There are two ways that I have typically approached teaching the Declaration of Independence. One begins with the preamble; the other, the list of grievances.
All students are struck by the infamous contradiction of slavery existing alongside the “self-evident truth, that all men are created equal.”
All students are struck by the infamous contradiction of slavery existing alongside the “self-evident truth, that all men are created equal,” which opens what was (at least from the perspective of the British Crown) the high treason of the birth of the American nation. To interrogate this contradiction, I have found it instructive to adduce what is not contained in the final document:
[The King of England] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people [of Africa] who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.
This indictment of slavery would have been a part of the Declaration had it not been deleted from an earlier draft at the behest of slave-owning South Carolina and Georgia and slave-trading Rhode Island. Removing this grievance indicates that the cost of American freedom would be more than the subsequent years of war and loss of life, and that this cost factored into the calculus to unite the colonies as a new nation. In other words, another price paid for American democracy would be nearly 100 years of African American slavery.
The contradiction of tying the proclamation of liberty to the preservation of slavery helps move to the second approach, which reframes the Declaration through a genre and practice of contemporary political culture: conspiracy theory.
The Declaration shares striking structural features with conspiracy theory rhetoric. It identifies a single malevolent actor whose personal character explains all harm. Every grievance is attributed to a big He — King George — rather than pointing fingers at Parliament or commercial interests. It converts a list of discrete, individually explicable policies into evidence of deliberate design. The “long train of abuses” argument not only enumerates the injustices but also, as it amasses weight and momentum across 27 grievances, avers that the pattern and frequency itself proves intent, a classical inferential move of conspiracy thinking.
The Declaration also positions its authors as people who perceive what others fail to see. The truths — even as they strike the reader, from whatever time period, as contradictory — are “self-evident,” obvious to those with clear perception and true hearts (those who have “done the research,” perhaps). The signatories are implicitly distinguished from those still deceived by the authority of the Crown, creating for themselves and those who will fight for independence a category outside treason: founders.
Finally, having defined local institutions of redress as corrupted or complicit and, thus, unable to mete out justice, the document appeals to a higher body: the “opinions of mankind,” a universal public capable of recognising the plot for what it is, a you, the readers, that can join the we declaring independence.
A prominent London periodical, The Scots Magazine, wrote that the Founding Fathers “assume to themselves an unalienable right of talking nonsense.”
The critical distinction, however, is that the Declaration’s charges were public, falsifiable and based on real policies that actually existed. The British press, rather than engaging with and contesting those claims, largely derided and dismissed them. A prominent London periodical, The Scots Magazine, wrote that the Founding Fathers “assume to themselves an unalienable right of talking nonsense.” Parliament, meanwhile, never denied passing the acts in question. The dispute, rather, was about legitimacy. Parliament held it had every right to pass and enforce the Stamp Act (UK) and Townshend duties, to quarter soldiers and to dissolve colonial legislatures.
On this point, historians Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood argue that this may not have even mattered much to the colonists themselves. By the 1770s, the conspiratorial worldview had become a widely held lens rather than a merely rhetorical device — the founders, on their reading, believed what they were saying. Indeed, political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith claims that “The Founders would view today’s norms against conspiratorial suspicion as not only arrogant, but also dangerous and un-American.”
These somewhat indirect approaches generate substantial discussion in classrooms, and they resist easy resolution. There is no pre-packaged takeaway. Students who leave uncertain about how to weigh the legitimacy of the grievances, or about what distinguishes a justified conspiracy claim from an unproductively paranoid one, ponder the questions that democratic citizens have always had to navigate, and increasingly so. The Declaration does not resolve these questions. As a founding document, it enacts them.
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