The words that shook the world
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
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.
The BriefWire