The greatest sentence ever written?

Walter Isaacson, prize-winning author of multiple popular biographies of people as diverse as Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, has written a deceptively simple book titled The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. Isaacson, who was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023, has written a 67-page book on what he declares is “the greatest sentence ever crafted by human hand.”

I am grateful that Isaacson scaled back the claim made in the book’s title, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. I had already decided that as a Christian, I believe the greatest sentence ever written is: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

So, the limitation, “the greatest sentence ever crafted by human hand,” was greatly appreciated. Even though I am not sure one can ever justify “the greatest sentence ever crafted by human hand,” I believe the declaration is undeniably one of the most important sentences in terms of its impact on subsequent human history.

Here is the sentence being discussed:

“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.”

Isaacson reminds us that the Declaration of Independence was drafted by an editorial committee consisting of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, New York lawyer Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman.

On June 7, 1776, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee proposed a motion declaring, “These United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states” (Isaacson, p. 44). Jefferson was tasked with writing a first draft of the Declaration, which the editorial committee amended, followed by the Continental Congress’s significant revisions before final approval on July 2, 1776.

A “critical mass” of opinion had formed in the colonies by 1776 that the British government had broken covenant with their American subjects, and that a new concept of government by consent of the governed held significant allegiance by July 1776.

In an 1815 letter to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams put the Revolutionary War in perspective: “The war? That was no part of the Revolution, it was only an effort and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people … 15 years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington,” writes Michael Gibson in “Jefferson’s Greatest Sentence” in Politics and Law.

At the beginning of the “Greatest Sentence,” Isaacson notes that Jefferson’s “sacred” is replaced by “self-evident.” Also, Jefferson’s original “men are created equal and from that equal creation they derive rights” is replaced with “endowed by their Creator” with rights. Isaacson and historians believe the first edit was made by Franklin and the second by Adams.

Isaacson identifies Jefferson, Franklin and Adams as Deists, who wanted to balance “the role of divine providence and that of reason in determining our rights”.  Like many interpreters before him, I believe Isaacson misunderstands these three men. Deists believed that a divine providence created the universe and left it to evolve on its own.

Franklin, Adams and Jefferson are better understood as Unitarians on steroids. They had varying degrees of doubt about the deity of Jesus, but they believed in a divine providence that was particularly interested in the United States of America, as their writings clearly illustrate.

The phrase “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” revealed the fundamental difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution, which followed soon after and, based on nothing more than man’s reason and assertion, collapsed into anarchy, dictatorship and mass murder.

In using this language, they were also “rejecting the idea, fundamental to the British system, that there were certain hereditary social classes, beginning with the royalty and aristocracy that had more rights than other classes”. 

When the Declaration said that “all men are created equal,” Jefferson (who had more than 600 slaves), Franklin and Adams were all opposed to slavery. While the Continental Congress eviscerated the antislavery parts of the Jefferson Committee’s draft (41 of the 66 signers of the Declaration were slaveholders), it revealed the fact, as “Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn shows in his sweeping study The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), in the three decades before 1776, pamphleteers, ministers, scholars, journalists, legislators, poets, madmen, and tavern drunks alike launched a sustained assault on the institution of slavery”.

In Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, George Mason turned Locke’s philosophy into a precursor of Jefferson’s sentence: “All men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights … namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety”.

In Jefferson’s explanation, “‘the pursuit of happiness’ is just a simpler way to say all that. It is your right — and your opportunity — to seek fulfillment, meaning, and well-being however you personally see fit”.

On the 250th year of our Declaration of Independence, Walter Isaacson has issued a challenge to all of his fellow American citizens.

“Abraham Lincoln opened his Gettysburg Address in 1863 by referring directly to the second sentence of 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’”.

As Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”.  As he reminded us, as a nation, we had promises to keep to our black fellow citizens.

Isaacson also reminds us that “the arc did not bend itself. It was, and remains, a constant American struggle to make the phrase ‘all men are created equal’ truly inclusive”.

I would strongly encourage everyone to purchase this little book, read it with your family, your friends, your youth group, etc., and discuss it. Every American will benefit from reading it. It will make you a better citizen. It will make you a better American.