone looking will instantly be convinced of their existence. The historian Carl Becker speculated that Benjamin Franklin inserted the “self” before “evident”; it was the kind of expression a lifelong inventor would have liked.

The word “equal” is also worth considering. It did not mean that humans were equal in size, or intellect—it meant that they were equal in their right to enjoy the basic freedoms that all human beings are born with. The phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” was heavily influenced by another, “life, liberty and property,” used by a writer they all admired, John Locke, who was a physician in addition to his many other talents.

“Equal” is also a mathematical word, and the founders were influenced by their training in arithmetic, geometry and physics. They were drawn to certain shapes—the District of Columbia was originally designed as a nearly-perfect square, thanks to a corner in Alexandria that was later ceded back to Virginia. The Greek mathematician Euclid was a favorite of Jefferson (and later of Lincoln), and many of his writings explored the nature of equality—how to prove that two entities were in fact the same size. One of Euclid’s maxims was, “Things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to each other.”

This ideal would prove enduringly relevant as the new government came together. In the Senate, states would have equal representation. Equal rights for individuals was a harder problem, but almost a century later, when the grim work of the Civil War was completed, the 14^th amendment promised “equal protection of the laws” to all citizens.

Another famous phrase in the Declaration is “the Laws of Nature.” Jefferson argues, in the first paragraph, that a nation may become independent because of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” “The Laws of Nature” was a phrase that frequently recurred in the writings of Isaac Newton, whose writings (especially Opticks) fascinated Jefferson and Franklin.

It was one thing to declare independence; it was quite another to achieve it. Thanks to the alliance with the French, the Americans astonished the British by avoiding defeat. That alliance owed a great deal to Franklin, whose scientific prestige was crucial to winning French favor. A French statesman, Turgot, would later speak for many when he said of Benjamin Franklin, “he snatched lightning from the sky, and the scepter from tyrants,” as if the American Revolution was just another of Franklin’s famed experiments. Perhaps it was—George Washington called it the “Great Experiment,” as if was still a bit in doubt, and we were only in the preliminary stages of something that needed some time to prove itself.

For most of the last 249 years, the experiment has felt like it could be defined, empirically, as an extraordinary success. But lately there has been evidence of a troubling ambivalence towards ideas and ideals the founders held dear. In recent months, there has been a decided turn against science, with massive cuts to federal funding for research on diseases, pandemics, and the building blocks of life itself.

That seems like a strange way to honor “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Especially with China doubling its spending on STEM education between 2012 and 2021, and the United States slipping to 12^th in the world in high school proficiency in science.

A new budget proposed for the National Institutes of Health would reduce its funding by 40%. The National Science Foundation has seen a 51% cut in grants funded so far this year. Crippling cuts are coming to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Every part of the government that looks into climate change has been eviscerated. At the EPA, brave signatories of a “Declaration of Dissent” honored the founders in their own way, by standing up for the science they believe in.

And last month, the Trump administration proposed the largest cut in NASA’s history, a reduction of 25 percent.

That would have disappointed the founders. They were star-gazers, and that too is something we might reflect on this Independence Day. When the Declaration was first read in Philadelphia, it was read by a speaker on a wooden stage that had been built as a crude astronomical observatory, to help local scientists watch the Transit of Venus in 1769. The work to coordinate observations between the 13 colonies had done a great deal to bring Americans closer together, in the years leading up to 1776.

You could almost say they created a new country by following the science.

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Ted Widmer is the author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington. He is editing a volume on the history of the Declaration of Independence for the Library of America.