The Paradox of Freedom in the Declaration

When Thomas Jefferson took pen to paper and wrote those fateful words, “all men are created equal”, he clearly did not include universal freedom for 500,000 souls who were treated as chattel property. Jefferson and other founding fathers did not see the paradox that these competing interests that the enslaved understood clearly. The racial hierarchies in existence were a given for these founders, and none of them seriously believed that emancipation would occur any time soon.

This divergence from what was said and what was accepted has set in motion an uncomfortable dance marathon that has survived for 250 years. The abolitionists used this tension to argue for laws to end enslavement. Black petitions for freedom based their appeals on this contradiction. Americans continued to press this moral argument year after year when the political environment will tolerate this quarter century irony.

When Fredrick Douglas was asked to give a speech about how Black America viewed the Declaration of Independence, he did not mince his words by saying that “Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. – The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, but not by me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice. I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.”

This dilemma has repeatedly shown up in American history, from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to the murder of George Floyd. Regardless of the current political atmosphere, the debate about this inconsistency will not disappear. The paradox is not just that some were free and others were not — it is that the founding document of the United States declared a truth that the nation itself was not yet willing to live by.