Our Glorious Founding Document – Religion & Liberty Online

Bad history books litter the shelves of classrooms, bookstores, and libraries everywhere. Beyond mere factual inaccuracies, bad works of history also pretend to neutrality, prefer a Marxist materialism to messy human motivations, and misalign the significance of events. The majority of Americans cease reading history when their formal education is complete; for many, their last memory of a history book is a survey text written by a committee. Such books are sucked dry of the vitality that marks the drama of history.

None of the above judgments can be made of Bradley J. Birzer’s Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty. Published two months before the sesquicentennial celebration of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Birzer’s book is an excellent reminder of the power of history written well, even though shaped by the author’s biases, which he makes clear in his introduction. “I am, for better or worse, rather proudly an American patriot as well as a supposedly objective scholar.”

Birzer is a gifted storyteller, and in this volume he tells the story of the Declaration in brilliant color. In terms of method, Birzer proceeds “contrary to all advice and standard style recommendations” and offers “some really long quotes. Yes, I know this violates nearly every norm of writing—but the quotes are really good and really important to understanding the context of what I’m trying to get at. So, I’ve left them in.”

In other words, rather than foregrounding his own analysis, Birzer provides dozens of primary sources that immerse the imagination in the words, thoughts, and influences of 18th-century colonial and revolutionary America. He sets forth to justify an extensive claim: “It would not be an exaggeration, however, to say that what Christianity accomplished theologically, the Declaration accomplished—or would eventually accomplish—politically.” Birzer’s book is a great appreciation of that accomplishment and the ongoing significance of the Declaration of Independence.

Declaration is an excellent entry into a market of historical volumes, opening with a clear introduction that sets forth the author’s credentials and approach. Chapters proceed year by year, from “Before 1774” to “1774,” “1775,” and “1776,” giving the reader a sense of momentum that builds to the climax of the Declaration. Chapter 5 offers a close reading of the Declaration; chapter 6 explores the influence four thinkers had on Jefferson by his own reckoning (Aristotle, Cicero, Sidney, Locke). This final chapter closes the volume on an odd note; a future edition would benefit from rearranging the material to cover sources and influences before the close reading, and so would leave the Declaration itself as the closing word.

A great history professor helps students get out of the present and into the world of the past. And Birzer is a fine example, having spent the past three decades teaching American history and Western Heritage courses at Hillsdale College. He knows the source material intimately, and his book immerses the reader in the world of 1774–76. By the conclusion, one is ready to join Birzer in seeing the Declaration not just as a political act but as a covenantal document setting forth an ideal that America has spent the past 250 years attempting to realize. As Birzer writes of Jefferson, “He had, in the manner of a classical demi-god, articulated and perhaps bestowed upon us our founding mission, our purpose, and our greatest contribution to the world: the belief, however poorly practiced and implemented, that ALL men are created equal, each endowed by his creator with certain inalienable rights.” Birzer presents the American experiment as an ongoing pursuit of the inalienable rights set forth in 1776.

Birzer’s commentary and sources include fascinating details that establish the strangeness and immense religiosity of the period. Consider the following examples: “Even more than the Coercive Acts, the Quebec Act seemed to Americans an ushering in of St. John’s Apocalypse.” The seeming kindness toward Catholics seen in Canada was perceived by Americans as creating the potential for a Papist takeover plot! And then there’s the issue of fertility and prosperity. Birzer quotes one 19th-century congressman thus: “I invite you to go to the west, and visit one of our log cabins, and number its inmates. There you will find a strong, stout youth of eighteen, with his Better Half, just commencing the first struggles of independent life. Thirty years from that time, visit them again; and instead of two, you will find in that same family twenty-two. That is what I call the American Multiplication Table.” In no other season of American history did the population explode with such natural vigor. Birzer notes that

Females reached menarche at about age fifteen in 1800 and perhaps a few months earlier in 1850. If a woman married soon after that, as many did, the ultimate size of her family could be prodigious. The American and Canadian census manuscripts are crowded with cases of women marrying at sixteen or seventeen and producing a child every eighteen to twenty-four months … the average woman on the frontier had approximately thirteen live births during her reproductive years.

Such details help readers both imagine the past and grasp the motivations for independence. Rather than romanticizing the founding generation, Birzer’s sources remind the reader that these were men of flesh and blood, of high wit and vim, and of great courage, even as they signed the Declaration:

The silence and the gloom of the morning were interrupted, I well recollect, only for a moment by Colonel Harrison of Virginia, who said to Mr. Gerry at the table: “I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Gerry, when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead.

They played for high stakes, yet the threat of death did not dim Harrison’s humor.

It should be noted that this volume is well suited for incorporation in the high school or college classroom. About 515,000 high school students sit for the College Board’s AP U.S. History and AP U.S. Government exams each year. Clearly, there is a desire among aspirational students to know the American past and form of government. Birzer’s Declaration could be assigned over the course of six weeks, one week per chapter, allowing for ample engagement with the primary sources. After all, “the Founding itself was a contest of ideas, images, pamphlets, books, and philosophies.” By the conclusion of such a study, students should be ready to appreciate both the continuity of the Declaration of Independence with British common law and the courage of the founding generation. Rather than working through one more Document Based Question set with students, teachers of these courses should explore ordering class sets of Declaration.

As Birzer explores the complexities of the theories of rights prevalent in 1776, teen students can also be prompted to discuss and explore further the questions that arise: “From the first moments of their extra-legal assemblage, the Continental Congress attempted to define and understand the nature and foundation of rights. Did they come from nature, from God through nature, from tradition, from God and nature through tradition, from being British citizens, or through God and nature through British citizenship?” Even at the college level, Declaration would be a strong accompanying text for a survey course covering the American founding.

In the end, Birzer has written a patriotic account of 1774–76; in the midst of this account, his own love for the American experiment undoubtedly shines through. In an age when the majority voice in American history invites readers to despise their homeland as a place of racial and gender-based oppression, Birzer offers a different approach. The nobility, the courage, the intelligence, and the passion of the founding generation present themselves through Birzer’s scholarship. The reader is thus invited to join Birzer in his enthusiasm. “Its final statement, then, added by Congress, turns the Declaration into a sacred and binding covenant: ‘And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.’”

C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man that the task of the modern educator is not to “cut down jungles” because we love too many things, but rather to “irrigate deserts” of the heart. Birzer’s Declaration will irrigate the hearts of American readers and grant them permission to love their country once again.