Law & Liberty
arlton F. W. Larson’s legal brief, published in book form as One Nation Under Law: The Meaning of the Declaration, argues that the Declaration of Independence created a singular nation that advocated for government as a positive good. Designed with the explicit goal of “shatter[ing] long-standing myths,” especially the “state-centric” view of the Declaration, One Nation is not an objective scholarly treatment of the Declaration’s importance in American constitutionalism. Rather, it is a lawyer defending a client, a forceful advocacy for an interpretive conclusion rather than a search for understanding.
What Larson means by the “state-centric” understanding of the Declaration, or the “We, the States” view, is the belief that the states both predated the nation and created it. Although jurists, politicians, and scholars often endorse this view, Larson asserts that “these state-centric views could not be more wrong.” He goes further, claiming that “whatever was happening on July 4, 1776, it was emphatically not the creation of thirteen independent nations, entirely separate from each other.” Instead, the Declaration spoke in the “voice of the ‘people.’” Larson contends that this “We, the people” reading is “more consistent” with the document’s “larger structure and theory.”
What allows the “We, the States” argument to persist is the present focus on and literal enshrinement of the engrossed and signed copy of the Declaration. Larson labels it “ceremonial parchment.” That copy contains the signatures of the members of Congress, and those signatures are listed under the state they served. Yet Larson contends that this is not the official copy of the Declaration. Rather, credit belongs to the numerous printings and copies of the document printed by John Dunlap on the evening of July 4.
Ignoring the Dunlap printing in favor of the “ceremonial copy,” he argues, creates several critical misperceptions. First, it ignores how the eighteenth century disseminated knowledge through print rather than handwriting, thereby making the Declaration seem “more distant and remote” in time. Second, it overemphasizes the signers’ role. Not only were those signatures not added until at least August of 1776 (and one was signed in November), but several who signed the document were not even members of Congress on July 4. Third, it turns the phrase “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” into a pledge made by the delegates themselves rather than by the people whom the Congress supposedly represented. Finally, the ceremonial version references “the united States of America,” while the Dunlap version uses all caps: “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” Larson asserted that anyone reading the Dunlap copy, which was reprinted throughout the states while no newspaper published the ceremonial parchment version, would instantly recognize that it proclaimed the independence of the United States of America as one nation. That such eminent historians as Gordon Wood or Forrest McDonald fail to distinguish between the two versions “fatally contradict[s]” their arguments for a more state-centric view.
Labeling the Declaration displayed in the National Archives as “ceremonial parchment” dismisses its significance. Yet that copy is far more important than Larson admits, in no small part because it undermines his argument. The signed parchment is the engrossed copy, making it the official and legal copy of the Declaration of Independence. Even today, 1 US Code Section 107 still requires parchment for enrolled bills, although it allows other “suitable quality” paper. The history of American law and constitutionalism demonstrates that ceremonial forms are not empty rituals but integral components of legal legitimacy.
The crux of Larson’s “We, the People” argument rests on his linguistic interpretation of several passages in the Declaration itself. He points to the document’s repeated use of first-person plural language such as “We hold these truths” and “For imposing taxes on us” to argue that the Declaration spoke with the voice of a single American people and therefore created one nation. For Larson, “one” necessarily means unitary. That reading, however, is difficult to reconcile with the document’s closing paragraph. There, the Declaration repeatedly refers to the colonies as “these United Colonies,” “Free and Independent States,” and “they,” language that strongly suggests a collective of distinct political communities acting together, rather than a single political entity.
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