WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS

TRACING THE HISTORY OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, BEFORE AND AFTER IT WAS WRITTEN

Author: By David M. Shribman, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, June 29, 1997

Page: N14

Section: Books

If America has a sacred text, then the Declaration of Independence surely is it. In it is the American creed writ large -- not what we are, to be sure, but surely what we want to be. And though there have been those who, like John C. Calhoun, believed that there was ``not a word of truth'' in the ``created equal'' idea, the document has animated American life for two centuries.

It is the deft intellectual achievement of Pauline Maier, a professor of American history at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to trace the development of the Declaration and, what is more, to trace the development of its ascendance from document to doctrine. Along the way she reminds us that the Declaration was first and foremost an explanation (of why Americans were separating themselves from Britain) and only later became an explication (of what Americans believe).

The Declaration is, above all, a utilitarian document. It was, of course, primarily an announcement (we're independent!) and secondarily a rationalization (here's why we thought the unthinkable). But the Declaration is also utilitarian in its applications; for everyone, including Lincoln, who needed a rationalization for the democratizing impulse in American history, the Declaration proved to be a pretty handy instrument. Apostles of great change -- abolitionists agitating to end slavery and feminists promoting women's rights, to name but two examples -- needed a historical basis for their contemporary views.

``And so they made one,'' Maier argues, ``pouring old wine into an old vessel manufactured for another purpose, creating a testament whose continuing usefulness depended not on the faithfulness with which it described the intentions of the signers but on its capacity to convince and inspire living Americans.''

This is iconoclasm of a gentle sort. Thomas Jefferson, its principal author, didn't invent the principles in the Declaration; he merely collected them. The ideas he asserted weren't his alone. Nor were the words he scratched down to express them. He was a great borrower -- and, though he would not like the description, a great popularizer. ``The many Americans who debated Independence did not need Thomas Jefferson to remind them that the `whole point' of the controversy that had absorbed their lives lay not in the ending of an old regime but in the founding of a better one, or that their future would be bound up with that powerful but ambiguous word, equality,'' Maier writes.

The truth is that the Declaration may be the greatest document ever written -- by a committee. It included, that summer of 1776, Jefferson, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Robert R. Livingston of New York, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, and John Adams of Massachusetts. Jefferson was the main writer, but not the creator. ``He was no Moses receiving the Ten Commandments from the hand of God,'' Maier writes, ``but a man who had to prepare a written text with little time to waste and who, like others in similar circumstances, drew on earlier documents of his own and other people's creation, acting within the rhetorical and ethical standards of his time, and producing a draft that revealed both splendid artistry and signs of haste.''

Indeed, Maier argues that the Declaration is more a triumph of editing than of writing. ``What generations of Americans came to revere was not Jefferson's but Congress's Declaration, the work not of a single man, or even a committee, but of a larger body of men with the good sense to recognize a `pretty good' draft when they saw it, and who were able to identify and eliminate Jefferson's more outlandish assertions and unnecessary words,'' she writes.

For all the force of its ideas, the Declaration is a reluctant document, just as its signers were reluctant rebels. As late as the middle of 1775, Jefferson himself hoped for reconciliation with Britain. Nearly everyone did. But eventually tensions between the American colonists and the British who ruled them grew overwhelming. (Perhaps independence was inevitable, but the hiring of German soldiers to fight the colonists certainly hastened the break.)

The Declaration served its purpose -- it declared the colonists free, and, read aloud, it provided a bit of a rallying point -- and then it faded into near obscurity. Though its opening (``When in the course of human events . . . '') was a pronouncement that American independence was a development of epic importance, the document soon became regarded more as a laundry list of complaints than as a soaring document of ideals and principle. It was, in short, forgotten.

Then it began its great comeback.

That comeback began at the end of the 18th century, in part as a way to celebrate Jefferson's genius and the identification of the Republicans (the forerunners of today's Democrats) with the rights of the individual. Its place in the American imagination was cemented by John Trumbull, whose 1814-'24 painting hangs in the Capitol -- and in the minds of millions of Americans.

Maier argues that the Declaration is a peculiar rationale for the champions of equality. ``Not only did its reference to men's equal creation concern people in a state of nature before government was created, but the document's original function was to end the previous regime, not to lay down principles to guide and limit its successor,'' she says.

Decades after it was written, Lincoln would say that he ``never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.'' Perhaps that is so. But the Declaration was never intended to inspire the Lincolns of the mid-19th century. It was aimed at the masses of the late 18th century.

That it is remembered at all today is testimony not to the grace of the Declaration's language nor to the beauty of its logic. It is, instead, a measure of the power of its ideas -- and, even more, of the success of its cause. The Declaration promoted independence, to be sure, but it later promoted freedom. In that sense it is the most durable tool of democracy ever written. So what if it came out of a committee?