Creating the United States
Declaration Legacy

The Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834), a general during the American Revolution and an important figure during the early days of the French Revolution, consulted with Thomas Jefferson about a declaration of rights before presenting one to the French National Assembly in July 1789. France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was adopted by the French National Assembly on August 26, 1789, emulates the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Declaration of Rights.

Borrowing heavily from the form and words of the United States Declaration of Independence, the delegates of the “people of Texas” meeting in convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos, declared their independence from Mexico on March 2, 1836. As in 1776, a committee of five delegates was appointed to write the document. The committee selected George C. Childress (1804–1841), filling the role of Thomas Jefferson had played sixty years earlier, as chief writer of the document.

On July 4, 1876, during the Centennial Celebration of the Declaration of Independence, the National Woman Suffrage Association adopted a ringing Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States. The association sought equal rights for women and particularly the right to vote.

In July 1848, more than three hundred men and women assembled in Seneca Falls, New York, for the first women’s rights convention, at which Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s (1815–1902) famous Declaration of Sentiments was read and adopted. Modeled after the Declaration of Independence, Stanton’s document protested women’s inferior legal status and put forward a list of proposals for the moral, economic, and political equality of women. The most radical resolution was the demand for woman suffrage, a goal that would consume the women’s movement for more than seventy years.

In this illustration from Life magazine, an American woman retouches the Declaration of Independence by editing the famous line to read: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men and women are created equal.” In 1915 American women were pushing for equal rights, particularly the right to vote in national elections, which finally came with the 1920 adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment.

This postcard calls forth the spirit of 1776 to support women’s rights—particularly the right to vote. While women march for suffrage rights, George Washington is shown exclaiming “Did I save my country for this!”

America’s expansion and growing economic and military power since 1776 were frequently points of pride of patriotic Americans early in the twentieth century as war again erupted in Europe and threatened to engulf the United States. In the spirit of this ultra nationalistic fervor, John T. McCutcheon (1870–1949) made this celebratory drawing that was first published in the Chicago Tribune on July 5, 1915.

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), a former slave and an outspoken leader of the Abolitionist Movement, called on African Americans to join the Union Army to fight for the freedom of all slaves and to preserve the federal Union in a March 2, 1863, speech at Rochester, New York. In the months after the Emancipation Proclamation, thousands of African Americans joined the fight against the Confederate States of America.

A 1918 poster by Joseph Pennell (1857–1926) for the World War I Fourth Liberty Loan Drive, invokes the spirit of the Declaration of Independence in the phrase “lest liberty perish from the face of the earth.” The statue of Lady Liberty is shown in ruins with New York City in flames.

A skilled and charismatic orator and civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), called on America to redeem the promises of the nation’s founders that all people are created equal. In his “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington, King asserted that “When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. . . . We have come to cash this check.”

On August 28, 1963, hundreds of thousands of Americans participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and heard Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his monumental “I Have a Dream” speech. This souvenir portfolio, featuring the title of the famous civil rights anthem and containing pamphlets and fliers relating to the march, was published for participants.

Danny Lyon was the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a national group of college students who joined together after the first sit-in by four African American college students at a North Carolina lunch counter. From 1963 to 1964, Lyon traveled the South and Mid-Atlantic regions capturing telling moments like this moving image taken at the March on Washington in 1963. This photograph is part of a limited edition portfolio that Lyon produced to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the civil rights struggle.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s fought to achieve for African Americans the rights that the Declaration of Independence guaranteed for all Americans. In this photograph, a white young man holding a sign reading “Go Home Negro” and an African American young man holding a sign reading “Give Us American Rights” picket together in front of the F. W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina. The store was the site of a lunch-counter sit-in by black students protesting segregation. Picketing, counter-picketing, and sit-ins were among the many forms of non-violent protests that played a significant role during the Civil Rights Movement.

The struggle for civil rights and equality for African Americans was part of the reform surge of the Kennedy-Johnson presidential era. Here Americans, both white and black, are marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965, in an effort to focus national attention on federal legislation to guarantee voting rights for all Americans.

This 1918 poster for the fourth Liberty Loan bond drive invokes the spirit of the Declaration of Independence in the title That Liberty Shall Not Perish from the Face of the Earth. In 1917 and 1918, the U.S. government sold Liberty Loan bonds to defray the enormous expenses of World War I. Noted artist Joseph Pennell (1857–1926) produced this poster to promote the bonds by arousing patriotism. In this view of the Statue of Liberty in ruins and New York City in flames, he shows liberty in danger and almost destroyed.

The American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence are celebrated in this pro-Democratic political print. Eight presidents are depicted, with Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) and Martin Van Buren (1782–1862) joining hands over a scroll with Jackson’s famous Jefferson Day dinner of 1830 toast, “The Union Must be Preserved.” Below stands George Washington, in uniform and holding a scroll inscribed “We declare ourselves free and independent.” He faces thirteen soldiers, representing the original American colonies, who are flanked by an American flag and the “National Flag of 1776.”

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the United States declared its independence in 1776, was the site of the nation’s major centennial commemoration in 1876. This advertising poster features the enormous main exhibition hall built on the grounds of Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park. The central image is surrounded by patriotic vignettes of historical events that had occurred in the hundred years since the drafting of the Declaration.

During the struggle for the civil rights of African Americans, the occupation of lunch counters and restaurants was a familiar tactic to force their desegregation. In this photograph a group of activists are holding a sit-in at a Toddle House restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia. John Lewis (b. 1940), a civil rights leader and currently a member of the United States House of Representatives, and Judy Richardson, a founding member of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and now a producer of prize-winning documentaries, are among those pictured.

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), an escaped slave from Maryland and a leading spokesman for the Abolitionist Movement, appealed to the Declaration of Independence in seeking freedom from slavery for all African Americans. Douglass’s speech to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, has become famous for its direct challenge to the nation: “What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) wrote this letter on April 16, 1963, from a Birmingham jail to his “Fellow Clergymen” who criticized his involvement in a non-violent campaign against racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. King argued that African Americans could wait no longer to fulfill the Declaration of Independence’s assertion “that all men are created equal”: “We have waited for more than 340 years for our Constitutional and God Given Rights. . . .”

Using a quotation from former President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), the Think American Institute issued this poster to promote limiting the growth of governmental power as the United States prepared for war in 1941. The American eagle soars carrying the symbols of liberty and war.