Promises Made and (Eventually) Kept
The Declaration of Independence at 250.
A review of The Promise of America: Reflections on Our Enduring Ideals by various authors; 208 pages; Simon & Schuster (May 2026)
As the semiquincentennial of the American founding neared, a number of excellent books on the watershed events of 1776 were loosed upon the world. Titles like Michael Auslin’s National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America, Sarah M.S. Pearsall’s Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution, and H.W. Brands’s American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington filled bookstores while their authors toured the podcast circuit. But one book in this recent glut stood out for its clarity, brevity, honesty, and inspiration.
The Promise of America: Reflections on Our Enduring Ideals is a compendium of seventeen essays issued by the National Constitution Centre, and it features reflections on the founding of the United States by some of the country’s most eminent historians, jurists, writers, and scholars. Readers intimately knowledgeable about the Declaration of Independence and those lacking familiarity with America’s foundational document will both find its insights rewarding. “We are a Nation, not of a single racially similar people,” former Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer writes in his foreword to the collection. “We are a Nation where very different kinds of people live together under legal and ethical documents.”
The Declaration of Independence, in particular, has anchored the American project for a quarter-millennium and served as a model for dozens of other countries. Reflecting on that document at its fiftieth anniversary in 1826, president John Quincy Adams (the son of the second US president John Adams) proclaimed that “the one people of the United States of America, became one separate sovereign independent power, assuming an equal station among the nations of the earth.” The Declaration laid the foundations for this project with an immortal line that the prolific biographer Walter Isaacson has described as “the greatest sentence ever written”: “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.” Within those 35 words, and the document they introduced, lay the blueprint for the unique country that the United States became.
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What exactly does the term “self-evident” mean here? In the original draft, Jefferson had described Americans’ natural rights as “sacred and undeniable,” but Benjamin Franklin deleted those words in favour of self-evident. In his contribution to The Promise of America, Isaacson recounts a 1771 visit by Franklin to see the Scottish philosopher David Hume at his home in Edinburgh. Hume had developed a theory of two types of truth: one that depends on empirical evidence and observations, and another that is true by definition or by reason alone. “Propositions of this kind,” Hume wrote of the latter category, “are discoverable by the mere operation of thought.” Franklin absorbed this distinction and applied it to the situation at hand. Determining that all Americans were created equal did not require empirical observation, it could be derived from reason alone. Isaacson shows how this notion found expression a month before the Declaration’s drafting in Virginia’s own Declaration of Rights, which stated that all men were “created equally free and independent.”
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