On September 2, 1945, in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square, Ho Chi Minh stood before a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people to proclaim the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. He was a committed Marxist-Leninist, a founding member of the French Communist Party, and the leader of a revolution the United States would spend the next two decades trying to defeat. He did not open with Marx. He did not open with Lenin. He opened with Jefferson:
“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776.”
Ho believed the Declaration meant what it said and that if it meant what it said, it had to apply to Vietnam. The United States spent thirty years demonstrating that it did not agree.
To understand why a Vietnamese communist reached for an 18th-century American document at the founding moment of his republic, one must understand what that document actually was: where it came from, what it cost to produce, and what, precisely, it said.
A rough draft of history
In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson, 33, sat at a portable writing desk in a rented room in Philadelphia and drafted what the Second Continental Congress had commissioned. He later said he “turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it,” drawing only on what he called “the common sense of the subject.” The resulting document went through 86 changes before adoption: 47 from John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, 39 from Congress during debate on July 3 and 4. The final text was adopted on the afternoon of July 4. Formal signing began on August 2.
The most important change was a deletion. Jefferson had included a paragraph indicting King George III for perpetuating the Atlantic slave trade, calling it “a cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people.” Congress cut it entirely, reportedly at the insistence of South Carolina, Georgia, and northern delegates whose constituents profited from the trade. What replaced it was a vague reference to the King inciting “domestic insurrections” among the colonists, which recast enslaved people as a threat rather than victims. The Declaration’s claim that “all men are created equal” was left to stand without any acknowledgment of the 5,00,000 people held in bondage in the colonies that signed it. Jefferson called the changes “mutilations” and kept private copies of his original draft to document what had been lost.
A subtler but significant change was in the preamble. Jefferson had written: “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable.” Someone, most likely Franklin, changed it to “self-evident.” The revision moved the argument from religious authority to rational logic and made the document considerably harder to dismiss without first engaging the laws of nature on their own terms.
First principles
The Declaration’s core propositions came primarily from John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689): natural rights precede government; government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed; when a government systematically violates those rights, the people may overthrow it. Jefferson borrowed this framework wholesale but made one consequential substitution. Locke’s three natural rights were life, liberty, and property. Jefferson changed the third to “the pursuit of happiness.”
Property is a legal category with defined contents. The pursuit of happiness is an open-ended aspiration that every subsequent generation has filled with different content: economic freedom, personal autonomy, religious practice, and the welfare state. That elasticity has become the document’s most durable feature.
The Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted by George Mason and adopted June 12, 1776, weeks before Jefferson began writing, had already declared that “all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights.” Jefferson knew it intimately and drew on it directly. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in January 1776, had made similar arguments in the popular idiom that shaped the mood Jefferson then addressed in a more formal register. The Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson had argued that certain moral truths were felt directly by any rational person without philosophical demonstration, which is the epistemological basis for calling truths “self-evident.” What Jefferson did was synthesise an existing tradition into a document designed to justify revolution to an international audience, under deadline, with a specific political purpose.
Historical innovations
Magna Carta (1215) and the English Bill of Rights (1689) framed rights as concessions from a sovereign to subjects: grants from above, which could in principle be revoked by the same authority that issued them. The Declaration grounded rights in the fact of being human, prior to any government and independent of any sovereign’s generosity.
More distinctively, it addressed itself not to subjects within an existing constitutional order but to “the Powers of the Earth,” asserting the right to constitute a new political order from scratch. The right to revolution followed as a logical consequence of the premises. If governments exist to secure natural rights, and a government instead systematically destroys them, the people are not merely permitted but obligated to act. The argument moves like a syllogism. That formal clarity is part of what made the document so portable across political traditions that had nothing else in common. Thirty-five American state constitutions contain the same or similar provisions on the right of revolution as in the Declaration’s preamble, and comparable language appears in the constitutions of France (1793), Texas, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, among others.
The Declaration also pioneered what might be called the audit model of political accountability. Its long middle section lists 27 specific grievances against George III, functioning less like a complaints register and more like a prosecutor’s indictment. Jefferson opens the charges: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.” The grievances that follow are concrete and particular: quartering troops among the civilian population; allowing British soldiers who murdered colonists to face trial in England rather than in the colonies; cutting off colonial trade with the rest of the world; taxing the colonists without their consent; and depriving them of trial by jury through the use of Admiralty courts. Other charges struck at self-governance itself: royal governors had suspended colonial legislatures and replaced statute law with royal proclamations in New York, Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina. The final counts escalated the indictment from civil abuse to open warfare, accusing the King of having “plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people,” and of deploying Hessian mercenaries “to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny.” The implication running through all 27 counts is that a government’s conduct can be itemised, documented, and judged against a standard. Every constitutional system that enumerates rights and governmental obligations inherits this structure.
A grammar for liberty
Karl Marx, writing in 1864 on behalf of the First International to congratulate Abraham Lincoln on his reelection, named the Declaration directly, calling it “the first Declaration of the Rights of Man” and identifying it as the event that had given “the first impulse to the European revolution of the eighteenth century.” He designated the document as the origin point of an entire historical era and argued that the working class would finish what 1776 had begun.
Twelve years earlier, on July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass perhaps explained the phenomenon of the Declaration more keenly than anyone else. Born into slavery, self-educated, and by then the most prominent Black abolitionist in America, he stood before a crowd of around 600 people in Rochester, New York, invited to speak on the Independence Day of the United States of America. His speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, is one of the most deliberate engagements with the Declaration in American history:
“I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”
Then he turned: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” Douglass’s argument was not that the Declaration had failed but that its inheritors had.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on December 10, 1948, by 48 nations with no dissenting votes, carries the architecture of Jefferson’s preamble into international law: rights that are inherent, that precede states, and that no authority can grant or revoke. Its preamble opens with “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.”
Unfinished business
Jefferson owned over 600 people at the time he wrote that all men are created equal. The document he produced was, at its core, a lawyer’s argument for a political purpose: to justify, to an international audience, the decision of thirteen colonies to break from Britain. Its universalist language was a rhetorical instrument, not a programme.
What it became is something else. The deletion of the slavery paragraph did not bury the contradiction; it drove it into the text’s foundation, where it sat under the pressure of “all men are created equal” for ninety years.
The shift from “sacred and undeniable” to “self-evident” planted the argument on rational ground where it could not be closed by authority or tradition, only by reason. Each of these changes, deliberate or incidental, made the document harder to contain.
Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, fifty years to the day after the Declaration’s adoption. Weeks before his death, he wrote that he hoped it would prove “an instrument… pregnant with our own and the fate of the world.”
