Drafted chiefly by Thomas Jefferson and adopted in July 1776, the Declaration announced American independence from Britain and grounded it in Enlightenment natural-rights philosophy: all men are created equal, governments derive just power from the consent of the governed. Its author enslaved hundreds; Congress struck a passage condemning the slave trade; the text itself called Native peoples savages. The promise was larger than the men who made it. Abolitionists, the women of Seneca Falls, Lincoln, and anti-colonial movements worldwide all took Jefferson's words and turned them against the powers that withheld what he had proclaimed.
On a hot July in 1776, a few dozen men in Philadelphia voted to break from one of the most powerful empires on earth, and to say why in public. The reasons they gave were not only their own grievances. They wrote that all men are created equal, that every person is born with rights no king and no government can take away, and that government holds its power only by the consent of the people it rules. The man who wrote those words, Thomas Jefferson, held hundreds of human beings in slavery as he wrote them. The Congress that approved them struck out his lines blaming the king for the slave trade. The same page that called all men equal called Native peoples savages. The promise was far larger than the men who made it. Ever since, the people it left out have used its own words against it. That is the strange power of this document: it set a standard its makers did not meet, and handed it to everyone they excluded.