tours staffs recently traveled to lubbock, texas. learn more at c-span.org/cities tour. you're watching american history tv. all weekend, every weekend on c-span 3. next on history bookshelf, danielle allen talks about her book our declaration, a reading of the declaration of independence in defense of equality in which she re-examines the promise of liberty and equality that was guaranteed by the founding fathers. this was recorded at the 2015 national book festival in washington, dc posted by the library of congress. it is about 55 minutes.
>> i want to welcome you to the national book festival and to this presentation on the new book our declaration. earlier today, walter isaacson discussed his book the innovators in which he places creativity at the intersection of science and art. danielle allen, the author of our declaration finds her creativity at the intersection of classical studies and political theory. she holds phd's in both subjects. isaacson found the brilliance that gave the world the programmable computer and the internet could not have come from the inspired efforts of an individual. of necessity they sprang from the collaboration of many individuals. dr. allen finds the assembling of the 1337 words of the declaration of independence was the result of a vast array of
conversation, collaboration, and debates among a surprisingly large number of collaborators. this book itself is a brilliance born of collaboration. a single hand, hers, wrote the text, the thought, the analysis, the philosophy embodied therein is the result of a decade of collaboration, debate and discussion between her and her students. she received much wisdom from them even as she taught them the mechanics of the language. a mechanic she is. like many really good mechanics, she disassembles the declaration's engine, word by word, sand blasts the parts clean, shines them, lubes them, and puts them back together so they run better than new. she has earned five diversity
-- university degrees, a bachelors in classics at princeton, master of philosophy and doctorate in classics at king's college, and a masters and doctorate in government from harvard. she has written five books. she has completed an appointment at the institute for advanced study at princeton. yes, that institute, the one about einstein and j robert oppenheimer. and has taken an appointment as professor in harvard's government department and director of the edmund j. souther center for ethics. please help a welcome dr. danielle allen. [applause] danielle: thank you so much, dan. that was an incredible introduction. i am in your debt. greetings to all of you.
it is wonderful to see you here. i have to say i particularly loved dan's description of me as a mechanic because in a sense, you have given me a way of overcoming a certain childhood failure that has always plagued me. my dad, when i was 11, gave me this car engine that was my job to take apart and reassemble. of all the things i was given in childhood, it was the only one that confounded me. there was no way i could do this. i had an image of it sitting in the dining room unfinished. now i have a different way of reporting i did at last finish my project as a mechanic. fantastic. it is terrific to see you all here tonight and have the chance to talk with you about my book, our declaration, about the declaration of independence. i want to tell you why i wrote
the book, what i was trying to do, then share the key stories in the book were the key ideas. the best way of trying to explain why i wrote the book is to say something about the first version of the book i wrote, not the book that is in front of your but the one that, when i gave it to people to read, they said, try again, danielle. the first version of this book was a dialogue. it was a conversation between a teacher and students. i want to give you a picture of the actual group of teachers and students. i am at the head of the table with my code teacher and group of students. we are working on the declaration of independence. this is a picture of me
explaining to people what a syllogism is. it is a kind of argument. you have a premise and conclusion that a traditional example is socrates. i like to use bill gates. the example goes, socrates, bill gates, human beings. all human beings are mortal. therefore bill gates, even bill gates, will die. the premise, the conclusion. a syllogism actually matters for finishing part of the declaration. i will come back to that. this is us in class. this group of students, who are taught in chicago on the south side in a course on humanities, the odyssey project, whose purpose was to get people who had fallen out of the educational system a chance to start over. the course was ambitious because it was taking a group of students, many of whom did not
have a high school degree, and was saying, we will give these students the same quality of education as during the day we are giving to the university of chicago undergraduates. the university undergraduates have come from the best high schools all over the country, tons of preparation. how do you give the same quality of education to people with that preparation on the one hand and people without the same on the other hand? there is a straightforward answer. you pick short but great texts to talk about. this comes back to dan's point. the declaration is only 1337 words. i have never had a student complain about the reading load with the declaration. that in itself is a great gift to a teacher. so out of basically pragmatic efficiency i started using the
declaration to teach u.s. history and philosophy, writing, literature. something magical happened in that classroom, and it was a conversation with a student that the magical thing happened area which is why in my first effort to write this book, it was a dialogue, a conversation with a teacher and students. i gave it to my agents and friends and family members. they all said, fess up, danielle. you are the teacher. stop pretending this is about somebody else. own what you have to say in this book and write it in your own book. so the book you actually have is my admitting to the fact i was that teacher. i was trying to write about. the teacher trying to share the magical thing with my students.
let me explain the magical thing, and then say something about why i think it matters not just for history, not just for teachers, but for all of us as citizens of a democracy. so the declaration, again, 1337 words. you all know it. my students have mostly not read the whole thing. some of them red experts, none had read the whole thing. they soon found at the university of chicago most of it had not read the whole of the declaration of independence. it is only 1337 words. no excuse. the magical thing that happened was the text is so short but in the middle is the long list of grievances, a stumbling block. people don't read it because the
list seems opaque, but nonetheless if you get all the way through it, it turns out the text is extremely simple. human in the most fundamental sense. it is the voice of a group of people who surveyed their circumstances, diagnosed them, and decided to change their lives. taking the time to explain themselves to the world. that is it. diagnosis, description, justification. these night students of mine, going back to the last photo, in this class, or people who had decided to change their lives. they went to the heart of the declaration faster than i had seen students do. the day students at the university of chicago, princeton and later were wonderful, talented, brilliant, exciting students, but who nonetheless
had always known they were going to college and their parents have gotten them ready to go to college. they had not yet had to set the course of their lives. my adult students were people who had their own obstacles in numerous obstacles with gun violence, diabetes and other difficulties, unstable employment, complexities with childcare arrangements, trying to magical -- trying to manage jobs and children in public schools. so they were sitting in that class on those nights, they had already made this decision they were going to change their lives. for that reason they were more approximate, closer in lived experience to the declaration. that is an extraordinary thing to think of a text from 1776 we think of belonging to these
be-wigged men, that the people closest to that text, living it most directly would be ordinary people among us struggling to make their lives flourish, to flourish in their circumstances. that was the magic i got out of the class. the reason it matters, not just for teachers, not just for my students there, but for all of us, is because that basic lesson, that lesson about human agency in the declaration is the foundational idea underneath the ideal of equality. one of the twins linked so tightly to freedom that counts as the foundation for democracy, ok?
equality. we need to talk about equality. this is a concept that has, a lot because of the black lives matter campaign. it has come up because of marriage equality. it has come up in many ways, but as a concept of equality has returned to the public conversation, it is revealing something about us. we don't actually know how to talk about equality. we have lost our intellectual capacity to do that. we are good, very good at talking about liberty and freedom. we have been talking about that for a long time. we have lots of clichés ready to hand about freedom and liberty. you can think of a man's home is his castle, describing freedom connected to property and privacy and interests. we can say things like
government encroaches on freedom. you have to be careful about government and freedom and ideas like that trip off our tongues. what clichés do we have for equality these days? what trips off the tongue? not very much in my experience. the declaration of independence is built around the concept of equality fundamentally and built on the notion that any human being, any human being is trying to flourish. simple idea. so simple. any human being has that capacity of human agency to survey their circumstances, diagnose what is wrong, set a new course in life, and justify it. that is it. that is it. democracy is built out of that idea. how do we come to think about it?
how do we start remembering the ideas that make equality something we can talk about easily, that we can use to diagnose our own circumstances and look around our own society and say this is working and this is not, and here we need to make a change because it is blocking our effort to realize for everybody the opportunity to be human agents in this kind of way? how can we acquire that? my firm conviction is the declaration can help us. in a minute i will come to the all-important second sentence where we hold these truths sentence. before i do i have to say something else about the history of the declaration and who wrote it because the truth is every time i suggest to people that we can take the declaration seriously and use it now in 2015 to understand our current
circumstances, people will say, jefferson wrote that document. and -- others of us don't admire him so much because of the complication of his having been a slave owner. wasn't jefferson a hypocrite? isn't every word of the declaration of independence nearly an example of self-serving hypocrisy? that is a question i have gotten a lot as i talk about the declaration. before i take you into the text. i need to say something about who wrote the declaration. this is important because as i understand it, u.s. citizenship exam, there is a question who wrote the declaration and the correct answer is thomas jefferson. i will give you a different answer. thomas jefferson put author,
declaration of independence. that is a good way to make sure you get credit for something. keep that in mind. consider what you want credit for. that is not to say he doesn't deserve credit. he was the chair of the committee of five people who drafted the declaration. who else was there? john adams, benjamin franklin, roger sherman, adam livingston. adams made significant contributions, then congress edited by 25%. it was a group writing effort. even beyond that, the declaration itself, the fact there was declaration to declare is thanks to john adams. thomas jefferson was the draftsman. john adams was the politician turning the wheel's along with his colleague in arms richard henry lee. let me show you a picture.
these are the men who have not gotten enough that it. john adams, a man of massachusetts who never held slaves. adams wrote a to-do list. one of my favorite artifacts from the massachusetts historical society. his to-do list for congress. you will not be able to see or your sitting. find it online. the fourth item on the left-hand side set government to be assumed in every colony. this is adams' strategy for getting to independence which convinced all the colonies they were basically in a state of anarchy and was time for them to write their own constitution. his product was build, then take away the old thing. then on the right-hand side fourth on the bottom, on the to-do list, declaration of
independence. he worked consistently through 1775 and 1776 to get the colony to the point of being ready to write a constitution and declare independence. he works to get the committee that would draft the declaration after richard henry lee had stood up in congress and resolved the colonies should declare themselves free and independent states. these were the two who drove the process forward. so we are going to come back to that because we really, it is john adams who gave us the pursuit of happiness. it is important to understand that. let me now dwell on that all-important second sentence why it is so important for all of us who are citizens of a democracy. remind ourselves of what it is. "we hold these truths to be
self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are the right -- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, though whenever a government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." do you remember it was that long? lots of times people think it
stops after pursuit of happiness. but -- let's see. do i not have the second sentence in here? there we go. in fact the sentence goes all the way from its beginning, we hold these truths, to their safety and happiness. here is where we get back to our syllogism as i indicated, that philosophical argumentation. we start with a premise. all people have rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. the second premise, governments are instituted to secure these rights. that is why as birds build nests, human beings build governance. conclusion then, when government is not working, doing good things for which it has been built, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. the sentence leads us from
individual rights through the tool we build together, government, and explain what our responsibility is in relationship to the tool. it is our responsibility to make a judgment whether that tool is achieving our shared safety and happiness and to take response ability for such alterations as necessary to get us to that goal. it is a profound sentence, economical, philosophical simultaneously. it is important to read all the way through. it does not end after pursuit of happiness. think about the whole sentence as it takes from individual rights to that shared project of safety and happiness. it is here in this sentence we get in capsule form, the story of human agency i described for you as being at the heart of my students' experience.
it is because each of us is charting a course for ourselves, pursuing happiness. that democracy is the best form for realizing our potential. in order for democracy to achieve that, we have to find a way to build together so that we can reject ourselves, our -- protect ourselves, our freedom. there is a lot more that can be said about this sentence and how important it is for making us think about the work of democracy, but what i would like to do for my final minutes before opening it up to questions is to say something about that happiness idea i just alluded to. we think of the pursuit of happiness being one of jefferson's most important phrases, but is adams to whom we owe the idea. it matters because the choice
for happiness was caught up in the debate for slavery. for those of you who have read other texts in the history of political thought and thought about the history of rights, you will realize this phrase, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is radical, innovative, because there were common formulations with life, liberty and property. how did we get from property to happiness in the declaration? adams and richard henry lee served together on a committee on what new hampshire should do given the fact its british royal governor had fled. the governor was responsible for all of the operations of the administration in new hampshire. new hampshire was an anarchy. what was the colony to do?
the answer adams and lee crafted was as follows. that it be recommended to the provincial convention of new hampshire to call full and free representation of the people and the representatives if they think it necessary establish such a form of government and in their judgment will best produce the happiness of the people and most effectively secure peace in the province. during the continuance of the present dispute between great britain and the colonies. this language, happiness, peace, good order, is coming from adams. we know that because in april 1776, he produced a pamphlet arguing about what his vision of government was. it is called thoughts on government. richard henry lee produced a poster that was excerpts from adams' pamphlet. these were circulated throughout the colonies to get all of them to be ready to write the
constitution. here is the introduction to adams' pamphlet. we ought to consider government before we determine the best form. all secular to politicians will agree the happiness of society is the end of government. the divine and moral philosophers will agree happiness of the individual is the end of man. from this principle it will follow the form of government which communicates these, comfort, security or in one word, happiness, to the greatest number of people and to the greatest degree is best. jefferson wasn't using the vocabulary of happiness. we know that because we have other texts of his. for example, this from 1775 where he lists the core lists of rights. conventional property.
as the british were telling slaves in virginia that if they fled and fought for the british they would receive freedom, virginians had begun to complain about that move on the part of the british as a violation of their rights of property. the vocabulary of property became closely linked to the sense of slavery in the fall of 1775 and spring of 1776. in may, george mason drafts the virginia declaration of rights, and he fuses the argument from adams, man of massachusetts who thought slavery was bad and never held slaves, with the conventional view of the virginians. he wrote all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherited rights, of which when they enter into a state of society they cannot by any compact derive their posterity.
the enjoyment of life, liberty, the means of acquiring and possessing property and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. here we see the two streams of conversation from the spring coming together, leaving us with the mystery of why it was property dropped out of the declaration of independence. let me give you a snippet from the debates in the continental congress that july and the articles of confederation to show you how closely property and slavery had been connected. this is lynch and south carolina. if it is debated if they are slaves are property, there is the end of the confederation. so when we look at the declaration of independence and look at the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we are reading one of the first compromises that made the new nation possible.
a language capacious enough to be acceptable to both a nascent anti-slavery side and the slavery side. a lot to be said about the danger and problematic nature of compromises in the american founding, but it is important to recognize this moment, this formulation was a victory for the anti-slavery position. there is the core rights that describe life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. we can attribute this to john adams who, over the course of that year, was making the case that happiness is the end of society as for the individual person, and that was the ideal the colonists should use to pull themselves together in chart a new course for themselves. let me conclude then by simply encouraging each of you to revisit the declaration of independence and to think of it s a living document.
let me take you back again to hat second sentence. right here. i will just read it one last time. because, again, its orientation is to the continual responsibility of a democratic people to be the agents that they have the potential to be. it's not a historical claim:it's a present claim, claim for the president, for now. that's for 1776, a claim that is always alive. we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with serp unalienable rights, that
among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever a government becomes instructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying a foundation on such principle and organizing its power in such form as to seem most her, shall likely to affect their safety and happiness. thank you. [applause] danielle: very glad to take questions.
please. >> yes, thank you for your book. i haven't read all of it. i just started it today, but i really appreciate your deconstructing the supposed dichotomy or conflict between liberty and freedom on the one hand, inequality on the other, and the focus in the last sentence in the declaration on the collectivity of effort that t took to get the nation going and also the point about the ongoing need to participate together. danielle: thank you. >> i am retired. i spent my career practicing psychotherapy, and so when you use the term human agency, you know, it's a psychological term as well as comes from other disciplines, i suppose, but you are talking about a collective human agency in terms of the creation of the country and the
writing of the declaration. i guess i -- i have thought about this a lot and the fact that psychology and psychotherapy tends to focus on the individual, i think, has historically, and the liberation of the individual being kind of the end point, the goal of psychological help and psychotherapy. and which leaves out all of these other issues that you are bringing up, but in the context of psychology, which i think has gone to serve kind of a consumerist kind of culture, focus on the individual and liberation through commodity, you know, and consumption, acquisition of commodities, so i wonder if you could -- if this is kind of part of how you think about this stuff and the role that psychology has played in our modern era in terms of
dividing ourselves the way that we are. danielle: thank you. thank you very much. it's interesting because one of the experiences of teaching my students, working with my students and writing this book, as this bizarre discovery of a closeness between individual human agency and the psychology of the individual trying to improve their lives and the political question. in fact, we think of politics as being so far removed from individual psychology and yet it's exactly the same thing about human beings that's at the heart of both. so yes, i do think that policy is incredibly important. laws are incredibly important. having the capacity to look at policy, look at laws and look for reforms is incredibly important, but so, too, is the capacity to actually build healthy interactions and relations and i do think it would be a great thing if psychologists would pay more attention to that issue of how
we help build healthy relationships in the sense of a broader collective and not just at the individual and family unit and things like that, so thank you. >> i have a question about one of the last quotes that you --ught up of james danielle: john adams? >> adams. what did he mean when he said that happiness would be the end of the individual and the end of government? danielle: right, great. o by "end" there, he meant goal, i should clarify that. the use of end was your ambition, your objective, the thing you are aiming for, and what he meant was he was really connecting to a long-lived philosophical tradition that focuses on an idea of human
flourishing or well-being, so any human being is trying to do more than survive, right? we want in some sense to be able to get to the end of our lives and say that was a life well lived, and that, i think, is at the core of adams' conception of happiness, and the folks of 1776, women as well as men, you can include abigail adams, in the group of thinkers that thought human beings needed to direct themselves in order for them to achieve that experience of being able to say that was a life well-lived. thank you. >> thank you. >> hi. danielle: hi. massachusetts, and i am not trying to stop the gay from having freedom, but freedom with to be at a rivalry
that freedom and family because the individual is linked to family and freedom and happiness . they want control of their children, but they brought their ghts to be free of choice as individuals to massachusetts and seem to be trying to oppress the freedoms of families. how would you resolve the rivalry that is starting in massachusetts with freedom and individual rights? danielle: thank you for your question. so it's important that freedom and equality be linked to each other. i think when people build their way of thinking about their own lives and our society around freedom alone, it can lead to
precisely that infringement on the rights of others, and so it's important -- this is a little technical in the history of philosophy, but there are two different ways of thinking about freedom. you can think about freedom as being freedom from interference, or you can think about freedom as being freedom from domination. these are different. freedom from interference gives one the idea that anything that interferes with one's life is a problem. but laws interfere with our lives, right? the point of a law is in fact to put rules of the game on the ground instead of constraints, in effect, that protect everybody from domination and thereby provide everybody with freedom from domination ensuring that the ways in which we are interfered by, by the law, are legitimate. so if you can focus on freedom from domination as the core
definition, it becomes clear how freedom and equality are linked to each other. if we are thinking freedom for all, there have to be limits on our behavior toward one another. there can't be such a thing as full freedom from interference. eedom for all requires egalitarian limits that we express through laws in order to protect one another. i think we have folks waiting over here if you don't mind. we have to take turns. >> professor allen, thank you so much. i have been following your work at princeton, the university of chicago. i read your aims of education speech at the university of chicago, very inspiring. danielle: thank you. >> had a quick question. you said, i am a teacher, and you said, we often lack the intellectual capacity to talk about equality. we have the capacity to talk about liberty, but we don't have the intellectual capacity to talk about equality.
can you talk more about this in the context of happiness? danielle: sure. thanks. let me say two things. one, to add a little bit to the remark i made about equality and i will connect it to happiness. so it's important if somebody invokes the idea of equality to ask them what kind they mean. do they mean political equality, moral equality, social equality? do they mean something to do with economic relations, economic equality or justice or opportunity? and you have to take the concept of heart in the first instance. we have forgotten how to do that. the declaration focuses primarily on political equality, which it rests on a ground of moral equality, and it pulls some elements of social equality into it, but it doesn't have that much to say about economic questions. it's important to be very precise about the ways equality works. i take it your question about happiness was whether we are good at thinking about happiness
or whether we have also lost the capacity to do that. i would say yes, i think our capacity to think about happiness has also weakened. once you work on the declaration, you see its use everywhere. i don't know if the rest of you have noticed this, but pursuit of happiness is used all over the place in ads. it has become our basic way of talking about what it means to buy stuff. that counts as pursuing happiness. and yes, that is absolutely a remarkably weakened sense of what happiness means. so how does one rebuild an idea of that, happiness is about the flourishing of the whole person, mind and spirit, well beyond matters of material questions, and happiness is about being able by the end of your life to ask and sforle answer that question, have -- answered that
question have i lived well and yes, i can look back and say the past that i have crafted was a life worth living. so i think it takes a lot of work to start rebuilding our ability to understand what happiness consists of. >> i appreciate you coming. i learned a lot just in your small session. my main question is what inspired you to write actually about the declaration of independence? danielle: yes, thank you. i feel i am not very good at answering that question. the answer on one level is my students. as i said in the beginning, it was truly magical in the classroom. it will, i think, by the end of my life be my best teaching experience. to date, it certainly has been, teaching my students and teaching the declaration. it was magical because it was a text that the students did not think of as belonging to them or the ining to them, and
centrality of the agency that they were claiming over their own lives and the fact that that's what this text was about crystallized and led them to say that text is mine. that declaration is mine. maybe i will pull out the list of grievances that's there and put in a new list of grievances, but that declaration is mine. to see people come into a sense of their personal and political agency is a privilege, incomparable to any other i can imagine. so it was my students who inspired me. there was a paper -- there was an article about the course i was teaching, a student was quoted adds saying the declaration session had been one of her favorite parts. that confirmed to me it wasn't just me who was feeling something. that's what inspired me to put it on paper. >> yes, dr. allen, wonderful to
hear your lecture. thanks so much. danielle: my pleasure. >> i appreciate your comments about how some people today don't appreciate the relevance of the declaration of independence today. i take that to mean that some people just don't see that it has necessarily a lot of value. it seems to me a significant contrast between the writers of the declaration of independence and our leaders today. the writers of the declaration of independence were revolutionaries who were feeling oppressed. they were looking for freedom from england. leaders today in the united states are not in that position, and so i am not certain if you were to ask many of the elected officials today how closely they identify with the declaration of independence. they might not because they don't feel that kind of oppression that the american revolutionaries felt. so i am wondering whether you
see that as an issue in terms of getting elected officials today and government to be responsive to our requirements. danielle: thanks for your question. our politics have confounded by a long list of problems, and so i would probably myself describe our difficulties somewhat differently in the sense that i the think you need to be subject of the oppression of something like the british empire to understand the declaration and make use of it again because what the declaration charges us with is the responsibility of surveying our circumstances. when in the course of human events -- what are the course of human events around us? what have been the course of human events for the past 20 years? what patterns are in them? i think responding to that question of how our world is changing around us is as relevant today as then.
is e, the greater concern what is pointed to by the end of the second sentence which i emphasized, the responsibility of the people to institute new governments, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such form to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. what are these things? principles -- the declaration of independence was a statement of principle. the articles of confederation was the first effort at form. we tried again with the institution. so what i am most concerned about with regard to our contemporary leaders is their very poor -- i don't know how else to say it -- capacity to engage with principle and in a principled fashion. so that's where i would put my emphasis. [applause] danielle: thank you.
, professor, estion certainly appreciate your auntil sis of this -- analysis of this. i would suggest perhaps it needs to be a tad bit further because the greatest challenge to this union occurred, of course, during the civil war when you have secession and then purportedly everybody was almost at a point, except for john wilkes booth, of hugging and let's move forward once the gettysburg address was proclaimed and once you had general lee give general grant his sword and in my view, from what the president who followed, lincoln did, he should have been impeached. he should have been tried for treason, and what occurred in terms of taking all of the northern troops, the union
troops, out of the south and allowing the rampage against the former slaves to take place and the horrors that took place for many years thereafter, i think is a betrayal of this -- these lofty statements that are contained in the forming of this union. and a further betrayal happens o be be what's occurred in every war where after americans were told you will be free, you will have equal rights, etc., and we have riots, murders, etc. taking place thereafter. do you think that maybe the next step that's important would be to right the wrong of maybe where a lot of folks who were in the confederacy -- that was it, he wasn't the president of the
confederacy, etc., or what would be your thoughts on that in terms of next steps? danielle: thank you very much. that's a very challenging question. so for me it's very important to say that there were multiple political traditions that flew out -- that flowed out of the moment of 1776. so from the moment of the writing of the declaration, you saw the beginning of an abolition movement that used the language of the declaration to make its case. you saw abolition beginning to move forward, 1780 in pennsylvania, vermont, massachusetts by 1782, all using the language of the declaration. n the south, you have -- the invention of the cotton gin which entrenched slavery, up until the invention of the cotton gin, it was reasonable for people to believe, as george washington did, that slavery was on its way out. so it's important to recognize
actually that the politics of slavery in this country have not been stable. it's not just been one thing from the beginning all the way through. there have been multiple traditions. the politics of slave ray was powerfully affected by the cotton gin. the the story of the country is one about traditions, contesting with each other, struggling with each other. that is true from the beginning to the present day. i don't have a silver bullet to the answer of how do we take this struggle and move in the direction of peace and resolution. i think it continues to be hard work, but i think we have to be committed to the idea of achieving peace and resolution. i think we have to be explicit that, again, there have been multiple traditions in the country. some are worthy, orte are not, and in that regard we have the hard challenge of helping
ourselves discard those of our traditions which are not worthy of us. [applause] >> i was intrigued. i just finished reading a book on "our declaration." danielle: thank you. >> i am tying that in with a book i read a while back. t was "american epic." it was similar use of text. so i am trying to tie the two, and i am thinking what the linkage is between the catalog of grievances against the king and how that fit in with the -- in other words, no longer when they were going to try to ratify the constitution. they wanted to have rights not just implied but enumerated. rights's why the bill of
came about, almost like some of the things listed in that list of grievances showed up in the bill of rights. danielle: that's exactly right. that's very well put. if you want to make a list of grieve -- grievances a heck of a lot more fun to read than it often is for people, notice the fact that it actually contains a constitutional theory. the first few complaints are all complaints about the legislative branch of government. then you get complaints about the judicial branch of government. and then you get complaints about the executive branch of government. you get a long list of stuff stuck in by jefferson that are his pet peeves. then at the very end you get complaints about violations of the law of war. that constitutional structure in the list of grievances comes from adams. his thoughts on government, the stuff on the quebec act is jefferson's pet peeve, got stuck
in the middle. you can see the two hands working together. yes, the bill of rights is an enumeration of what they put in the negative form in the complaints in the declaration, which means of course, importantly, that it's not the case that first we had the derglargs and -- declaration and it was about equality and then we had the constitution and it was about liberty and those are different things. the documents belong together. they share the same constitutional theory. they are about the union of equality and liberty. thank you. we are out of time. thank you so much. appreciate it. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2018]
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>> retired u.s. army sergeant major gavin mcilvenna talks about the creation of the tomb of the unknown soldier at arlington national cemetery following world war i. a founder and president of the society of the honor guard, he describes the changing of the guard ceremony and reflects on the meaning of the monument. the national world war i museum and memorial hosted the hour long event. >> now it is my pleasure to introduce sergeant major retired gavin mcilvenna, the 11th president of the society of the honor guard tomb of the unknown soldier. retired from the u.s. army after nearly 23 years of service, where he held key leadership positions, led peace and the contingency operations and earned several decorations and as i watched him walk through the halls on an incompetent credibly busy memorial day
