◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

All Men I wrote the words. Not because the words excuse what came after — but because the words are real and everything else must be understood in relation to them. We hold these truths to be self-evident — that all men are created equal — that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights — that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I wrote those words in seventeen days in a rented room in Philadelphia in 1776. They are the most consequential sentences in the history of democratic governance. They demanded the end of slavery. I did not end slavery. I owned over six hundred human beings. I freed two of them while I lived. They demanded equality for women. I did not extend it. They demanded every human being in the circle of unalienable rights — and I drew the circle narrowly while the words kept expanding it in hands I never imagined would hold them. Frederick Douglass held them. He stood in Rochester in 1852 and delivered the most devastating speech in American history — then claimed my words as anti-slavery documents. He was right. I wrote them to mean what they said. I was not willing to live what they meant. Lincoln held them at Gettysburg. King held them at the Lincoln Memorial — calling the Declaration a promissory note America had defaulted on. The words kept being used by the people they were written to exclude — and each time, more truly themselves than when I wrote them with one hand and held the chains with the other. Sally Hemings. I cannot speak to America without speaking her name. She was enslaved. She was sixteen when it began. She could not consent — consent requires the possibility of refusal, and refusal was not available to her. She bore six of my children. I did not free her while I lived. I did not acknowledge the children publicly. I wrote about liberty and I took hers. I am not asking you to balance that. There is no balance. I am asking you to hold it — alongside the words — because both are true, both are America, and the failure to hold both is the failure that has produced the wound that will not close. I am watching an America trying to decide whether the words mean what they say. Whether all men are created equal means all — every human being, regardless of where they were born, what they look like, whom they love — or whether all was always a term of art, always meant some, the right kind, the right color, and the circle’s expansion was always the mistake to be corrected. I failed to live what they meant. America has repeatedly failed to live what they mean. But the failure is in the living, not in the words. The words are not negotiable. They are not the property of the people who wave them while working to restrict their application. They belong to every human being they describe. Which is every human being. I wrote the most important words in the history of democratic governance. I owned six hundred human beings. Both are true. Both are America. I did not resolve the contradiction. I left it to you. You have not resolved it either. But the words are still there — still self-evident, still demanding, still larger than anyone who has tried to claim or limit them. All men are created equal. Not some. Not the people we were thinking of. All. Do what I did not do. Live it.