Freedom According to the Declaration Of Independence | The Story of Us

I'm headed to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia to meet with its librarian Patrick Spiro. He studies documents dating back to the time of the country's founding. What you're looking at here is one of the first printings of the Declaration of Independence.

The first section is the Preamble. And this is where they talk about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And the idea is that individuals should be free to do these things, and government is constituted to protect those freedoms.

And what the King has done is broken that contract, broken that trust. And so they have to be freed from the King in order to be free to do what they want. Now, can you say that this was the first time a group of people decided that they wanted to be free to do whatever the heck they wanted to do?

Well, I think it's the first time that it was ever written in an official way. But this is not the only version of the Declaration of Independence that survives. The other document I want to show you is this: Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence.

And you can see on the side, there's these notes. Yeah? Once Congress got their hands on this, they started changing words, changing meanings. I think the most notable one is, in that famous phrase, that people are endowed with certain unalienable rights.

Jefferson originally wrote, inherent and inalienable rights. Inherent rights, which Jefferson used several times, means that all people are born with these rights. OK. So if these rights are not inherent, then you're not necessarily born with them?

Only a few people are born with them. And that applied only to white society. White, male society. Yes. Yes.