America’s 250th birthday is a moment to remember what has always made this country extraordinary: a people entrusted with freedom and a republic strong enough to endure because of it. Our right to speak openly, to challenge power, and to defend our beliefs has been part of the American story from the beginning. But freedom survives only when citizens understand it, value it, and defend it. This anniversary should renew our focus on civics and on the personal responsibility to protect our liberties.
In April, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas gave a speech at the University of Texas that highlights the importance of the Declaration, as well as some of the threats we have seen to its principles and natural rights over the last 100 years. In the following excerpts (starting at 18:27 mark), Justice Thomas spells out the purpose of the Declaration and the devotion of our Founding Fathers to its bedrock principles:
When Alexis de Tocqueville visited early America from France, he was struck that there was no country in the civilized world where they were less occupied with philosophy than the United States. But there was likewise no country where the principles of the declaration were more deeply ingrained or more fiercely defended than those same United States.
That is the sense in which I knew the principles of the declaration in my childhood. That is the only sense in which those principles can sustain our country. And that is the sense in which I will speak to you about those principles today.
I believe now as I did then that the declaration of 1776 provides us with the principles to guide us as citizens of our republic. Even in this time of questioning and criticism of our founding, we should not forget that the Declaration established the principles that produced, despite all of its our imperfections, our miscues, and our tragic mistakes. It gave us the freest, wealthiest, and most powerful nation in the history of the world. It provided the moral principles by which Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King would criticize the institutions of slavery and segregation.
The declaration is in fact, along with the gospels, one of the greatest anti-slavery documents in the history of western civilization. It did not establish a form of government. That was the work of the constitution that followed. But it stated the purpose of government. The declaration made it clear that the purpose of government is to protect our God-given unalienable rights. Rights that all individuals equally possess.
As Abraham Lincoln declared in 1858 in the midst of his great debates with Steven Douglas, quote, “Drop every paltry insignificant thought for any man’s success. It is nothing. I am nothing. Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of humanity, the Declaration of American Independence.”
[...]
However, when I encounter the Declaration of Independence anew today, I am most struck by the final sentence. It can be easy to forget 250 years later the courage it took for those 56 men to sign the Declaration. Arguably those men committed treason against the king, risking death at the hands of an empire far mightier than the newborn United States. They thus concluded with the memorable final sentence and I quote, “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.” I will say it again. We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
Recently, I came across a definition of courage that is attributed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear. In essence, the signers of the declaration were saying that they were willing to die for the principles they were asserting, the supreme act of courage. Those principles were more important than their fear.
Nothing in the Declaration of Independence, I now realize, matters without that final sentence. Without that sentence, the rest of the Declaration is but mere words on parchment paper. Nice words, but nonetheless just words. What changed the world was not the words but the commitment and spirit of the people who were willing to labor, sacrifice and even give their lives at what Lincoln at Gettysburg called the last full measure of devotion for the Declaration’s principles. It is that devotion. It is that devotion to which we owe our rich inheritance.
America’s future depends on more than remembrance of an anniversary. It depends on citizens who understand the principles that built this republic and who are willing to defend them. As Justice Thomas so eloquently conveyed, the Declaration was not only a statement of ideals, but a call to courage, sacrifice, and responsibility. If we want to preserve our liberties, we must renew our commitment to the civic duty of protecting them.