Bradley Birzer
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
Quincy Institute Spotlights The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty
By Elaine Pasquini
Washington, DC: This July 4 marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. As part of the commemoration of this landmark event, on May 28, 2026, Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a senior advisor at The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, discussed The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty with its author Bradley Birzer, professor of history at Hillsdale College.
In his book which is a comprehensive history of the years leading up to independence, Birzer calls the foundational document “a clarion call for human dignity” that demanded Americans “rise to their better selves.” In addition, the language employed was that of the people themselves.
“This is a striking vision and gets to the notion that the Declaration of Independence reflected the American mind in 1776,” Vlahos noted.
During his interview, Birzer pointed out that most of the original founders were accustomed to governing themselves as they did from 1607 to 1763. And, at that time, almost all education was classical Greek and Latin.
In the book, he explores the founders’ contributions to society, such as common law, the right to be innocent until proven guilty, right to a trial by jury, right to habeas corpus and non-excessive bail, along with the right to not be under cruel and unusual punishment.
Discussing Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, Birzer said that up until his death Jefferson was an extremely controversial figure. “Driven by the division between New England and Virginia, half the country loved him, half the country hated him,” he said.
Following his death on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson’s popularity rose.
In the 1990s, as attention was drawn to the third US president’s large number of slaves held on his Monticello Virginia plantation, he became unpopular again. “For me,” Birzer stated, “Thomas Jefferson really represents everything good and bad in America. He represents our best and he represents our worst in every way.”
The Committee of five ( Adams , Livingston , Sherman , Jefferson , and Franklin ) presents the draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on June 28, 1776, as depicted in John Trumbull 's 1818 portrait – Simple Wikipedia
With respect to the worst, he continued, “you can’t whitewash the fact that he was a slaveholder. He knew it was wrong and had argued against it forcefully in legislation. But in private life, he kept slaves as did other founding fathers, and it’s a problem we must deal with.”
John Adams, who ironically died the same day as Jefferson, did not hold slaves. American Revolution hero Thomas Paine also never owned enslaved people.
Noting at that time there were half a million Africans living in slavery, Vlahos asked how it was possible to reconcile the bondage with a declaration supposedly dealing with equal rights.
In response, Birzer simply stated that the founders made a “bad choice.” They wanted to keep the 13 colonies together and knew that if they did not allow slavery to continue, they would lose Georgia and South Carolina. “They made an immoral and unethical decision that for the unity of the country they would keep slavery,” he said. “I think it was a horrible decision, and they knew it was a bad decision, but they made it anyway. That we just cannot escape.”
Discussing the strength and growth of the federal government and what today has become 50 states revolving around an enormously powerful central government, the professor related how in 1850, as a result of the Fugitive Slave Act, the US government created a federal police force called US Commissioners. Today, he said, “every one of our federal police forces from the Secret Service to the FBI to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have their roots in slavery.”
Despite Jefferson’s wrongdoing of holding slaves, Birzer believes that the statesman’s words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident” form one of the most powerful statements in the history of the world about human dignity.
“So, no matter how many sins Thomas Jefferson or the founders committed, they got something so right that it trumps all of those evils in every way,” he opined. “In that Declaration we did something that nobody had ever done before. We made it a political statement. We made it the very foundation of who we are. And I would go as far as saying all of American history is the playing out of that sentence.”
In today’s landscape, Birzer opined, “we are so out-of-whack right now in our constitutional understanding” along with being so polarized. “We don’t love what we ought to love; we don’t hate what we ought to hate either. We just have our priorities so messed up as a culture at this moment.”
(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journaliSt Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)
