NATIONAL TREASURE

A history of the Declaration of Independence from its composition to the present.

“A constitutional republic is a fragile creation,” writes Hoover Institution fellow Auslin, “for only the people’s adherence to its principles and rules preserves it.” If the Constitution is its user’s manual, the republic is philosophically grounded in the document that Thomas Jefferson, assigned by the Continental Congress, wrote in an inspired two weeks. That grounding is for better and for worse: After all, Jefferson’s first-draft denunciation of the enslavement of “a distant people who never offended him [i.e., King George III],” was cut by committee, foreshadowing the conflict over slavery to come. Indeed, Auslin writes, South Carolina’s rationalization for seceding from the Union in 1860 was directly based on “the language and claims of the Declaration.” North or South, the Declaration of Independence was immediately enshrined in American thought. Auslin does good historical footwork in recounting the reaction of the British press and political class to the document, widely reprinted in British newspapers and both noisily denounced and quietly approved of in Parliament. Auslin also offers an engaging account of the fortunes of the document itself as it moved from place to place, exhibited for years in the State Department’s library and then removed, now badly aged and deteriorating, to first Fort Knox (to protect it in the event of an Axis invasion) and then the Library of Congress. There, Auslin writes, it was enshrined until being transferred to the new National Archives in 1952—and not with resistance from the librarians. Auslin closes with a note on how the Declaration remains an object of veneration and popular interest, with the 2004 movie that lends his book its title driving thousands of visitors to Washington for a look while, at least with luck, “uniting us in a still-radical experiment in republican self-government.”

Welcome reading in this bisesquicentennial year.