From the Editor

The Declaration of Independence was written to explain the just causes for the Americans’ break with their mother country. In it, Thomas Jefferson carefully listed the American grievances against the king, creating a catalogue of abuses and arbitrary laws imposed upon the colonists. Today, many people have only the vaguest notion of the specific causes Jefferson described that prompted this rebellion. What Americans do remember, however, is the ringing statement in the preamble of an ideal: human equality. It is the seemingly simple, yet truly profound statement that all men are created equal that became our country’s guiding principle. Much of our national history can be told in the centuries-long struggle to see this promise of equality realized.

In this issue of History Now our scholars examine several of the key struggles to ensure that the credo of equality was more than rhetoric, that it could be and must be our social reality. In our opening essay, “The Declaration of Independence and the Long Struggle for Equality in America: An Introduction,” Louis P. Masur places Jefferson’s preamble in the context of earlier assertions of human equality made by Enlightenment figures, by Thomas Paine in his Common Sense, and by George Mason in the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Masur points out that, for the eighteenth-century political leadership in America, “all men” did not include African American men, nor American Indian men, nor for that matter any women at all. Yet the concept of equality propelled others to create an abolitionist movement to end enslavement, a women’s rights movement to end gender inequality, a class-based movement to end inequalities experienced by farmers and workingmen, and a civil rights movement to insure full citizenship and an equality of opportunity for African Americans. These movements, Masur points out, and many others in our own lifetime, are based on this commitment to ensure that “all men are created equal.”

In “The Escape of Black Women during the American Revolution,” Karen Cook Bell reminds us that the enslaved did not wait for their masters to live up to the promise of the Declaration. Black women freed themselves and their children during the Revolutionary era, taking advantage of the disruption war brought to flee to the British army, or to Spanish Florida, or to the safety of the city of Philadelphia. As Bell puts it, “motherhood, freedom, and love of family” were driving forces in their determination to escape bondage. Bell introduces us to several of these women, and their stories remind us that Black women were not on the margins of the Revolution or the nineteenth-century abolition movement; they were active, visible participants who risked their lives for freedom.

In “A Second Declaration of Independence: The 1848 Declaration of Sentiments,” Sally McMillen takes us to Seneca Falls and the first organized effort to demand that “all men” actually meant “men and women.” This idea was not new. Women authors had asserted the intellectual and moral equality of men and women in eighteenth-century books and essays and, in 1837, in the powerful Letters on the Equality of the Sexes by abolitionist Sarah Grimké. But the 300 women and men went further: they, like Jefferson before them, listed their grievances, spelled out the abuses by men, and elaborated on the consequences of those abuses. Then they went further and issued a list of specific reforms they demanded. But just as Jefferson was a White man of his century, unable to include Black or American Indian men under the umbrella of equality, the Seneca Falls activists—White, middle and upper class—ignored poor White women or women of color as they issued their declaration. Despite its narrow framework, McMillen points out that modern women activists have not forgotten the Declaration of Sentiments. The author Maya Angelou wrote a poem about it in 1977 and Hillary Clinton referred to it in her speech accepting the 2016 Democratic nomination for the presidency. The Declaration of Sentiments, McMillen declares, helps us assess how far women have come—or not come—since 1848.

In “Polish Political Exiles and the Legacy of the American Revolution in the Antebellum US,” Derek Kane O’Leary raises the question of America’s responsibility to honor its credo of “all men are created equal” for those rising up against oppression in other countries. In the early 1830s, Polish patriots sought to overturn Russian control of their country. Although Americans applauded this uprising, President Andrew Jackson refused to endorse it against one of the country’s commercial allies. Slowly, American interest in the fate of Poland diminished, overshadowed by the sectional conflicts brewing between North and South that foreshadowed the Civil War. When more than 250 Poles sought asylum in the US, the distinguished diplomat and intellectual Alexander Hill Everett urged Americans to remember their historic responsibility to welcome freedom fighters from other nations. He reminded them that Polish military leaders like Pulaski and Kościuszko had thrown in their lot with the Americans during their war for independence. As O’Leary puts it: “Americans’ treatment of foreigners . . . revealed something important about Americans’ own identity and values.” At the end of his essay, O’Leary points out the obvious parallels to the battle raging in Europe today and the test it poses to the meaning of our global citizenship and our commitment to promote our ideals abroad.

In addition to these original essays, this issue of History Now includes related articles from the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s archives, videos, and spotlighted primary sources from the Gilder Lehman Collection. The issue’s special feature is a virtual talk, available on YouTube, by contributor Karen Cook Bell about her 2021 book, Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1XMNHGO-98&t=24s .

Nicole and I hope you enjoy a wonderful summer! We will see you again in the fall.

Carol Berkin, Editor
Presidential Professor of History, Emerita, Baruch College & The Graduate Center, CUNY

Nicole Seary, Associate Editor, History Now, and Senior Editor, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History