The Letter Jefferson Rewrote

The Letter Jefferson Rewrote

I. The Room

It's June 1776, and Thomas Jefferson is 33 years old, sitting in a rented room on the second floor of a brick house at the corner of Market and Seventh Streets in Philadelphia. The room is spare—a desk, a chair, a bed, a small portable writing desk that sits on his lap. Through the open window comes the sound of horses, vendors, the business of a city preparing for war.

On the desk in front of him is a draft covered in crossed-out words and marginal notes. He's been working on it for seventeen days. The Continental Congress has asked him to explain why thirteen colonies are about to commit treason against the most powerful empire on earth. They want a legal brief, a list of grievances.

But Jefferson is writing something else entirely. He's writing a new theory of government into existence.

He picks up his pen and crosses out a word: "property." Above it, he writes: "the pursuit of happiness."

It's a small edit. Three words for one. But those three words will echo for centuries.

The philosopher John Locke, writing 87 years earlier, had proposed a radical idea: that governments derive their legitimacy not from God's will or hereditary right, but from the consent of the governed. And that governments exist to protect three natural rights: life, liberty, and property.

Property. Land. Ownership. The concrete, measurable things a man possessed.

Jefferson reads Locke. He admires Locke. He is, in many ways, translating Locke's philosophy into political action.

But he changes that one word.

Not property. The pursuit of happiness.

Why?

Maybe because "property" sounds too mercenary, too narrow for a declaration that aspires to universalism. Maybe because many of the colonists don't own property, and he needs language that includes them. Maybe because he genuinely believes that human flourishing—eudaimonia, as the Greeks called it—is a more fundamental right than mere possession.

Or maybe—and this is the terrible possibility—because acknowledging "property" as a natural right would force him to confront what he is not willing to confront: that outside his window, down on Market Street, enslaved human beings are being bought and sold as property. And if property is a natural right, what does that make of the people who are property?

Jefferson does not write about this. He crosses out "property" and writes "the pursuit of happiness," and moves on to the next sentence.

The contradiction lodges itself in the heart of the American experiment like a bullet waiting to detonate.

II. The Philosopher's Ghost

To understand what Jefferson is doing in that rented room, you have to go back to London, 1689.

John Locke publishes Two Treatises of Government anonymously. It's dangerous to attach his name to it—he's arguing against the divine right of kings, and the wrong king might take that personally.

Locke's argument is revolutionary in its simplicity:

1. All human beings are born in a state of nature, where they are free and equal.
2. In this state of nature, every person has natural rights: to life, to liberty, to the fruits of their labor (property).
3. People form governments by consent—giving up some freedoms in exchange for protection of their rights.
4. If a government fails to protect those rights, or actively violates them, the people have the right to dissolve that government and form a new one.

This is dynamite wrapped in measured prose.

For thousands of years, political philosophy had assumed that authority flowed downward: from God to king to subject. Locke reverses the flow. Authority comes from the people. Governments are tools, servants, creations of the governed. When they fail, you discard them.

Locke's ideas spread through the coffeehouses and salons of Europe and across the Atlantic to the American colonies. They're discussed, debated, refined. When the colonies begin to chafe under British rule—taxes without representation, soldiers quartered in private homes, trials without juries—Locke's framework provides the language to understand what's happening:

This is not just unfair. It is illegitimate. It violates our natural rights. Therefore, we have the right to resist.

Jefferson, sitting in his rented room, is not inventing these ideas. He's channeling them, condensing them, weaponizing them.

He writes:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Let's parse this. Every word matters.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident"—not subject to debate, not requiring proof. These are axioms, the foundation on which everything else rests.

"All men are created equal"—there is no natural hierarchy. No one is born with the right to rule over another.

"Endowed by their Creator"—these rights come from God (or nature, or the universe—Jefferson is deliberately vague), not from governments or kings. They are innate.

"Unalienable"—they cannot be given away, sold, or taken by force. They are part of what it means to be human.

"Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"—the trinity. You get to live. You get to be free. And you get to seek fulfillment on your own terms.

And then comes the kicker:

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."

Governments exist to protect rights. If they don't, overthrow them. You not only may—you should.

This is not a request for King George III to reconsider his tax policy. This is a declaration that his authority over the colonies never existed in the first place, because it was never consented to.

It is, in legal terms, a divorce. But it's also a manifesto for a new kind of political order.

III. The Beautiful Lie

The Declaration of Independence was read aloud publicly for the first time on July 8, 1776, in the yard of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Thousands gathered. Church bells rang. There was cheering, shouting, the intoxicating sense of a new beginning.

But not everyone in that crowd was free.

Enslaved people stood at the edges, serving their masters, listening to the words "all men are created equal" and wondering if those words applied to them.

Jefferson himself owned more than 600 enslaved people over his lifetime. At the time he wrote the Declaration, he owned about 200. He fathered children with Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved, who had no legal right to refuse him. She was also his late wife's half-sister—the daughter of Jefferson's father-in-law by an enslaved woman.

When Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal," he did not mean Black people.

He had, in fact, included a passage in his original draft condemning King George III for the slave trade, calling it a "cruel war against human nature itself." But the passage was struck out by the Continental Congress—delegates from South Carolina and Georgia objected, and even some Northern delegates who profited from the slave trade wanted it removed.

So the final Declaration is silent on slavery.

And in that silence, a wound is opened that will bleed for 89 years until it nearly kills the nation.

The contradiction is not accidental. It is structural.

The Declaration's language is universal: "all men," "self-evident," "unalienable." It does not say "all British colonists" or "all property-owning white men." It says all men.

But the reality is particular. The rights described apply, in practice, to a specific subset of humanity: white men who own land.

Not women. Not enslaved people. Not Indigenous peoples. Not the poor.

Yet the language refuses to admit this limitation.

And that refusal—that gap between the universal language and the particular application—becomes the lever that future generations will use to pry open the doors.

Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became one of the greatest orators in American history, understood this perfectly. In 1852, he gave a speech on the Fourth of July:

"What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham."

But Douglass did not reject the Declaration. He did the opposite:

"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."

He held the Declaration's words up as a mirror, showing America its own hypocrisy. If these truths are self-evident, then they apply to me. If all men are created equal, then I am your equal. You wrote the words. Now live up to them.

The suffragists at Seneca Falls in 1848 did the same thing, rewriting the Declaration's opening:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal."

Same strategy. You claimed universality. We're taking you at your word.

IV. The Letter as Weapon

The Declaration of Independence is not a law. It has no legal force. It does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. You cannot cite it in court to win a case.

And yet it is perhaps the most powerful political document in American history.

Why?

Because it established the why.

The Constitution, written eleven years later, establishes the how—the machinery of government, the checks and balances, the procedures. But it does not explain the purpose. It does not answer the question: What is this all for?

The Declaration answers that question: To secure the rights that all people possess simply by being human.

Every subsequent movement for justice in American history has returned to this document, pointing to the gap between its ideals and the nation's reality.

Abolitionists cited it to argue that slavery violated the "unalienable right" to liberty.

Civil rights activists cited it to demand that "all men are created equal" include Black Americans.

Women's rights activists cited it to insist that "men" means humanity, not just males.

LGBTQ activists cited it to argue that the "pursuit of happiness" includes the right to love whom you choose and live as your authentic self.

Immigrants and refugees cite it as proof that America's promise is not limited to those born here—the principles are universal.

The Declaration became a rhetorical weapon that could be turned against the government that claimed to be founded on it.

And here's the crucial thing: this works even though Jefferson was a hypocrite. Even though the Founders who signed the Declaration owned slaves. Even though they didn't mean women, or Indigenous people, or anyone who wasn't like them.

The words escaped their authors' intentions.

Once you declare that rights are unalienable—that they cannot be taken away—you can't take them back. Once you say these truths are self-evident, you can't hide behind "but we didn't mean you." If they're self-evident, they're evident to everyone.

The Declaration of Independence is like a promissory note, as Martin Luther King Jr. would later describe it. It's a promise America made that it has never fully kept. But the promise is written down. You can point to it. You can demand payment.

V. The Ghost in the Constitution

Eleven years after Jefferson wrote the Declaration, delegates gathered in Philadelphia again to write a Constitution. They created a framework for a new government: Congress, President, courts, checks and balances.

But they faced a problem.

The southern states would not join the union unless slavery was protected. The northern states (most of which still had slavery, though they were beginning to phase it out) were willing to compromise.

So the Constitution is filled with careful euphemisms:

• It counts enslaved people as "three-fifths" of a person for purposes of representation—giving slaveholding states more power in Congress, without ever using the word "slave."
• It includes a fugitive slave clause, requiring that people "held to Service or Labour in one State" who escape to another state must be returned. Again, no mention of the word "slavery."
• It bans Congress from outlawing the international slave trade for twenty years.

The Constitution protects slavery while pretending not to see it.

But the Declaration's ghost haunts it.

Abraham Lincoln, in the years before the Civil War, would point out this tension. The Constitution, he said, was a compromise with reality—the Founders knew they couldn't abolish slavery immediately without fracturing the union. But the Declaration was a statement of purpose. It's the North Star. The Constitution was meant to steer toward it, however imperfectly.

When Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address in 1863, he didn't quote the Constitution. He quoted the Declaration:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

He's dating the nation not from the Constitution's ratification in 1788, but from the Declaration in 1776.

He's saying: The Declaration is the soul of America. The Constitution is just the body. And if the body betrays the soul, the soul wins.

Three months after Gettysburg, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Two years later, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery.

It took a war that killed 600,000 people. But Jefferson's words—"all men are created equal"—finally meant something closer to what they said.

VI. The Export

The Declaration of Independence was never meant just for America.

Jefferson's language is deliberately universal. He doesn't say "Englishmen have rights" or "colonists have rights." He says people have rights. All people. By virtue of being human.

And so the Declaration became a template.

When the French revolutionaries stormed the Bastille in 1789, they drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It echoes Jefferson:

"Men are born and remain free and equal in rights."

When Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence from France in 1945, he began:

"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

He quoted Jefferson. Then he asked France, which claimed to be the heir of Enlightenment values, how they could deny Vietnam the same rights they claimed for themselves.

When the United Nations drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt and the committee drew on the same lineage. Article 1:

"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights."

Jefferson's sentence, globalized.

The ideas are older than Jefferson, of course. Natural rights, equality, consent of the governed—these threads run through Locke, back to the Enlightenment, to medieval thinkers, to Stoic philosophy, to the ancient Greeks. Jefferson was synthesizing, not inventing.

But he did something crucial: he made the ideas short, sharp, memorable, and actionable.

Not a treatise. Not a philosophical argument. A declaration. A statement of fact, followed by a list of grievances, followed by a decision:

We're done with you. We're starting over. And these are the principles we're building on.

That clarity, that directness, is what made the Declaration exportable. You could translate it into any language. You could apply it to any oppressor. You could stand up, wherever you were, and say:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident."

And then demand your rights.

VII. The Question We Still Can't Answer

There is a monument to Thomas Jefferson in Washington, D.C.—a domed rotunda with a nineteen-foot bronze statue of him holding the Declaration. Carved into the walls are his words:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

Tourists take photographs. School groups visit. It is treated as sacred American space.

But there is no mention, on those marble walls, of Sally Hemings. No mention of the 600 people Jefferson enslaved. No mention of the clause he wrote condemning slavery, then allowed to be deleted.

How do we hold both of these things in our minds at once?

The man who wrote "all men are created equal" owned human beings.

The document that inspired liberation movements around the world was written by a slaveholder in a nation built on stolen land.

One response is to say: Jefferson was a hypocrite. Throw out the Declaration. It's tainted by its origins.

But the other response—the one that history has largely chosen—is to say: The words are bigger than the man who wrote them.

Jefferson's failure to live up to his own principles doesn't invalidate the principles. If anything, it proves their power. They were so true that even the people who violated them couldn't help but articulate them.

And once articulated, they could not be contained.

There's a story about Frederick Douglass meeting Lincoln in 1863. Douglass had been fiercely critical of Lincoln, calling him too slow to act on emancipation, too willing to compromise with slaveholders.

But when Douglass entered the White House, Lincoln greeted him warmly and said, "Mr. Douglass, I know you. I have read your speeches."

They talked for an hour. Douglass left impressed. Later, he would say:

"In his company, I was never reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color."

Here were two men who should have been enemies—one a former slave, one the son of the frontier. But they could speak to each other, as equals, because they shared a vocabulary.

The vocabulary Jefferson gave them.

Life. Liberty. Equality. Self-evident truths. Unalienable rights.

They could argue about what those words meant, how far they extended, who deserved them. But the words themselves provided the common ground.

VIII. The Letter We Keep Rewriting

In 2020, during protests following the murder of George Floyd, someone spraypainted on a statue base in Washington, D.C.:

"All men are created equal."

It was both a condemnation and a demand.

Condemnation: You wrote this and didn't mean it.

Demand: Mean it now.

The Declaration of Independence is an unfinished project. Every generation rewrites it—not the literal text, but its application, its reach, its promise.

The Founders wrote "all men" and meant white property owners. Abolitionists said: all men means all men. Suffragists said: all men means all people. Civil rights activists said: equal means equal. LGBTQ activists said: the pursuit of happiness includes us.

Each generation pulls one more stone from the dam.

Jefferson died on July 4, 1826—exactly fifty years after the Declaration was adopted. By coincidence, John Adams, his old friend and rival, died the same day.

Adams's last words were: "Thomas Jefferson survives."

He was wrong, by a few hours. Jefferson had died earlier that morning.

But in another sense, Adams was right.

Jefferson survives in the words he wrote.

Not the Jefferson who owned slaves. Not the Jefferson who fathered children with Sally Hemings and kept them enslaved. Not the Jefferson who spoke of equality but lived in hierarchy.

The Jefferson who survives is the ghost in the Declaration—the idea that there are truths we hold to be self-evident, that rights exist independent of power, that governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed, and that when they fail to protect our rights, we can start over.

That Jefferson—the Jefferson of the words, not the man—survives.

And every time someone stands up to power and says, "I have rights. You can't do this to me. I am your equal"—

They are channeling that ghost.

Coda: The Crossed-Out Word

Go back to that room in Philadelphia. June 1776. The portable writing desk on Jefferson's lap. The word "property" crossed out. "The pursuit of happiness" written above it.

He made that change for complicated reasons, some noble, some evasive.

But here's what he couldn't have known:

That three-word substitution would become the opening through which millions of people would walk toward freedom.

"Pursuit of happiness" is vague. It's expansive. It can't be easily quantified or limited. It invites interpretation. It demands that each generation ask: What does happiness mean? Who gets to pursue it? What stands in the way?

If Jefferson had left it as "property," the Declaration would be narrower, more transactional. It would protect what you own. Period.

But "the pursuit of happiness"? That's a door that, once opened, you can't close.

It means: You get to define what a good life looks like for you. You get to seek it. You get to build it. And no one—no king, no government, no majority—can tell you that your vision of happiness is less valid than theirs.

As long as your pursuit doesn't deny someone else theirs.

That last part is the hard part. That's the part America is still arguing about. Whose happiness matters? When rights conflict, which ones win?

But the question itself—the idea that every person has an equal claim to pursue fulfillment—is revolutionary.

And it started with three words, written above a crossed-out line, in a rented room, by a man who couldn't see his own contradictions.

The words escaped him.

And the world is still trying to catch up to them.

Series: The Ancient Chorus, Part 4 Read Next: "The Liberator Who Never Compromised" – How William Lloyd Garrison and the abolitionists turned moral truth into a movement

The original draft of the Declaration, with Jefferson's edits, is housed in the Library of Congress. The final version, signed by 56 delegates, is displayed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The Declaration has been cited in countless freedom movements worldwide and remains one of the most translated and referenced political documents in history.