Odds are many of you aren’t planning to steal the Declaration of Independence – and shame on those of you who are. That would be pretty unpatriotic as this sacred civic document celebrates its 250th birthday.
Such a heist, however, is the plot of the movie National Treasure. In the film, quirky historian Benjamin Franklin Gates, played by Nicolas Cage, steals the Declaration of Independence. He does so to save the founding document from unsavory treasure hunters – who are appropriately British and akin to modern-day Redcoats. They want it because the Declaration is a map leading to the ancient Templar Knights’ vast riches.
As far as we know, the real Declaration isn’t actually a treasure map – not in the traditional sense anyway. But it is a guide to understanding what it means to be an American.
Some frame the Declaration as America’s “mission statement,” particularly that famous sentence, “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.” Consider how that document, those words, inspire many great Americans to action throughout the nation’s history.
Despite its zany premise, National Treasure captures well a deep reverence for artifacts like the Declaration. It drives home the point that these aren’t stale remnants of our past, but tangible objects with the power to shape our present and guide our future. They are physical manifestations – something we can see and touch – of the ideals that shape us as citizens.
First lady Dolley Madison may have been the first to “steal” the Declaration as Nicolas Cage did in National Treasure. There’s a legend that, during the War of 1812, she stuffed a copy of the Declaration into a suitcase while fleeing the White House. She wanted to protect it as British troops burned Washington. That story is likely apocryphal because official copies of the Declaration and other documents were kept at the State Department, not the White House. And we know that a small cadre of clerks rescued them before the British invaders entered the capital. Madison did, however, insist on saving the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington even though it was screwed into the wall – and she did.
Thankfully, these civil servants saved the original artifacts from enemies (just like those treasure hunters in the movie) who might desecrate them. They were patriotic Americans who understood that these documents could inspire our country across generations. And they were absolutely right.
In 1852, abolitionist Frederick Douglass boldly asked what the Declaration of Independence meant to enslaved Black people, 76 years after its signing. The Declaration boasted of freedom and equality, both of which were unattainable for enslaved people at the time, yet Douglass, while speaking to a majority White audience, planted the seed of belief that these abstract values should be applied to all citizens.
On July 10, 1858, Illinois Senate candidate Abraham Lincoln described an “electric cord” that connects every American – naturally born or naturalized – directly to the Declaration of Independence in perpetuity. He noted that many in the country weren’t descended from the Founders’ generation, but, “when they look through that old Declaration of Independence, they find that those old men say that `We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men … and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.”
In the early 20th century, women invoked the founding documents in their fight for voting rights. The suffragists revived the slogan, “no taxation without representation,” a phrase famously associated with the American Revolution. By that era, women paid income and property taxes and were governed by the same laws as men, yet they lacked voting rights for their representatives. They also contended that the ideals of equality, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, should underpin the effort to expand women’s suffrage.
Fast forward several decades to Sept. 17, 2001, when President George W. Bush spoke to an anxious nation from the Islamic Center of Washington. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks – committed by radical Islamic militants – Muslim-Americans were targets of unjustified backlash from fellow citizens.
President Bush’s remarks captured the spirit of the Declaration and the Bill of Rights as he implicitly described self-evident and unalienable rights, equality, and freedoms of worship, expression, and association.
He offered Americans moral clarity in that tense moment saying, “Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America. They represent the worst of humankind, and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior. This is a great country. It’s a great country because we share the same values of respect and dignity and human worth.”
The United States is a great country. And hatred of fellow citizens disconnects us from that greatness because it rejects America’s mission statement. Even if those founding ideals are always just out of reach, we don’t abandon the chase. That pursuit – trying to be better citizens who make their country better – is the treasure map hidden within the Declaration.
And we the people must follow it together in order to be successful.
