American Enterprise Institute

Natural Rights, the Common Good, and the American Revolution

Equality, Liberty, and Rights in the Declaration of Independence Notes

  1. See, for instance, David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Harvard University Press, 2007); John Phillip Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority of Rights (University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); and John Phillip Reid, “The Irrelevance of the Declaration,” in Law in the American Revolution and the Revolution in Law: A Collection of Review Essays on American Legal History, ed. Hendrik Hartog (New York University Press, 1981).
  2. Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address,” speech, Gettysburg, PA, November 19, 1863, https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.24404500/.
  3. Danielle Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright, 2014), 309.
  4. See Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Vintage Books, 1998).
  5. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 269.
  6. Locke, Two Treatises of Government.
  7. Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings (Literary Classics of the United States, 1989), 1:398.
  8. See Michael Zuckert, Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy (University Press of Kansas, 2002), 220–24.
  9. Zuckert, Launching Liberalism, 221, 274–93. See also Michael Zuckert, “Natural Rights and Imperial Constitutionalism: The American Revolution and the Development of the American Amalgam,” Social Philosophy and Policy 22, no. 1 (2005): 27–55.
  10. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 US 407 (1857).
  11. Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd, vol. 1, 1760–1776 (Princeton University Press, 1950), 243–47.
  12. Thomas Jefferson, Writings (Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 289.
  13. Jefferson, Writings, 1344.
  14. Henry Steele Commager, Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment (George Braziller, 1975), xi.
  15. Commager, Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment, 82.
  16. Sanford Levinson, “Self-Evident Truths in the Declaration of Independence,” Texas Law Review 57, no. 5 (1979): 856.
  17. Allen, Our Declaration, 160–66.
  18. Jefferson, Writings, 939; and John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689; Oxford University Press, 1979), 591–608.
  19. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 591.
  20. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 596.
  21. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 607–8.
  22. Allen, Our Declaration, 16–63.
  23. Jefferson, Writings, 1517.
  24. On Jefferson, see Michael Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition (University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 56–89. On Locke, see Michael Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton University Press, 1994), 275–86.