Staying True to the Founding Principles: A Review Article

Abstract

In The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story, Kermit Roosevelt III argues that Americans fundamentally misunderstand the nation's founding principles, especially as articulated in the Declaration of Independence of 1776. We think that the Declaration stood for human equality and freedom – “a set of aspirations toward which the best in American history strive.” Roosevelt insists that this “view of the Declaration is exactly what we must let go.” Properly understood, the Declaration “is consistent with slavery” and even condones it: “A government that protects the rights of its citizens, including their right to enslave outsiders, is a Declaration-style government.” Roosevelt's view, however, is bereft of support in the historical record. No author of the Declaration argued that it condoned slavery. Within three decades of the nation's founding, half the states abolished slavery largely by appealing to the principles of the Declaration. Similarly, the abolitionists of the 1830s and Abraham Lincoln in the 1850s explicitly appealed to the anti-slavery principles of the Declaration. Roosevelt's own heroes of Reconstruction – leaders like John Bingham, Thaddeus Stevens, and Charles Sumner – all embraced an understanding of the Declaration fundamentally at odds with his own. Finally, Martin Luther King, whom Roosevelt claims gave lip service to the “standard story” of the American Founding only for tactical reasons and who “set aside the Founding entirely” by “the end of his life,” actually praised the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution” the very day before his assassination in April of 1968.