What makes us one people?

Gordon S. Wood is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Revolutionary era in American history. The Five Books site regularly asks scholars to recommend the best books in their areas of expertise. Today Wood is interviewed about "The Best Fourth of July Books." I haven't read any of them but was particularly interested in some of his comments. Excerpts:

.... In the decade or so following the Declaration of Independence, the former colonies became much more egalitarian. The declaration made the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for ordinary people the goal of the new nation. The United States became a much more democratic, much more middle-class society. In that sense, the Revolution was much more radical than earlier analyses acknowledged. ....

Abraham Lincoln made the declaration into the principal document in American history. In his Gettysburg address, he invoked the declaration’s appeal to equality. “All men are created equal” was, for Lincoln, the central point of the document. He used those words to mobilize the North to continue fighting for the Union, despite the heavy casualties. Since then, the declaration’s appeal to equality has been a powerful touchstone. ....

...[T]here was slavery all over the world in 1776. Slavery had existed for thousands and thousands of years without substantial criticism. People in the eighteenth century, all over the world, took slavery and indentured labor for granted. The American Revolution, and its assertion that all men are created equal, created the first anti-slavery movement in the history of the world. The first meeting of anti-slavery advocates was held in Philadelphia in 1775. That’s not coincidental. The Revolution sparked an American anti-slavery movement. ....

It took another 80 years to finally end slavery, with the Civil War. But in 1776, at lot of people thought that slavery would die a natural death. Indications of that in Virginia, for example, led many to the illusion that slavery would be wiped off of the United States map. We know they were wrong, therefore we indict them for not knowing the future; I think that’s the wrong way to write about history. ....

The Declaration of Independence, which is what we celebrate on the Fourth of July, is America’s saving grace because it is what holds us together. We’re a nation of many different people. We have no common ethnicity. We have no common religion. We have no common race. So, we need to keep honoring the one thing we have in common.

President Abraham Lincoln recognized, in an 1858 speech, that belief in the self-evident truths, “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” is what makes us, as the first sentence of the declaration says, “one people.” We’ve got to celebrate that oneness, otherwise we’ll cease to be one nation altogether.

The Best Fourth of July Books | Five Books Expert Recommendations