The Genesis of the Declaration of Independence

Fireworks this Friday will celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence almost 250 years ago. The founders’ assurance “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” was authorized by “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” But the meaning of that phrase has been the subject of heated debate for some time. For example, John Fea suggests that because the document’s primary purpose was to “announce the birth of the United States to the world” readers cannot point to phrases such as “endowed by their Creator” and “Nature’s God” as language originally understood to mean that “human rights came from God.”

But the concept of natural law and phrases such as “Nature’s God” had been used to signal a theistic understanding of government for centuries before Thomas Jefferson put pen to paper. Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, political theorists hardly noted for their piety, presented natural law as a code of conduct instituted by the God of Genesis, at the creation of the world. “This original law of nature,” wrote John Locke, can be traced back to the divine injunction in Genesis 1:28 when

God and his reason commanded him [Adam] to subdue the earth, i.e. improve it for the benefit of life and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour. He that, in obedience to this command of God, subdued, tilled, and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his property, which another had no title to, nor could without injury take from him.