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The founders left three groups out of the Declaration of Independence: Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, and women. This is how they responded.
A few years ago, Civics 101 did a series revisiting the Declaration of Independence, and three groups for which the tenants of life, liberty, and property enshrined in that document did not apply. We bring you all three parts of that series today.
Part 1: Byron Williams, author of The Radical Declaration, walks us through how enslaved Americans and Black Americans pushed against the document from the very beginning of our nation’s founding.
Part 2: Writer and activist Mark Charles lays out the anti-Native American sentiments within it, the doctrines and proclamations from before 1776 that justified ‘discovery,’ and the Supreme Court decisions that continue to cite them all.
Part 3: Laura Free, host of the podcast Amended and professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, tells us about the Declaration of Sentiments, the document at the heart of the women’s suffrage movement.
Listen here:
Transcript:
Nick Capodice: About a year ago. Hannah We made an episode about the Declaration of Independence, and it had a healthy dose of my enthusiasm for 1776.
Archival Tape: But declaration will be a triumph, I tell you.
Nick Capodice: And it had different takes from three scholars on what the document was.
Tape: It had the job of justifying one of the most consequential political decisions ever taken.
Tape: I referred to the Declaration of Independence as originally written as a secession ordinance.
Tape: This was as close to a perfect document on human agency that one will ever find.
Nick Capodice: And I love making that episode. I really did.
Hannah McCarthy: And since then, the Declaration has found its way into many of our episodes.
Nick Capodice: Yes, our exploration of that document feels forever unfinished. And on the cutting room floor of that episode was something our guest, Byron Williams, said how the declaration was exclusionary, but the ideas in it evolved into the words of Abraham Lincoln. James Baldwin, the poet and activist Langston Hughes. As we pass this most recent quarantine, 4th of July, I called Byron up to just get a little more on it. Check the time before we start. Do you still have like 30 minutes?
Byron Williams: I got 31 for you.
Nick Capodice: Byron Williams is a professor, theologian and host of the show The Public Morality, and he has just written the Radical Declaration. It's a book of essays on our paradoxical founding document. So I asked him first how the declaration had been used to fuel political change.
Byron Williams: Well, Lincoln reconstruction, women's suffrage, civil rights, Jim Crow, Vietnam, the current moment we see that's the great thing about about that document. We can just pick a seminal moment and it pretty much works. So how do you want to go?
Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: This is Civics 101, the podcast refresher course on the basics of how our democracy works. Today, we are revisiting the Declaration of Independence, one of our most celebrated founding documents. And while it has been used, as Byron said, to instigate change throughout our country's history, it is frankly a document that left many people out.
Hannah McCarthy: By which you mean enslaved Americans, women, people of color and Native Americans.
Nick Capodice: And initially, even more than that.
Byron Williams: It is never stated. But the the unstated part of that declaration was it applied to white male landowners. In our present discourse, oftentimes we hear white male and we leave out landowners, but it was white male landowners sort of like, think of it this way life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is this moral agreement. And you got to have all three to have them. All two thirds of that proposition won't cut it. If you were white and male and not a landowner, you were still disenfranchized. So as a result, you have this document that proposes creating a nation on liberty and equality. What becomes the unstated white male landowners? You had subjective liberty and inequality. You disenfranchize all the women, all of the people of color. And depending on the pinning on the data, somewhere between 35 and 50% of the white male population. So it's a document right there rooted in inconsistency in what I talk about in the book Paradox.
Nick Capodice: And that paradox in the Declaration was commented on and tested not long after it was signed. Byron points to Prince Whipple of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Byron Williams: He was the slave of William Whipple, who was a signer of the Declaration in a petition to the Hampshire Continental Congress in 1779, to be exact. And a part of it reads The petition of Nero Brewster and others, natives of Africa, now forcibly detained in slavery in said state, most humbly submit that the God of nature gave them life and freedom upon terms of the most perfect equality with other men. That freedom is an inherent right of the human species not to be surrendered. Does that not sound like they were slightly influenced by We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator? You see right there, the Declaration of Independence is already becoming radicalized, going already going beyond the intended white male landowner to to more people, really not included going, wait a minute. You said these things and we are partitioning our freedom based on what you have already committed yourselves.
Hannah McCarthy: That this was a literal petition that went before the New Hampshire House.
Nick Capodice: Yes, before we even had a constitutional right to protest or petition. This was how the people in New Hampshire could interact with their government.
Hannah McCarthy: What did the New Hampshire Congress do?
Nick Capodice: They tabled it with no legislative action. Whipple himself was not freed for five more years. Movement towards abolition in New Hampshire began in 1783, but Portsmouth merchants participated in the slave trade until 1807. That was the year the African slave trade was abolished, not the practice of slavery itself. A small number of enslaved people were reported on the census in New Hampshire until 1840, and shortly after that, in 1852, one of the most famous and critical speeches about American independence was delivered. Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave is the 4th of July. It's a speech he gave at a commemoration of the declaration signing.
Hannah McCarthy: Did you see that recording done by NPR this past 4th of July of his descendants reading sections from that.
Reading: What to the Slave is the 4th of July: What to the American Slave is your 4th of July? I answer a day that reveals to him more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him. Your celebration is a sham. Your boasted liberty and unholy license. Your national greatness, swelling, vanity. Your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless.
Byron Williams: Frederick Douglass is obviously one of those stories you can't make up. A runaway slave, he runs away, stows away goes to England, becomes educated. I'm just giving you the really not even the Reader's Digest version and comes back and becomes one of the most ardent abolitionists to end slavery at this point. Eight 1852 Frederick Douglass sees the irony, the inconsistency of the Declaration of Independence, that it does not extend to everybody and specifically does not extend, you know, to to people of African descent. But later on. Post-civil War. Douglas says this. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring removal to the chain of your nation's destiny. So indeed, I regarded the principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles. Be true to them on all occasions and in all places against all foes and at whatever cost. I think that's a great lesson for all of us.
Byron Williams: You know, if we freeze this document in time. You know, I'm an African-American. If I freeze it, if I freeze the document to the intentions of 1776, then the document may not be relevant to me given given given the history of America. But it's not about anyone's intent. It's what the country committed to. And so you see in Frederick Douglass, he added in the first reading, he points out the hypocrisy. But then later on, he evolves and goes, You know what? This document does work. But it can only work if we want it to work.
Nick Capodice: When I learned about Frederick Douglass in school, it was always in the context of the Civil War. But he continued to give lectures across the world well after he helped to build housing for Black Americans in Baltimore in the 1890s. And he died in 1895 after returning from a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C.. So, yes, slavery was abolished in 1865, but responses to the declaration and the ideals laid out in it continued into the 20th century.
Byron Williams: So then you have Langston Hughes saying, you know, America has never been America to me. It's a beautiful poem.
Nick Capodice: Are you familiar with Langston Hughes?
Hannah McCarthy: I know little I know that he was a prominent author during the Harlem Renaissance and that he wrote a famous poem called Harlem.
Nick Capodice: What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun or fester like a sore and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Byron is referencing Hughes's later poem entitled Let America Be America Again.
Byron Williams: But even in that lament that America has never been America to him and acknowledging the hypocrisy, Hughes carves out a piece of hope. But I do say clearly America will be America to me, in spite of itself. This thing will happen. And so there is the reality that that America of America still promised, but yet there's still this hope that America will be this thing one day. And then you have one of the great 20th century writers, James Baldwin.
Nick Capodice: James Baldwin was a prolific playwright, a novelist and essayist who wrote extensively on the subject of race, but also spoke about it on late night talk shows.
Byron Williams: This is great interview that he does on on Dick Cavett and I'm paraphrasing it, but Baldwin basically says, you know, I don't know if if real estate lobbyists hate Black people, but I know where they force me to live.
James Baldwin Archival: I don't know whether the labor unions and their. Bosses really hate me. That doesn't matter. But I know I'm not in their unions. I don't know if the Board of Education hates Black people, but I know the textbooks that get my children to read. And the schools that we have to go to.
James Baldwin Archival: Now, this is the evidence you want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sisters, my children on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen.
Byron Williams: And so at some point, delayed gratification becomes it becomes nonexistent. And I don't believe it. And the only challenge to that is that if you follow the Baldwin path to its logical conclusion, you end up nihilistic and apathetic, which is an understandable conclusion. It does not make us a better people. You know, Bob Dylan was wrote the lyric, When you got nothing, you've got nothing to lose. A democratic republic cannot survive if it has a growing population that feels they have nothing to. They have nothing, so they have nothing to lose. And they sort of checked out. The republic cannot survive if that number reaches a certain threshold. And I and I actually worried today, Nick, that we're getting closer to that threshold.
Hannah McCarthy: What does Byron think will improve our democratic republic?
Nick Capodice: Byron was very careful to not give prescriptions on how to improve our democratic republic. He specifically said he wrote this book on the declaration to start a conversation. I think I'm going to end this one on the words of someone else. On James Baldwin. Apathy and nihilism aside, in 1959, he wrote Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom from which we began, which is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And then he said, the recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country. A hard look at himself. And if we're not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.
Nick Capodice: The Declaration of Independence is one of our most celebrated founding documents. When we did our Declaration episode last year, Hanna, author and Harvard professor Danielle Allen told us the document was a masterclass in political philosophy unto itself, that you can hear pro slavery and anti slavery voices in it. And then there was something that we didn't talk about in the episode. In a recent interview on Vox, she said One of the big things we get wrong when we talk about the declaration is that we think it was written entirely by Thomas Jefferson.
Danielle Allen: He put on his tombstone author Declaration of Independence, and that was a real self aggrandizing gesture. In fact, he was the scribe. The intellectual work of the Declaration was driven significantly by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. That's an important thing to say out loud, because Adams is somebody who never owned slaves, and Franklin was somebody who was an enslaver earlier in his life and who repudiated enslavement and in fact, became a proactive vocal advocate of abolition.
Nick Capodice: And when we spoke with Danielle, she noted this, that there are pro-slavery and anti-slavery voices in the declaration. But then she followed up that there is one community that shared no such duality.
Danielle Allen: You can't say the same thing about the treatment of Native Americans. You can't see a moment of sort of positivity in the declaration on that front. And this is really, for me, the worst moment in the declaration, the one piece of the declaration that still I think really hurts.
Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice. I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: And this is Civics 101, the podcast refresher course on the basics of how our democracy works. In this episode, we are exploring three communities for which the tenets of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the Declaration of Independence did not apply. Now let's focus on that particular grievance Danielle Allan mentioned and its social and political reverberations. I spoke with author and activist Mark Charles, and I'm going to let him introduce himself.
Mark Charles: Yá’ át’ ééh. Mark Charles yinishyé. Tsin bikee dine’é nishłí. Dóó tó’aheedlíinii bá shíshchíín. Tsin bikee’ dine’é dashicheii. Dóó tódích’ íi’ nii dashinálí.
Mark Charles: In our Navajo culture, when we introduce ourselves, we always give our four clans. We're matrilineal as a people and our identities come from our mother's mother. So my mother's mother's American of Dutch heritage. And that's why I say Tsin bikee dine’é that loosely translated, that means I'm from the wooden shoe people. My second clan, my father's mother is tó’aheedlíinii gleni, which is the waters that flow together. My third clan, my mother's father is also Tsin bikee dine’é, my fourth clan, my father's father is tódích’ íi’ nii, that's the bitter water clan. It's one of the original clans of our Navajo people.
Hannah McCarthy: That's really interesting because, you know, whenever we introduce ourselves, like even at the beginning of each podcast, we say our first name and our last name and leave it at that. But the Navajo introduction roots oneself in the lands and the people that are a part of you. That's an active form of self-identifying.
Mark Charles: I also just want to acknowledge that I am speaking to you today from Washington, D.C. and Washington, D.C. is the traditional land of the Piscataway, the Piscataway or the native nation. They lived here, they hunted here, they farmed here, they fished here. They raised their families here. They bury their dead here. Their society was here. And this was the nation that was removed from these lands and when these lands were colonized. So they were here long before Columbus got lost at sea, and then they were removed from these lands. So the District of Columbia, the state of Maryland, the state of Virginia could be established. I like to acknowledge the people whose land I'm on no matter where I go around the country. So everywhere I speak, when I travel, I always acknowledge the host people of the land. And I want to acknowledge today the Piscataway and I want to thank them publicly for their stewardship of these lands. And I want to thank them for the honor of living, of being on their land today.
Nick Capodice: I called Mark to talk about the Declaration, but he said first we had to go back to another set of documents from about 300 years earlier, which created a concept of international law called the Doctrine of Discovery.
Hannah McCarthy: To be honest, I actually haven't heard of that, and I'm a little abashed because we did an entire series on the founding documents. What is the doctrine of Discovery?
Mark Charles: The Doctrine of Discovery is a series of papal bulls that are edicts of the Catholic Church, written between 1452 and 1493. They say things like invade, search, out, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever. Reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, convert them to his and to their use and profit.
Nick Capodice: That quote is from the papal bull Dum Diversas in 1452. A papal bull, by the way, is a public decree or a charter that's issued by the pope and dum da versus was issued in 1452 by Pope Nicholas the fifth.
Mark Charles: So the doctrine of discovery, it's essentially the church in Europe saying to the nations of Europe, wherever you go, whatever lands you find are not ruled by white European Christian rulers. Those people are subhuman and their land is yours for the taking. So this is literally the doctrine that let European nations go into Africa, colonize the continent, and enslave the people because they didn't believe them to be human. It's the same doctrine that allowed Columbus, who was lost at sea, to land in this new world which was already inhabited by millions and claimed to have discovered it. If you think about it, you cannot discover land already inhabited. That's called stealing. It's called conquering. Called colonizing. The fact that our history books are monuments are our proclamations refer to Columbus as the discoverer of America. This reveals the implicit racial bias of the nation, which is that Native people specifically and people of color in general are not fully human.
Hannah McCarthy: And I would guess, right, that the dehumanization of nonwhites results in a drastic expansion of the church's power across the whole world. So how is this idea of enslavement and the taking of land tied to the Declaration of Independence?
Nick Capodice: Mark wanted to mention one more step before 1776. It's a proclamation of King George, the third given to the 13 colonies in 1763.
Mark Charles: In this proclamation, one of the things he did was he essentially drew a line down the Appalachian Mountains, and he said to the colonies that were here that they no longer had the right of discovery of the empty Indian lands west of Appalachia. That right, he said, belong to the crown, not to the colonists. Now, this is where there was a break between the northern colonies up where Canada is and the southern colonies, which were the 13 of the US, where the Northern Colonies accepted the proclamation of 1763 didn't change the history. The lands were still discovered. They were just discovered by the Crown, not the colonies.
Nick Capodice: 1763 is also the year of the end of the French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years War. And that's when what became Canada changed from French hands to British control. And this proclamation actually started to set up guidance on how to protect indigenous rights to the land. It's a huge factor in Canadian land rights, even to this day. But the southern colonies and when I say Southern, I mean all of the 13 colonies that eventually became the United States. They rejected this. They wanted that land for themselves. They wanted that right of discovery. And so they made an official complaint.
Mark Charles: So a few years later, they write a letter of protest. In their letter of protest, they have a list of grievances against the king. One of the grievances is that he's raising the level of conditions for new appropriations of land. The other grievance, this is one of their last grievances is that he's endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose only known rule of warfare is a complete destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. This is the Declaration of Independence.
Hannah McCarthy: I have thought of the Declaration as an announcement of separation, a justification for revolution, but I'd never considered it as a letter of protest.
Nick Capodice: The grievances, frankly, get short shrift when we examine the document, but they are all tied to very specific frustrations with England, with the king. And those two paired together embed this racist doctrine of discovery into our very founding.
Mark Charles: So 30 lines below the statement All men are created equal. The Declaration of Independence refers to natives as savages, making it very clear that the Founding Fathers use this inclusive term, all men, merely because they had a very narrow definition of who is actually human. So this makes the Declaration of Independence a blatant, systemically white supremacist document.
Nick Capodice: And it's not just the ethical problem of considering a whole people as savages. The doctrine of Discovery becomes embedded into American law. In 1823, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Johnson v McIntosh.
Mark Charles: And it's two men of European descent there, litigating over a single piece of land. One of them got the land, acquired the land from a tribe. The other one acquired the same land from the government. They want to know who owned it. So the case goes all the way to the Supreme Court. So the Supreme Court this is John Marshall's court. He was the chief justice at the time. They had to decide the principle that land titles were based on. They ruled that the principle was that Discovery gave title to the land and then they referenced the doctrine of Discovery. And John Marshall actually wrote, he said, But the Indians who inhabited these lands were fierce savages, whose subsistence came chiefly from the forest. To leave them in possession of their own country was to leave the country a wilderness. This is in the in the opinion he wrote in Johnson versus Mcintosh. So literally the conclusion of this opinion is that title is based on discovery and natives, even though we were here first. But because we're savages, we are merely occupants of the land. Like a fish occupies water. A bird occupies air. Meanwhile, Europeans who have the right of discovery to the land, the fee title to it, they're the two title holders. So that case back in 1823 creates the legal precedent for land titles based on this understanding that natives are savages.
Hannah McCarthy: How long did that Supreme Court precedent remain that land titles are based on, quote, discovery?
Nick Capodice: That decision Marshall's decision was cited in 1954, 1985 and 2005.
Hannah McCarthy: Are you kidding? What was the 2005 case?
Nick Capodice: It was the city of Sherrill versus the Oneida Indian Nation of New York to take it back. At the time of our founding, the Oneida Indian Nation owned about 6 million acres of land which the George Washington administration reduced to a few hundred thousand and set aside as a reservation. The Oneida sold much of that land to New York state over the next 200 years.
Mark Charles: So in the 1990s, the Oneida Indian Nation came back to the state of New York and they purchased some of their traditional lands on the open market. They paid full price for them and they wanted to reestablish some of their traditional sovereignty over these lands. Now the lands they bought were within the city limits of the city of Cheryl, and if they had sovereignty over them, it meant they wouldn't pay taxes on them. The City of Sherrill wanted their tax revenue, so they sued the Oneida Indian Nation in Federal District Court. The case went to the Supreme Court in 2004 and in 2005, the opinion was written. In the first footnote of the case, the court references the doctrine of discovery by name. They then go on to establish that because these lands were settled by or settled by white people, that there was no precedent for giving the land back. They then go on and they build the argument that these lands there have since been converted from wilderness to become parts of city like Sherrill.
Hannah McCarthy: They used that exact word wilderness.
Nick Capodice: They did. They are reiterating the exact words of Justice Marshall.
Mark Charles: So the court in 2005 is making the exact same argument. It's just not using the word savages, but it's making the same argument. And so then they conclude that the Oneida Indian Nation cannot rekindle embers of sovereignty that have long ago grown cold. It's one of the most white supremacist Supreme Court opinions in my lifetime. And that opinion was written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Archival: But given the extraordinary passage of time, the night is long delay in seeking equitable relief in court against New York or its local units and developments in the city of Sherrill, spanning several generations, we reject the piecemeal shift in governance.
Mark Charles: And you ask yourself, how can this happen? While our nation is literally having a debate about systemic, institutionalized white supremacy and we're calling out these racist symbols and we're making some even big changes, and yet we still celebrate this document that literally calls native savages.
Nick Capodice: Mark told me the reason he wants to have a national conversation about this is that when we talk about institutional racism and white supremacy, we don't just deal with the low hanging fruit.
Mark Charles: Right. The low hanging fruit is Andrew Jackson. Most Americans can agree he was a problem. We have to deal with him. The low hanging fruit is the Confederate flag. And generally, you know, most people can agree, yeah, they didn't represent the best of America. The low hanging fruit is Christopher Columbus. Yes. He was pretty vile person who who way overstepped his bounds of what he should have done. That's the low hanging fruit. And yeah, we can all agree those are not good pieces of our history in our legacy to deal with. But because we're dealing with systemic racism and institutionalized white supremacy, we also have to realize that's going to affect the core of who we are. So we have to also look at. What's at the center. Abraham Lincoln, who was a blatant white supremacist and literally committed genocide against native peoples in the states of Minnesota, Colorado and New Mexico, including my own people, the Navajo in the Long Walk. We have to look at the Declaration of Independence. It's the value statements for our nation.
Mark Charles: And what I'm saying is until we have a foundation. That actually allows for the humanity of everybody. Our laws are never going to reflect that. If you have a house that's built on a bad foundation. You're going to have cracks in your walls, you're going to have gaps in your windowsills. You're going to have a creaky, crooked floor. Now you can paint your walls all you want. You can caulk your windows as much as you want. You can new carpet your your floor every every summer. But until you fix the foundation, you're never going to fix the house. And so this is where a new law isn't going to solve these problems. We have to deal with the foundation. And so I propose that let's remove the racism, the sexism and the white supremacy from our foundations.
Nick Capodice: That's two out of three declaration responses. And the third is up next. Women's suffrage and the Declaration of Sentiments.
Nick Capodice: This is Civics 101 and we've reached our third and final revisit to the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Sentiments, the document at the heart of the women's rights movement.
Reading: Declaration of Independence: The History of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
Nick Capodice: One of the things that I like about the Declaration of Independence, though, the more we visit it, the more problematic things we find in it. But one thing I can say I like about it is its directness.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, it does a lot. In only 1300 words.
Nick Capodice: It's an argument. It's a solid argument in four parts. First, a preamble saying what the document is. Then a statement of human rights and the claim that when a government doesn't give you those rights, it's your job to alter or abolish it. And then we get the grievances. And finally, the action, because of the above, were ending this relationship. And throughout this series we have talked about the immediate criticism and accusations of hypocrisy in it. And yet it lives on. It lives on as this core of our American identity. So what if you didn't just criticize it or call it to task? What if you used its power of argument as a tool to fight inequality?
Laura Free: Right. And in 1848, in America, probably every schoolchild was forced to memorize this document. Everyone knew the words. They all knew the rhythm, the cadence. It would have been a deeply familiar text to them.
Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah Mccarthy.
Nick Capodice: And this is Civics 101. And we spoke with Laura Fry. She's a professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and she's also the host of Amended, a new, wonderful podcast about the myths and realities of the long fight for women's suffrage.
Hannah McCarthy: So we should start with what the Declaration of Sentiments actually is.
Laura Free: Yeah, so the Declaration of Sentiments is essentially the central manifesto of the early women's rights movement. It was a text that was created by a group of women, one of whom was Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Seneca Falls in 1848. In upstate New York.
Nick Capodice: Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an activist and one of the first leaders of the women's rights movement. She helped organize the Seneca Falls Convention and wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, which was an extremely influential document at the time. Judith Wellman, she's a historian of the convention at Seneca Falls. She called it the single most important factor in spreading news of the women's rights movement around the country. A quick side note when Laura was referencing the Declaration of Sentiments in the interview, she was reading from this massive reproduction of it.
Laura Free: I have this in front of me and you're going to laugh because this was a gift to me from a student. And for Halloween, when my my kid was seven, maybe she wanted to be Eliza Witch Cady Stanton. So she wore a witch hat and the declaration of sentiments around her neck.
Hannah McCarthy: That's adorable. Of course, if you're the daughter of Laura Free, that's I go for Alice. But why 1848? And what makes them think that this is the way to go?
Nick Capodice: Well, starting in the early 1800s, a small number of women begin to group up and push back against societal restrictions against them. And in 1840, Stanton goes to London for an anti-slavery convention. And on the boat ride back, she befriends abolitionist, activist and Quaker Lucretia coffin. Mott And the two of them on the boat start to plan their own convention, one to further the cause of women's rights. In 1848, Mott and others put in an announcement in the Seneca County Courier calling a convention to discuss the social, civil and religious conditions and rights of woman.
Laura Free: And so that goes out just to sort of the locals. And so they sit around and they start talking and they're like, Well, what are we going to do with this meeting? We've never had a women's rights meeting before. Or maybe we should, you know, have something that people should talk about and maybe even vote on. Stanton herself claims credit for this, but it's not clear that that she's the one who came up with the idea. But someone said, you know what, if we used the Declaration of Independence as a model, what if that was our guide? And I'm sure everyone went, Oh yeah. So Stanton does do a lot of the work of making, of writing this. And so she she takes the original declaration, she goes home and she says, okay, let's, let's, let's fix this, right? Let's fix this for women. And, you know, the the of course, the best line is that is that the first one of the second paragraph where she says, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. Right. Like that. Right there would have signaled to everyone who saw it, who listened to it, who heard it be read out loud. Whoa, wait. Something's different. Something's different here. And perhaps at that point, a lot of people would have accepted the term men to mean all humans without thinking about it. Right. It was it was often a term used to mean people generally. But the fact that she put in women, there was a wake up call in some ways for for the people listening.
Nick Capodice: The original declaration says all men are created equal. And as we've said in several episodes, women, people of color, enslaved Americans, Native Americans and white non landowners were not included. The Declaration of Sentiments is even shorter than the Declaration of Independence. It's under 1000 words, but it uses that same powerful four part argument.
Laura Free: And the other thing that Stanton does in the Declaration of Sentiments that really parallels well to the original is, you know, the whole declaration is in some way as a wake up letter to the king, right? Like, Yo King, here's what you've done. And Stanton takes that format and she applies it to men and women. So she's like, Yo, men, here's what you've done that have have made all of the women in America unequal. She's calling them out here.
Hannah McCarthy: And it's an exhaustive list. It's got 16 grievances against, quote, he the first of which is he has not ever permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
Nick Capodice: He has never permitted her to vote. And that one, that's the first one. It was the most controversial at the time.
Laura Free: Stanton read them this draft version of the Declaration of Sentiments. And Lucretia mott says to her in her in her lovely Quaker 19th century language, she says, Lizzie, they will make us ridiculous, that the right to vote to the demand for the right to vote was so was so radical. It's going to be problematic. Now, there are some issues with that. There are lots of people prior to this moment who had been asking for the right to vote. Right. Women voted in New Jersey until 1807. There were women in colonial Massachusetts that we know who voted. So, you know, it's not it's not completely unheard of, but it was fairly radical. And so when the meeting takes place, everyone all of these ideas are raised and people are like, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. And then they get they get they get to voting rights and the convention. You can you can kind of imagine maybe like took a kind of a deep breath like, okay, what are we going to do with this one? And and Stanton herself, it was her first time speaking in public, and she professed to being very nervous and felt like she didn't do a good job defending defending this provision. And so she turns to Frederick Douglass.
Nick Capodice: Douglass, who escaped slavery just ten years earlier, became one of the most influential abolitionists in American history. He gave speeches around the world advocating for equality and ending slavery, and he attended the convention in Seneca Falls.
Laura Free: He says something along the lines of Without the ballot. None of these other changes are going to be possible because women have to have sufficient power to make these other things stick, essentially, and that the vote is is the way to do that.
Hannah McCarthy: I find it really interesting that the question of getting women the right to vote was the most controversial because there are some grievances in there that are quite advanced for the time.
Laura Free: Yeah. The Declaration asks for equal pay. For equal work for women. Right. You know something that still is not achieved in America today.
Hannah McCarthy: I mean, equal pay women only earned the right to sue their employers for unequal pay in 2010.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, and another grievance, Stanton accuses men of playing God.
Laura Free: You know the language she used. She says he has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action when that belongs to her conscience and her God. So basically she's saying men put themselves above God by trying to tell women what they can and can't do. And so in some ways, she's using religion to indict men further for their bad behavior. So it's not just that men tell women what to do. Men are trying to take over and become God. And so that, I think, gives it a degree of of power for her listeners or her her listeners, her readers or whoever would see this. They they would they maybe would resonate with that and say, wow, nobody should get in between somebody in God.
Hannah McCarthy: Oh, that's so interesting because that's that's kind of the the best bit of the Magna Carta, right? That no one is above God or the law. Not even the rulers, not even kings. All right, give me just one more grievance.
Nick Capodice: Oh, you got it. Here's one. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction, which he considers most honorable to himself as a teacher of theology, medicine or the law. She is not known.
Hannah McCarthy: Women couldn't become doctors or lawyers.
Nick Capodice: No, they weren't permitted to attend medical school or law school. The first woman lawyer, Arabella Mansfield, was admitted to the Iowa bar in 1869.
Hannah McCarthy: Jeez. All right. So there is one grievance. I do think that we need to address. The third one, an accusation that I know that Laura and other scholars have explored in their work. This one says he has withheld her from rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men, both natives and foreigners.
Laura Free: Yeah. Yeah. You know, that's the that's the one that's a signal to me that that the women's rights movement is not going to take up the cause of equality for all people. It's going to argue. And and Stanton herself is is is is the flag bearer for this aspect of the movement. But it's going to argue, essentially that white women should have the same rights as white men, not necessarily that all people should have should all be equal. Stanton is is particularly unhappy at this point, and she becomes increasingly so over the next 20 years that there are men that she believes to be her own personal inferior who have more power and more rights in American society than she does. And that's that's her signal there about who who she feels that she's better than. And by the 1860s, this becomes fully blown racist language and arguments. And she's letting her baggage show here in a way. Right. That that she's she considers herself better than other people. And she's going to put that right front and center of the women's rights movement. And nobody really calls her on that bit. You know, they accept the they vote on all of the provisions of the declaration and no one says, hey, at least we don't have record of anyone saying in the meeting, hey, you know, maybe that's not the nicest thing you could be saying here when we're in a movement at a meeting for people who are, you know, looking for equality, let's not also retrench race and class inequalities in our movement. Yeah, we don't see that.
Hannah McCarthy: This is something that we cannot separate from the movement. And Stanton specifically that these women divorce women's suffrage from other issues of equality. It's the ugly truth that the best known suffragists actively opposed the 15th Amendment, which gave Black American men the right to vote.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, this document mimics the Declaration of Independence, in its words and its format. But there's one contrast that I wanted to ask Laura about. It's the action, the conclusion the action in 1776 was. And therefore, because of this, we're done with you, England. We're done with the he and all of those grievances. This isn't the case with the Declaration of Sentiments. 68 women signed it, but so did 32 men.
Laura Free: Most of their the people are these are married people. These are people who live in close relationship with each other. There are men present at the convention. They don't want to get rid of men in the same way that Americans wanted to get rid of the king. They just want. Men to behave better. They want. They want the laws to be framed more equally. They want. They want a seat at the table, essentially. And so in some ways, they're not they're not saying goodbye. They're asking to say hello.
Hannah McCarthy: As we've revisited the Declaration of Independence, one theme that struck me again and again was that the declaration has unending reverberations. It's got bad echoes in the case of the anti Native American language that made its way into Supreme Court decisions and good ones. It's used to incite change to advocate for equality.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. I asked Laura what the Declaration of Sentiments can teach us.
Laura Free: I think what I would point to isn't anything inherent in the declaration or in the movement or in the women's rights movement itself. But is just the persistence, right? This is 1848 when the Declaration of Sentiments is is raised. It's not until 1920 that the 19th Amendment is passed that denies states the right to discriminate on the basis of sex. But it's not even until the present moment that all women have the right to vote in a secure way. So it takes a really long time to make change in America. And it's so exciting right now to be living through this moment of profound, hopefully transformation. But I think it's it's going to be a marathon and not a sprint. And perhaps the women who met in 1848 knew that perhaps they did not. I don't know if they understood how long it was going to be before women's equality would be granted, that it's still not even right at this moment. But nevertheless, they persisted. And I think that's the message that I try to carry is just to keep persisting.
Nick Capodice: Well, that is a wrap on a revisitation of the Declaration of Independence. This episode was originally a three part series that was written and produced by me, Nick Capodice and Hannah McCarthy with help from Jacqui Fulton, Erika Janic, Felix Poon and Christina Phillips. Our executive producer is Rebecca Lavoie. Music in this episode by Madan The Grand Affair, a Sara Yung Carts Sub Harmonic Bliss, Emily Sprague, Jesse Gallagher, Black Sonya Sara the Illstrumentalist and Chris Zabriskie. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.