It is not surprising that we should misunderstand the Declaration [of Jefferson's original draft]. It is written in the lost language of the Enlightenment. It is dark with unexamined lights. [xiv]

Jefferson's draft Declaration was altered before adoption by the Continental Congress; the prevailing notion is the alterations were stylistic improvements merely. Wills examines several reasons to doubt this, reasons we don't understand Jefferson's draft and the changes effected by the revisions. For one thing, we no longer understand the language it's written in (key familiar terms hold different meanings today). And, the vision instilled by Lincoln's Gettysburg Address serves now as a distorting lens. [xxiv] Finally, Congress rejected Jefferson's framework for understanding independence, namely his premise of "expatriation as independence," and so removed explicit references to that framework. The resulting document is mistakenly understood to be Lockean, when at root it was sentimental following Francis Hutcheson.

In addition to a close reading of Jefferson's Declaration and its important departures from the published Congressional document, Wills provides:
1 - Political context leading up to and including the Declaration (corrective to the commonplace "symbolic" meaning of the official Declaration)
2 - A primer on the Scottish Enlightenment and its place in Colonial America (especially the significance of moral sense philosophy)

Wills looks at the political arguments and backroom politicking, but more interesting for me is the intellectual history he brings. Why Jefferson argued for "expatriation as independence" and why he found it important to frame his argument in moral sentiment and science; opposed to Adams and others. Jefferson theorised through expatriation the Colonists broke fundamentally from Britain, broke the "ties of affection" which made us collectively a single people. Our colonial link to Britain came later, when charters were drawn severally to a common King. The later separation ("independence" in conventional wisdom) from Britain occurred in the hearts of men [sic], the Declaration merely acknowledging that fact. [316] Jefferson's draft rested on this understanding, and since no-one (excepting Geo Whyte) shared it, all explicit reference to it was excised from official document. But: vestigial evidence remains, discernible when read with the eyes of a student of the Scottish Enlightenment. Wills provides those eyes.

A fair question: why bother with Jefferson's draft, and the ideas informing it, if in fact no one else shared his premise for it, neither Loyalist nor Colonial? For me, it comes down to an interest in political culture, historical and contemporary. It is not so much recovering a "lost" education as providing a corrective to a tentative grasp on a superficial and distorted history, instilling in me a new-found interest in U.S. political culture and the events funding it.

//

Prologue outlines argument in Lincoln at Gettysburg; highlights how Lincoln made politics religious, rather than making a politics of his religion. This reinforced the already present influence of religion on U.S. politics. The danger of idealism, the inherent conservatism of it: conform to this ideal, or you are not a true American.

Of moral sense philosophy:
1 - when did it cease to be a standard?
2 - why did it no longer suffice? (related to internal issues with theory, or external developments in culture?)
3 - was decline linked to secular individualism and Lockean liberalism and Utilitarianism?
4 - what is the evidence for / against it? (ad points out mirror neurons as possible neurobiological corollary) ( )

Very well written but a little more detail than I was looking for. ( )

This book is much broader than the title suggests. It does much to de-mythologize the Declaration itself, distinguishing the documents penned by Jefferson and approved by Congress from the symbolic meanings that have surrounded it, particularly since Lincoln's elegiac invocation of it in the Gettysburg address. But it is also a lucid and detailed study of the intellectual origins of virtually all of the ideas Jefferson put into the writing of it, not all of which were retained in the version approved by Congress on July 4th.

Though not a biography of Jefferson, Wills's deep study of the intellectual origins of Jefferson's Declaration moves Jefferson out of the mists of legend so that his ideas and contributions to the foundation of the America state can be properly evaluated.

I think Wills over-reaches a bit in some of his claims about the revolution, for instance too easily rejecting the role of a nascent working class politics in the Revolution,and the idea that some elements of the Constitution are at odds with the Declaration.

But the book remians quite valuable as an expllication of Jefferson's ideas. ( )

2/17/23

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