Why is the Declaration important?

The Declaration of Independence is important because it states the philosophical reasons for American independence and grounds them in a theory of natural rights that has shaped American politics, law, and identity ever since. Three claims of the Declaration carry continuing weight. The first is the doctrine of natural rights. The Declaration asserts that all people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that these rights exist before government and cannot be transferred or surrendered.

The doctrine drew on John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government from 1689 and on the long tradition of English liberty rooted in Magna Carta of 1215 and the Bill of Rights of 1689, but the Declaration applied those principles universally rather than to a single people. The second claim is the consent doctrine. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and when a government becomes destructive of the ends for which it is established the people have the right to alter or abolish it and create a new government. This was a radical inversion of the prevailing belief in monarchical authority by divine right.

The third claim is equality. The Declaration begins from the proposition that all men are created equal. Thomas Jefferson and his fellow signers held this principle while owning enslaved people, a contradiction that Jefferson himself acknowledged. The contradiction did not cancel the principle but instead seeded an internal pressure that abolitionists, women's rights advocates, civil rights leaders, and immigrant communities have invoked over and over again.

Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863 grounded the Civil War effort in the Declaration's promise of equality. The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments on July 19, 1848 borrowed its language to demand equal rights for women. Frederick Douglass in his July 5, 1852 speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" used its words to indict slavery. Martin Luther King Jr. in the I Have a Dream speech on August 28, 1963 called the Declaration a promissory note to which every American was heir.

The Declaration also matters because it severed legal allegiance to Britain on July 4, 1776, dating the birth of the United States from that day. It served as international notice that a new nation was claiming a place among the powers of the earth, opening the door to French alliance and ultimate victory. Although not law itself, it has been treated by courts and statesmen as the moral foundation of the constitutional order.