Kyle Chattleton: This is Mountaintop History, a podcast produced by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. 

Olivia Brown: Mountaintop History brings forward meaningful stories from this historic home and plantation — from the past and from the present.

Kyle Chattleton: My name is Kyle Chattleton. 

Olivia Brown: And I'm Olivia Brown.

Kyle Chattleton: Thank you for joining us. We hope you'll learn something new.

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Olivia Brown: In 1776, Thomas Jefferson spent 17 days in a rented room in Philadelphia writing the draft of a document that would change the world. He wrote down what he later said was “common sense […] terms so plain and firm, as to command [the] assent” of mankind. The final version held some of the most famous words written in human history: 

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. 

Over the course of nearly 250 years, people from around the world have looked to these words and ideas. In fact, approximately 120 declarations of independence have been made by different countries and peoples since then, all of them invariably influenced by the 1776 Declaration of American Independence. And today we’re going to talk about a few of them.

Kyle Chattleton: One of the first documents to be clearly influenced by the Declaration of Independence was written in 1789 in France. Thomas Jefferson was living in Paris and serving as a Foreign Minister to the French government, and while he was there he assisted his friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, in drafting the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The document marked a pivotal moment leading up to the French Revolution. It read, “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” The French Revolution saw the rise of the National Assembly and the “Third Estate,” the body of government that represented the common man, and not the nobility. French citizens would eventually overthrow the monarchy of King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette and, after an extended struggle, establish a republic, governed more directly by the citizens of France.

Olivia Brown: The reach of Jefferson’s words and ideas continued throughout American history as well. At the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention dedicated to the cause of women’s rights and suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote a document called the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. In it she declared that, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.” The convention itself was the first women’s rights convention in the world and brought together American women from all backgrounds to “discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman.” Women in the American suffrage movement would fight for 72 more years before the 19th Amendment secured them the right to vote in 1920. It was not just women who gathered for this convention, however; one male attendee at the Seneca Falls Convention was also its sole African American attendee: Frederick Douglass.

Kyle Chattleton: After the Seneca Falls Convention, in 1852, the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society invited Douglass to speak on July 5. He demanded that Americans consider how well the country had lived up to the principles articulated by American founders like Thomas Jefferson when he asked, “Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice embodied in that Declaration of Independence extended to us?” Douglass, born into slavery, lived enslaved for approximately 20 years of his life before escaping to freedom. In this famous speech he posed another important question that captured much of his life and the lives of millions of others: “What to the American slave is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” Frederick Douglass showed that Jefferson’s words have not remained unquestioned for these many years since 1776, but rather drew attention to how often Americans have failed to meet fully the lofty ideals contained in Jefferson’s words and how others have embraced those words and principles to demand change and expand the reach of Jefferson’s vision.

Olivia Brown: Many years after Douglass’s speech, he took his concerns directly to the White House. He later wrote that he “elbowed” his way in to see the 16th American President, Abraham Lincoln, on August 10, 1863. Perhaps Douglass’s critiques of the country and its failure to live up to its founding message influenced Lincoln; perhaps Lincoln had been considering these ideas all along, but a few months later, on November 19, Abraham Lincoln spoke these famous words in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.”  

87 years after Thomas Jefferson had penned them, the words of the Declaration of Independence continued to inspire change.

Kyle Chattleton: Jefferson’s words have also been used by advocates of human rights and democracy around the world. Seeking independence from British rule, members of the Indian National Congress unified over the idea of self-government. For years, Indian civil disobedience and nonviolent protests tried to achieve reform under the British Raj, but many Indian political parties ultimately hoped for political and spiritual independence. The Purna Swaraj, known also as the Declaration of Sovereignty and Self-Rule, written by Mahatma Gandhi, was officially presented on January 26, 1930. While the document itself was quite short, Gandhi’s words brought forward ideas that had influenced so many over centuries:

We believe that it is the inalienable right of the Indian people, as of any other people, to have freedom to enjoy the fruits of their toil and have the necessities of life, so that they may have full opportunities of growth. We believe also that if any government deprives a people of these rights and oppresses them the people have a further right to abolish it.

Afterward, President Jawaharlal Nehru flew the tricolor Indian flag of independence, and 172 Indian members of central and provincial legislatures resigned their posts in support of the resolution. 

Olivia Brown: Since the year 1776, people around the world have declared their independence and have fought for the principles of liberty and freedom. Over and over, those people have turned to the words written by Jefferson and the ideas articulated in America’s founding documents.

Throughout the 20th century, Americans continued to expand on the ideas of their founding document as well. One of the most famous invocations of the words of the Declaration of American Independence were spoken by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. in 1963. King spoke of dreams: dreams for the future and unfulfilled dreams of the past. In the heart of the American Civil Rights Movement, King said, “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.” Over 250,000 people stood in the nation’s capital as King spoke of hope for a better future, asking his fellow citizens to be a part of necessary change promised by the American dream:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

Kyle Chattleton: In many ways, the Declaration of American Independence started a global movement, and for nearly 250 years, people have continued to strive for self-government, independence, equality, and human rights. The document’s legacy, and in turn that of Thomas Jefferson, has had a wide-reaching impact on our modern world.

In one of the last letters Jefferson wrote he looked back on the Declaration of Independence with satisfaction. He realized that there was much work to be done, but he believed that the American Declaration signaled an optimistic future for mankind. He explained:

All eyes are opened or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the lights of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others — for ourselves let the annual return of [July 4th] forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

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Olivia Brown: This has been another episode of Mountaintop History, a collaboration podcast between WTJU and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. 

Kyle Chattleton: Join us for new episodes every two weeks on Apple and Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and the Virginia Audio Collective.

Olivia Brown: To learn more about Monticello or to plan your next trip, visit us online at Monticello.org.