New Library of Congress exhibit features rare draft of Declaration of Independence
Washington — These are words etched on America’s conscience: “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Visitors to the Library of Congress can rediscover these fundamental principles in the rare, original draft of the Declaration of Independence written by President Thomas Jefferson. This is on display in a new exhibit titled “The Promise of the Declaration,” which begins this month for America’s sesquicentennial and runs through July 2027.
“This is a fully realized sketch of Jefferson,” Ryan Reft, the exhibit’s chief curator, told CBS News. “You can see that they changed the words throughout and turned the first draft into the draft we know today.”
The document includes regulations from Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, such as using the word “citizens” instead of “subjects.” “They were breaking away from a monarchy and breaking away from the idea of kinship through ethnicity, creating a country based on this new and critical idea in the Declaration that we are not subject to anyone,” Reft said. he explained. “We were subject to each other. We were citizens.”
There were other changes, too, according to historian Kevin Butterfield, acting director of the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress.
“In the beginning, Thomas Jefferson said: ‘We believe these rights to be sacred and undeniable.’ And Ben Franklin said, “No, actually, maybe we should say ‘obvious,'” Butterfield said.
But what took time to develop was the statement that “all men are created equal.”
“The statement ‘All men are created’ probably only applies to White men,” Reft said. “It ignored women and enslaved people, Native Americans and others. But that’s the great thing about the Declaration – there’s strength even in its weaknesses – the sense that the language it created, of life, of liberty, of the pursuit of happiness, of the consent of the governed, enabled people who were then unequal to decide for themselves what equality was.”
The exhibit showcases the country’s evolution through other items such as President Abraham Lincoln’s draft of the Gettysburg Address during the Civil War.
“He (Lincoln) says, why are we here? Why did we fight this war? And it comes down to one basic idea: equality,” Reft told CBS News.
The collection also includes the Bill of Rights read by Susan B. Anthony in support of women’s suffrage, as well as the Bill of Rights read by Dr. Anthony during the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis’ speeches are also included.
“These are moments to look back and see where we were and where we need to be,” Reft said.
