Seven Myths About the Declaration of Independence, Checked Against the Record

Here is a fun party game for the Fourth of July. Ask the table when the Declaration of Independence was signed. Everyone will say July 4, 1776. Everyone will be mostly wrong. Then ask whether the Liberty Bell rang that day, and watch the room split between people who are confident and people who are confident in the other direction. Nobody wins the game, but you will be invited to fewer parties.

The serious point is this. Americans love the Declaration, and much of what we learn about it is wrong in the details. Some of the errors are harmless. Others distort what the document means, and those distortions are not random. They tend to run in one of two directions: toward making the founding look like a pageant, or toward making it look like a fraud. Both are mistakes, and the record corrects both.

How we test a myth

Let me define terms, because the word "myth" gets used loosely.

• A myth, for this post, is a claim widely taught or repeated about the Declaration that the documentary record does not support.
• The record means the documents of the time: the journals of the Continental Congress, the text itself, the printed broadsides, the surviving letters of the men involved, and the parchment.
• Each myth gets a verdict: false, mostly false, or half true. We distinguish facts, which the record settles, from interpretations, which reasonable people argue about. Where something is uncertain, we say so.

Seven claims follow.

Myth 1: Everyone signed the Declaration on July 4, 1776

The claim. The Founders gathered on July 4, adopted the Declaration and signed it together, one after another.

The record. Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776, by approving Richard Henry Lee's resolution. It finished editing and adopted the text of the Declaration on July 4. That night the printer John Dunlap produced broadsides carrying only two names, John Hancock as president and Charles Thomson as secretary. On July 19 Congress ordered the text engrossed on parchment and signed by every member. Most of the delegates signed that parchment on August 2, 1776. Others signed later: Matthew Thornton of New Hampshire did not take his seat until November 1776, and Thomas McKean's signature may date from 1777 or after.

Part of the confusion is the Founders' own fault. Years later Jefferson, writing from memory, recalled a signing on July 4. The journals and the parchment say otherwise.

Verdict: False. July 4 is the date of adoption, not of a single signing. The full calendar is in July 2, July 4, August 2, the Dates Behind the Declaration of Independence.

Myth 2: The Liberty Bell rang out on July 4 to announce independence

The claim. As the vote was taken, an old bell-ringer in the State House steeple got the signal and rang the bell that would become the Liberty Bell.

The record. No document from July 1776 says the bell rang on July 4. The story of the old bell-ringer and the boy shouting "Ring!" comes from a piece of fiction published in the 1840s by the Philadelphia writer George Lippard, which was later reprinted as if it were history. The name "Liberty Bell" itself was popularized in the 1830s by abolitionists, who adopted the bell as a symbol because of its inscription from Leviticus 25:10: "Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof." The public reading of the Declaration in Philadelphia took place on July 8, and bells in the city were rung for celebrations around that time, but whether this particular bell rang, and on which day, is not settled by the record.

Verdict: False as told. The legend is newer than the bell's fame, and the bell's fame came from the fight against slavery, which is a better story anyway.

Myth 3: "All men" meant only white men who owned property

The claim. The phrase "all men are created equal" was understood by its authors to mean only property-owning white men. It was a class statement, and its universal language is a later gloss.

The record. Start with the text. It says "all men," not "freeholders" or "Englishmen." It grounds equality in creation, "created equal," and rights in the Creator. The theory is universal by its own terms.

Second, property qualifications for voting were real, but they were state laws about the franchise, not part of the Declaration. The Declaration is about natural rights, not voting rules. Confusing the two is like reading a state's driving-age statute into the Bill of Rights.

Third, the authors' own failures were measured against this text in their own time. Jefferson's draft included a long passage condemning the slave trade, which Congress removed. Within a few years of 1776, several northern states began abolishing slavery, and opponents of slavery quoted the Declaration constantly. Frederick Douglass, in his Rochester address of July 5, 1852, condemned American slavery fiercely while honoring the Declaration's principles and calling the nation back to them. Lincoln built his entire political argument against slavery's expansion on the premise that "all men" meant all men.

Fourth, the steelman. The best version of this myth is the observation that many signers held slaves, that women could not vote, and that the men who wrote "all men are created equal" did not apply it to everyone in their own households. That is true, and we should say so without flinching. But it is a statement about the signers' conduct, not about the meaning of the sentence. Hypocrisy is the failure to live up to a standard you profess. It presupposes the standard. You cannot be a hypocrite about a principle you never stated.

Verdict: False as to meaning; true that many of the men who adopted it failed to live by it. We take up the broader question in The Constitution Is Not Illegitimate Because Its Framers Held Slaves.

Myth 4: The signers were all wealthy aristocrats

The claim. The Declaration was the work of a rich elite protecting its own interests.

The record. Some signers were very rich. John Hancock was among the wealthiest merchants in New England. Charles Carroll of Carrollton was among the wealthiest men in the colonies. Several Virginia signers were large planters.

Others were not. Roger Sherman of Connecticut began as a shoemaker and taught himself law. Benjamin Franklin was the son of a Boston candle-maker and ran away to Philadelphia as a teenager. John Hart of New Jersey was a farmer. A number of signers were physicians, among them Benjamin Rush, Josiah Bartlett and Lyman Hall. Many were lawyers, merchants or ministers' sons. As a group, they were well above the average colonist in education and means, which is what you would expect of men chosen by their colonies to represent them in a national congress. They were not a hereditary aristocracy; most had made their own way.

And notice what they risked. Signing was treason under British law. The fifty-six men pledged "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." Some lost property during the war; Richard Stockton of New Jersey was captured by the British and imprisoned. Rich men protecting their interests do not usually sign their names to a document that invites the world's strongest empire to hang them.

Verdict: Mostly false. Some were rich, many were self-made, and the claim that the whole enterprise was class interest does not survive the facts. More in The Founders Were Not Just Rich Men Protecting Their Property.

Myth 5: The Declaration has the force of law today

The claim. The Declaration is part of the law of the United States, and its principles can be enforced in court like the Constitution.

The record. This one is half true, which makes it interesting. The official United States Code begins with a section titled "The Organic Laws of the United States of America," and the Declaration of Independence is listed first, ahead of the Articles of Confederation, the Northwest Ordinance and the Constitution. So in one sense Congress itself treats the Declaration as foundational law.

But courts do not enforce the Declaration as a source of rights. You cannot file a lawsuit under the phrase "pursuit of Happiness." The binding legal rules are in the Constitution and in statutes. What the Declaration does is supply the purposes of the government the Constitution creates. Judges, presidents and members of Congress cite it to explain what the Constitution is for, and Lincoln argued that the Constitution should be read in its light.

Verdict: Half true. It is the nation's founding act and stands first among the organic laws in the Code, but it is not a source of enforceable claims in court.

Myth 6: The text was Jefferson's alone

The claim. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, by himself, in a flash of genius.

The record. Jefferson wrote the draft. That is not in dispute, and he deserves the credit. But on June 11, 1776, Congress appointed a committee of five, Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston, and the draft went through that committee before it went to Congress. Adams and Franklin made changes. Congress then spent parts of July 2, 3 and 4 editing the draft and cut about a quarter of it, including Jefferson's passage on the slave trade. Congress also added lines, including the appeal "to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions" and the reliance "on the protection of divine Providence."

Jefferson himself never claimed originality of thought. In a letter to Henry Lee of May 8, 1825, he said the object was to express "the American mind," not to find new principles. The ideas came from Locke, from the English constitutional tradition and from documents like George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights, adopted on June 12, 1776.

Verdict: Mostly false. Jefferson was the draftsman; the Declaration was the work of a committee, an edited text of the whole Congress, and the voice of a political tradition.

Myth 7: The Declaration is a secular document

The claim. The Declaration is a product of the Enlightenment and its references to God are boilerplate deism with no real content.

The record. Count the references. There are four:

1. "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" in the first paragraph;
2. "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" in the second;
3. "appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions" near the close;
4. "with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence" in the final sentence.

The first two do the essential philosophical work. Rights come from the Creator, which is why no government can take them away. Remove the Creator and the argument for unalienable rights loses its foundation; rights that come from the state are the state's to revoke. The last two were added by Congress during its editing, which means the body as a whole chose to strengthen the religious language, not weaken it.

The steelman here is real: the Declaration names no church, cites no Scripture, and uses language a deist and a Calvinist could both accept. Jefferson's own beliefs were unorthodox. That is fair. But "not sectarian" is not the same as "secular." The Declaration is broadly theistic. It assumes a Creator who grants rights and a Judge who weighs intentions. It is a document that requires God to make its argument work, while refusing to establish any particular church. That is exactly the American settlement.

Verdict: False. Non-sectarian, yes. Secular, no.

Why the myths matter

Look at the seven together and a pattern appears. Myths 1, 2 and 6 make the founding into a pageant: one day, one bell, one genius. They are sentimental. Myths 3, 4 and 7 make the founding into a fraud: a class document, a rich man's club, a secular tract with pious decorations. They are cynical. Myth 5 overstates the document's legal force.

The sentimental myths are mostly harmless, but they make the founding look easy. It was not easy. It was a sequence of hard votes over weeks, a committee draft hacked down by a contentious Congress, and a parchment signed one man at a time.

The cynical myths do real damage. If the Declaration meant only property-owning white men, then its principles are not ours to claim, and the abolitionists and the civil-rights movement were appealing to a lie. If it was secular, then rights come from the state after all. If it was class interest, then American history is a story of the powerful protecting themselves and nothing more.

The record refutes all three. That matters because a nation that does not know its founding documents cannot defend them. You can test your own knowledge on the site's civics test, and read the text itself on the Constitution page, which carries the founding documents.

For the substance underneath the myths, read The Declaration's Second Paragraph Is a Complete Theory of Government on the theory and The Grievance List in the Declaration Reads Like a Charge Sheet Against Power on the charges. For the same treatment applied to the Bill of Rights, see Eight Myths About the Bill of Rights That Civics Classes Keep Repeating.

The case in brief

1. The Declaration was adopted on July 4, 1776, but most delegates signed it on August 2, and some signed months later.
2. The Liberty Bell story comes from 1840s fiction, and the bell's name came from the abolitionists who borrowed its inscription.
3. "All men" is universal on its face, and the signers' failures to live by it are hypocrisy, which presupposes the standard.
4. The text was a committee draft edited by Congress, and its references to the Creator are essential to its argument, not decoration.
5. The sentimental myths make the founding look easy and the cynical myths make it look fraudulent; the record shows it was neither.

What you can do: read the Declaration in full on the site's Constitution page, count the four references to God yourself, and then take the site's civics test with someone in your family.