In the Days of Yore

The Declaration of Independence was sent throughout the colonies within a couple of days…but how people personally reacted is hard to know on a large scale, what with the lack of photos, tweets and reaction videos from the 18th century.

We know that Jefferson's original draft was brought before the Committee of Five and the congress for some revisions, which were mostly about word choice, but sometimes took out whole paragraphs (Jefferson claims there was an anti-slavery paragraph that was eliminated).

Generally, congressmen liked the text, and the vast majority of what's left is his original words.

As for the public, the document was a huge deal because of what it meant—that the colonies were now their own country—so the exact language of it was probably not the focus of most non-Congress people—we're imagining that a lot of them scanned the thing, screamed "U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!" and downed some apple cider. (That's what we would have done.)

Also, remember that the real, engrossed version that we all know and love wasn't fully signed until a month later, and even then in relative secrecy because of the danger of the war and being declared a traitor to the Crown.

At the time, the document was significant for what it did rather than the content itself. The Revolutionary War was already underway when the Declaration of Independence was written, but the approval of the document turned a rebellion into a war between countries.

The Declaration never lost its immortal place in the pantheon of famous American documents. More and more copies were made starting in the early 19th century, and Lincoln brought it up long before he was president. (Source)

Not only that, but Elizabeth Cady Stanton used the document as a template for her "Declaration of Sentiments," written for the women's rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848. (Source)

Nowadays

Considering that the United States of America have been independent for well over 300 years (woo-hoo!) most of the Declaration of Independence is only browsed in history lessons (or on Shmoop, obviously), or visited in the National Archives. If people find themselves in awe, it's often because of the power that one piece of parchment had in creating the nation, and less because of the exact words.

Did most of the document sound at all familiar to you? Let's be honest here—probably not. And there's no shame in that.

There is one significant exception of course. Almost everybody knows the line, "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" (2). If you see that sentence, chances are you know exactly what it's from.

You can find it quoted in all sorts of places, from souvenir mugs to intense political discussions about the role that government should play in the lives of the American people. Americans still place of a lot of weight on the work of the Founding Fathers, and their wisdom in the formation of the nation, so their 1776 definitions of government are still considered to be extremely important today.

This one sentence has become ingrained in the American national identity, even if people don't always agree with how to interpret it. The idea of "all men are created equal" has long been held up in issues about inequality, especially racial (see Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech).

The question of what constitutes "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" has become a hot-button political issue, because how the government defines those (primarily the "pursuit of Happiness" part) can significantly change its role in the lives of Americans. It's not just a heart-wrenching Will Smith movie, but also an open-ended invitation for government to protect, or stay away from, parts of our lives that might not be directly referenced elsewhere.

The Declaration of Independence has a strong hold on American nostalgia, and appeals to people's inner patriots when looking at the text that created the country. We've been celebrating the document through the Fourth of July since 1777, and that celebration has grown from some cannons and decorations to a full-fledged commercial holiday, complete with stars-and-stripes clothing and ginormous fireworks displays.

The document is ever-present, even if people generally only know a few lines…and what it accomplished, of course. (U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!)