The Legacy of the Declaration
On the Declaration's 250th anniversary, Larsen Plyler asks what the document was actually written to do. Taking Justice Clarence Thomas's recent claim that it ranks among the West's great anti-slavery documents as his starting point, Plyler argues that the Declaration's legacy has been shaped less by Jefferson than by Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., who read a later conception of equality and a single unified nation back into it. Returning the text to its context—grievances aimed at the king alone, a closing paragraph declaring thirteen free and independent states—he makes the case for…
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