National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America

In this episode of Liberty + Leadership, Roger Ream sits down with historian and author Michael Auslin to discuss his new book, “National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America.” As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, Auslin explores the remarkable history of the Declaration of Independence, not only as the nation's founding document but also as a living symbol that has shaped American identity for nearly two and a half centuries. 

Together, they discuss the Declaration's origins, its philosophical foundations in natural rights, natural law and the Anglo-American constitutional tradition, and the ways its meaning has evolved throughout American history. Auslin explains how figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. drew upon the Declaration's principles to advance their own visions of liberty and equality while arguing that the document's most enduring message is one of national unity. 

The conversation also explores the upcoming America 250 celebration, the state of civic education in the United States and why a renewed understanding of the Declaration remains essential to preserving the American experiment in self-government.

The Liberty + Leadership Podcast is hosted by TFAS president Roger Ream and produced by Podville Media. If you have a comment or question for the show, please email us at podcast@TFAS.org. To support TFAS and its mission, please visit TFAS.org/support.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFES alumni, faculty, and friends who are making an impact today. I'm your host, Roger Reim. I'm very pleased to welcome Dr. Michael Oslin to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast. Michael is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Michael is an historian and a writer. He is the author of several books, including the most recent title National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America. Michael publishes the Potomac Packet, a Substack newsletter that focuses on America's and Washington, D.C.'s histories. Michael is currently a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a fellow at the Society of Cincinnati, and also serves on the board of the American Ditchley Foundation. Michael, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Roger.

Why Write A Declaration History

SPEAKER_00 1:06

We're in America 250 this year. And so it's easy to just try to capitalize on that by writing a book called The Declaration of Independence. So what motivated you? The money and the opportunity to write it or something else? And I know the answer because you write about it in the book. But tell me about why you were motivated to write this book.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Well, I had spent most of my career looking at America abroad and trying to understand our history and our interests, our values abroad. That's what I taught when I was at Yale and what I did in some of the think tanks and what I did starting at Hoover. But at a certain point, I think the questions that I was asking, I wanted more to find out the answers looking back inward at home. You know, that I felt at least somewhat I had a handle on why we did certain things abroad, but maybe less on the motivations that we were having coming from our own historical experience. And I thought one of the ways to do that was actually look at Washington, D.C. as a capital and how decisions are made and how policy is formulated, but the people and the networks and the ideas. And to do that, you have to learn a little bit about the history of the city. So I was down at the National Archives and stumbled across the Declaration, which I hadn't seen for years, really. Talked to some people, heard some stories, realized I didn't really know anything about our own founding document. And it occurred to me as well that when I had been looking abroad, other countries don't have founding documents, but we have this unique moment that we can chart in essence when we began as a nation. So I went to look for a book on the Declaration, and there wasn't one. And so that really is what started me off was to say, what has been America's story through the history of the Declaration?

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Well, I found it a fascinating book. I uh feel like I got a pretty good civic education growing up. And I've always had an interest in the founding, the founding fathers, and I've been reading more and more as we approach America 250, attending conferences on America 250. But I learned a lot from your book. So congratulations on writing a great book. Thank you. Your book tells about the number of lives that our Declaration has had, and you walk through that throughout our history. And you also focus both on the document itself, the physical document, and what has transpired with that over our history, as well as those ideas. So maybe I'll just ask first, you know, what do you hope readers will take from your book?

Liberty Equality And The Unity Claim

SPEAKER_01 3:28

There's a couple of things. The first one is that no one, and again, this was just my own desire to read, no one had written a complete history of the Declaration. Most of the books, and wonderful books, focus on 1776. Some will focus on the Civil War. Most of them focus on the thoughts and ideas, which obviously is critical to who we are as Americans. But no one had written a complete history of the way that the ideas have evolved, the way that the actual physical parchment has survived, the way that it has become a part of our popular culture, and tracing it through all these different eras in American history. So, on the one hand, I really wanted just sort of the soup to nuts version of the Declaration, and that didn't exist. So that's one level is I just, there's so many wonderful stories and so many incredible experiences that the document has had, that the ideas have had, that I wanted to bring those back into contemporary discussion. That's one thing. The second thing, though, is that as I worked on the book, normally the way that people talk about the ideas within the document is that there's two claims. Sometimes they see them as competing, sometimes they see them as complementary. Those are the liberty claim and the equality claim. You know, the liberty claim, consent of the governed, free, and independent states, why we're breaking away from Britain, and then the equality claim, obviously, you know, we hold these truths to be self-evident. All men are created equal. And certainly those are true. Jefferson himself, I think, saw them as complementary as two sides of the same coin. But as I went through the history of the document and I read it more carefully and then read how it was interpreted and how it was expressed through different eras, I saw over both of those an umbrella that is a unity claim. And what I really want people to take away from this book and from the declaration is that it is our great statement of unity. It's why the first line opens up when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to sever the bonds that have connected them to another. One people. Jefferson originally writes a people, and then it's changed to one people. It's why Jefferson writes, we hold these truths to be self-evident, not the Congress or me or whoever it is, but we Americans hold these truths to be self-evident. Congress representing the American people, their calling into being. And why the founders pledge to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. They don't pledge it to the new country, they don't pledge it to their states, they pledge it to each other. What the declaration really is is a covenant. It's a covenant among Americans, that these very fractious, disparate colonies with different traditions and sometimes religions and cultures, yet form one people. So it's a covenant among them, and it's a covenant between Americans and God. And they're very explicit about this. And all of that, as covenants are, is meant to unify. And when you look at every group in American history that appealed to it, with the one exception, of course, of the Confederacy and the Civil War, but every group, whether it's women's rights activists, whether it's abolitionists, uh, whether it's temperance movement, whether it's immigrants, even quite frankly, socialists early in the 19th century and the like, they are looking at it as a unifying document, meaning they're not claiming separatism. They're not claiming special treatment or enclaves. They are claiming to be part of this great people, that they want fully to be Americans, and they are appealing back to the document and often mimicking it in their own writings, that this is their right as well. And so that's really what I want people to take away from it.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

The purpose of the declaration

Independence Justification And Foreign Aid

SPEAKER_00 7:12

was to justify our separation from England. And sometimes it's dismissed as it was solely written as a justification for independence, nothing more than that. What do you think of the argument that it's really just intended to be a justification for independence, nothing more than that?

SPEAKER_01 7:29

Aaron Powell I think that was part of it. And it works again at at least two levels. The first level is to justify why we were separating, not because we were doing something new, but because we were preserving our inherited age-old freedoms as British, English, North Americans. This has been going on for 170 years almost by the time of the declaration. So on the one hand, it's not to claim our rights, it is to say we have these rights. And in order to protect them, we have to separate. And in essence, we have to change everything to preserve everything. So, yes, it's that justification. But it also works at another level, and that's an interior level, where it is designed and meant to unify Americans. Much later in life, John Adams says that at the time of the declaration, one-third of Americans were in favor of independence, one-third were opposed, and in good American fashion, one third didn't have an opinion. Whatever happened was fine with them. And so you needed this declaration to inspire the Patriots, to hopefully sway the undecided, and maybe even to peel off some of those loyalists. But you had to make people, in essence, choose sides. We're losing the war. We need aid. And that's another, by the way, another purpose of the declaration, very explicitly, is we have to be able to justify why we're asking for aid from countries like France and Spain. You can't do it if all you want is to be part of Britain again. That's easy. Just lose the war and you'll be part of Britain again. You don't have to worry. But if you are going to make these claims of you standing alone in the world, you have to make it very explicit. So there is absolutely an external element to this declaration that was very much part of this. But the second part is to unify and link Americans. And by the way, those charges that we don't read today, but which are very interesting, some of which are overwrought, some of which are, you know, they're not always exactly accurate, but they were meant to say to Americans, this is what we all are suffering. Whether one thing happened up in New Hampshire and another thing happened down in Georgia, this is happening to us as Americans. And so even the charges are meant, I think, in a fashion as a unifying element for the colonists.

Lincoln Recasts The Declaration’s Meaning

SPEAKER_00 9:52

You write about how it took on different lives throughout our history. First of maybe first, but uh one big important event was Abraham Lincoln using it when he was president, most notably at Gettysburg, that we are a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to this proposition is found in the Declaration of Independence. Talk a little bit about how that was, in a sense, somewhat of a transformation or an ad or a building on of what the Declaration meant.

SPEAKER_01 10:20

Well, I think what we saw during the 19th century is that the initial interpretations of the document really as a sort of liberty document, right? It just how we talked about it. You know, this was the great instrument of our liberty, and now it's inspiring other nations, for example, in Latin America to declare their own independence, that begins to change roughly around the 1820s. At one level, we stress much more the idea that this actually is an inspiration around the world. So we take great pride in that. But it's also the moment when you begin to see these other groups that I had mentioned earlier make their claims on the document to become fully American, starts with socialists Robert Owen, 1826. It moves to women suffragists such as Elizabeth Caddy Stanton later. It's going to be Susan B. Anthony, very much with the abolitionists Frederick Douglass, people like David Walker, you know, William Lloyd Garrison. And it reaches its apotheosis with Abraham Lincoln. So by the time of Lincoln, there had been this movement to where the document was seen as a justification for repairing injustices, for creating that more perfect union that the Constitution talks about. And for Lincoln, it becomes the central source of his political philosophy and his political beliefs, which he himself says, you know, in Philadelphia on the way to his inauguration, stops at Independence Hall. And he says, I never had a thought, a political thought, that did not emanate from the Declaration. For Lincoln, what he calls the deformations in American society, most notably coming from the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which said that if the people vote for slavery, then slavery is okay. That was when the consent of the governed concept begins to change and Lincoln begins to attack it. And then, secondly, the Dred Scott case of 1857, in which the Supreme Court rules and even goes beyond the merits of the case, to rule not only that slaves are not citizens, were never considered such, that blacks were not considered citizens, that they are literally property. These are not just irreconcilable with the spirit of the declaration, they are intolerable with the spirit of the declaration. And so he begins, he's done it a little bit earlier, but it's really at that moment that he begins this recasting of the declaration into this equality claim, above all, for the purposes of liberty, and really changes how Americans themselves understand the document ever since that moment.

Biblical Natural Law And English Roots

SPEAKER_00 12:51

You have a description here that I think captures exactly what I've believed here, that the Declaration was biblically inspired, steeped in natural law, and drawn from England's constitutional traditions. Even very recently, I was at a forum with someone who was asked about, you know, was this did the Founding Fathers draw it all on religious concepts for the Declaration? It was dismissed right away as, oh no, they were all agnostics or deists, and there was no religious inspiration in the Declaration. And others might neglect, I think, the strong English tradition that they were claiming the rights as Englishmen. Our visiting fellow Daniel Hannon, who's a lord in the House of Lords in the UK, likes to point out that Paul Revier didn't shout the British are coming, the British were coming, because they were all British. They may have said the regulars were coming or the red coats or something, but not that the British were coming. But could you discuss a little bit those traditions, the biblical inspiration, the natural law, and the rights as Englishmen coming from Magna Carta and elsewhere? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Yeah, absolutely. And I think you know that that really sort of sums it up. And it's at the Continental Congress, Constitutional Convention, of course, a little bit later. Continental Congress, the second one, opens in 1775. We're already at war by the time they convene, and so they become a war congress, grappling with the question of number one, is reconciliation possible? And it becomes clear that it's not. So now do you take this unprecedented, almost unimaginable step of being independent? What does that mean? Nobody had ever called a country into being before. Today we take it for granted, but it was traumatic and it was truly revolutionary, even though what they were doing was trying to conserve their liberties. And by the time of the drafting, by the time Thomas Jefferson is given the pen to sit down and draft it in June of 1776, the ideas that ultimately make their way into the document, first of all, had been part and parcel of the American mindset for generations. And more particularly, had been activated, so to speak, by the crisis of the past decade from 1765 and the imposition of the Stamp Act and then the Intolerable Act and, you know, moving through the Townsend duties and these various attempts by Britain to very unwisely increase their control over the colonies, which initially, yeah, they're focused on uh financial issues, right, fiscal issues, raising revenue and tariffs, but they very quickly, for the colonists, become questions of political philosophy, political theory. You know, where do rights lie? Who has the right to legislate for us? Because we've been legislating for ourselves for generations. And those ideas themselves had been drawn from the experience over the century and a half or so that when Americans began really, you know, focusing on governing themselves because it was simply too hard to govern from England. So they do come from things like the Magna Carta's one influence, of course, but more important was the 1689 English Bill of Rights, which set limits to what government could do. Obviously, the entire tradition of English common law, which is what the colonists in essence imported for themselves and then adapted to their own circumstances as the feudal structures that were initially imposed very quickly began to break down in the New World. Enlightenment philosophy, British Enlightenment. This is, you know, not the radical philosophs of right of France, but this is John Locke. It's the more moderate Enlightenment, it's the Scottish Enlightenment of Francis Hutchinson, which itself recognizes natural law coming from natural rights from God, that all men are created equal in the eyes of God. They have these natural rights, these are translated into mechanisms here to protect them. And of course, that itself is drawn from biblical concepts, biblical concepts not only of the creator, but of the limits on what man can do in this world because of divine sanction. All of this, I think, forms not only the matrix in which the American mindset is formed, and what Thomas Jefferson actually calls the expression of the American mind that he writes in his draft, but the reason that we don't become France, that we don't spin off the rails, because unlike the French who want to start everything anew, start with year zero, sweep away everything, ours was a much more measured enlightenment. And I think the biblical element was critical, the common law element was critical, and the understanding of where these rights come from was critical as

Abolition Civil Rights And Moral Claims

SPEAKER_01 17:41

well.

SPEAKER_00 17:41

Aaron Powell In your book, you talk about, and you've touched on this a little bit in our discussion, but you've talked about how it was used by Frederick Douglass, you talk about Martin Luther King and the March on Washington in 1963, referencing it. Talk a little bit about how the Declaration has become this very important set of ideas for these types of movements.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

Well, one of the things that surprised me actually, I mean, obviously I you know I'd known about the civil rights movement, we all do. What I didn't know was how central the declaration was to the arguments being made, just to take this case, in the civil rights movement. Or to go back, if we want to go back to the abolitionist movement, again, how central the declaration was in the claims. I always figured, oh, yeah, it was probably constitutional, and they'd be talking about the rights under the Constitution and legal concepts and the like, which they did. But the spirit behind it all was the declaration. So when David Walker, who was a famous black abolitionist, is castigating Americans for not living up to the declaration, doesn't talk about not living up to the Constitution. He says, your declaration says all men are created equal, yet you and your fathers have not treated us as equal. And then a century later, Martin Luther King, you know, verbatim repeats the claim, as did black newspapers throughout the country, as did pastors throughout the country and politicians. One who did repeatedly actually was Lyndon Johnson, who referred repeatedly to the declaration in his arguments for why the Civil Rights Act was needed and why expansion of the Civil Rights Act was needed. And, you know, and that actually did become ultimately controversial in the sense of was it going beyond the intent of what Congress meant to make sure that there was an equal playing field for all versus ensuring an equal outcome, which can change the way that some people are treated. And so, you know, all of this was a continuing interpretation and negotiation, but it always was going back to the declaration. And that's really what I found fascinating that you could have a newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee, a black newspaper, when blacks were prevented from going to an auto show in the early 60s, cite the declaration and say, read your declaration, and that's why this is wrong, in segregation and Jim Crow. And I find it fascinating proof of the enduring power of the document that even as these were legal questions or constitutional questions, legislative questions that had to be resolved, the one thing they kept going back to was the founding document.

SPEAKER_00 20:20

I visited the archives

How The Parchment Survives Threats

SPEAKER_00 20:21

just a week ago, had some friends in town and took them there and talked to the guard next to the declaration about the vault and how they protect it. And then I read your book and I was surprised that in on 9-11, it wasn't in the archives. Nor, I guess, was the Constitution. So they weren't in the vault if a plane had hit the archives or something. Uh, but tell a little bit of that story about what's happened with the document.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Sure, when you look at it today, it looks stationary and motionless. It looks like it's been in that case forever and it's never going to go anywhere. Well, first of all, every night it still goes into a vault. And it's been going into a vault for 70 years, over 70 years, since it was moved to the National Archives in 1952. And that, of course, was to protect it against atomic attack and atomic warfare. So there's the famous vault that's no longer there, the original vault, the Mosler vault, which was right underneath the rotunda. It went down every night, the declaration and the constitution as one unit, and the steel doors enclosed it, even as we're using it as this icon in the fight against communism and totalitarianism. We're hiding it every night to protect it, in essence. Uh, the one time, by the way, that I thought it probably was lowered into the vault in a crisis was the Cuban Missile Crisis. But I couldn't find any evidence of that. And I asked at the archives and nobody could come up with anything. But I'm still willing to bet that in those seven days in May, the uh no October, right? 13 days in October, I'm confusing the movie with the with the with the reality. The um in those 13 days in October, it it probably at some points may have been lowered into the vault just in case things you know really went badly, which means we wouldn't even be here talking. But the document has Always been protected as best as people knew how at the time, which sometimes meant actually, unfortunately, harming it because we just didn't know better. When it was hung up vertically for a very long time, we thought that was the right way to, you know, to protect it and keep it from being touched so much and rolled and unrolled. And then we found that sunlight and humidity weren't good for it. So then we hid it in the dark. And then it was put in the Library of Congress in a shrine, but that also wasn't great. And then even that vertical hanging in the archives for half a century took its toll on it. So in 2001, the uh cases from the 1950s were breaking down. So they used that as an opportunity not only to make the new cases that have been there now for a quarter of a century, but to completely redo the rotunda. And if you're old enough, as I know you remember and I remember from kids, it used to be up on the back wall of the rotunda in the shrine and the altar within the shrine with the doors open and it was above the Constitution and an eagle's over it. It was so powerful. It was like the Ten Commandments and it drew your eyes to it. But it was a little hard to see because it was up on the wall and it's very faded. And physically it wasn't good for the document. So it's been changed now. You go today and it sits in a case on the floor. You can get right up close to it, but it's lost the power that it used to have. But we also have gained this intimacy to it that we never had before. And so it's a bit of a trade-off. But the the fascinating thing to me is that even as recently as just 25 years ago, we were still trying to figure out the best way to display it, the best way to preserve it, to ensure that future generations of Americans, 250 more years, people could see it and have that almost time machine-like connection to the moment of our birth. It's a wonderful story, I think, of really a sort of human life to this document that every step of the way, we were doing the best that we could, the best that we thought. And we've really only just sort of hit, you know, recently on what we think is best. But you know what? In another 25, 30 years, they might figure out something totally different.

SPEAKER_00 24:05

Yeah, it is interesting that if you look at other countries, I think you may reference the fact that you've spent a number of years in Japan. And in Japan, probably the most precious thing in the country are the treasures of the royal family. Yeah, the imperial treasures, yeah. And in uh France, you know, if there were a crisis, someone might grab the Mona Lisa. In England, it may be the crown jewels. In our country, it's ideas that are on a piece of paper. Yeah. That are the most important American document. And that's fascinating and why this book is so important. I attended a program at the Fund for

America 250 Civic Memory And Division

SPEAKER_00 24:38

American Studies when I was in college, coincidentally in 1976. So I was here for the bicentennial. It was a wonderful event. Great to be in the nation's capital at that time. But when I recently moved to a new house, I found in an old trunk a copy of the Washington Post from that morning, July 4th, 1976. And it was fascinating to see how little, in some sense, has changed in our country. The subheading was Israel Frees Hostages.

SPEAKER_01 25:06

Oh no king.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

There's the raid on Entebe. And there was a story that despite the terrible polarization in our country, Americans are coming together to celebrate our Fourth of July bicentennial. That headline will probably appear again this year, I hope. I hope we'll come together. But do you sense there's a uh coming together, or at least we're doing a lot to make this day, July 4th, 2026, have importance and maybe help us jumpstart a revival of civic education in our country?

SPEAKER_01 25:37

I certainly hope so. I think in some ways it's uh, you know, the best of times and the worst of times. I think for the vast majority of Americans, as it was in 1976, which, you know, is just two years after Watergate, one year after the final withdrawal from Vietnam, less than a decade from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the riots, the country was deeply divided, had come through at that point probably the worst period since the Civil War. And yet, as you point out, tens of millions of Americans, I have a whole chapter on the Bicentennial in the book, tens of millions of Americans do celebrate. Books come out, there's just endless pageantry. Queen Elizabeth II comes, there's the tall ships, and as you mentioned, fireworks and the like. And even those who were cynical, you know, remarked, as I point out with some quoting some of the newspapers, about how the bicentennial really did, at least for a period, pull together a country that at times had seemed it was flying apart. And unfortunately, 50 years later, we face a lot of that as well. I believe that for the vast majority of Americans, first of all, outside the coasts and outside the big cities, from the Midwest where I am, and the West and the South and the mountains and the like, they are proud. They are patriotic. It's not that people are unaware of our problems, it's not that they're uh ignoring issues that we have to deal with, but I think they recognize what this country has done, how much it's done, and they want to celebrate and they will celebrate. But we also have changed a lot since 1976 as a nation. We don't teach civics nearly as much as we used to, really, sort of the ending of that tradition of teaching civics was coming out of the 60s and into the 70s. The cynicism from Vietnam and Watergate and the assassinations worked its way through our culture over the following decades. And we have very, very contested views. You know, we didn't have a 1619 project in 1976. We didn't have claims in the same way because we were not quite as diverse back then demographically, and we are so much more diverse today that we have so many more competing interpretations of both of what it means to be an American, but also what should be celebrated. Whereas, you know, in 1976, really everyone running the country was part of the greatest generation. They had fought in World War II or Korea. They had been educated in a, you know, a sort of traditional way with civics. And a lot of that has broken down. So I think it is far more cacophonous today. We just saw a report today that the celebration for Freedom 250 on the mall has been sabotaged. Some of the, you know, the pipelines were cut to cut the gas from the lights and you know, things that you didn't really see back in 1976. And this is just beginning. So I think it's much more contested. And yet at the same time, I think the great majority of Americans still want to celebrate, want to reflect on what's good, what can be better, but to do it in a way that's very civically minded, to your point about are we getting to a new upsurge of civics? Things like what the Fund for American Studies does.

SPEAKER_00 28:52

Well, and your book does, I should mention, have chapters on the semicientennial, the centennial, the bicentennial. You cover this throughout American history. You also include one of my favorite lines or sections from Abraham Lincoln, his young men's Lyceum speech, which I think is worth reading here. I do not mean to say that the scenes of the revolution are now or ever will be entirely forgotten, but that like everything else, they must fade upon the memory of the world and grow more and more dim by the lapse of time. As the Patriots of 76 did to the support of the Declaration and Laws, he beseeched Lincoln, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor to uphold the proud fabric of freedom. And I think that's what you're getting at here is we need a renewal of our pledge, not just of our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, but really of what you say, unity to liberty to equality. And I think this theme of unity is particularly timely right now. So thank you so much for writing an excellent book. Thank you. National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America. Thank you to Michael Oslin. And uh the book is available now as of a few weeks ago, I think. So I encourage everyone to get a copy and read it before the Fourth of July. Thank you. Thank you, Roger.

Closing Thoughts And Listener Actions

SPEAKER_00 30:18

Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast. If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfas.org, and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five star review. Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media. I'm your host, Roger Reim, and until next time, show courage in things large and small.