History of the United States I / Unit 13 USH1 1858 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Alteration
The idea
The Declaration of Rights and Sentiments works by rewriting the smallest possible number of words in the founding text, and there are three changes worth knowing. The equality clause of seventeen seventy-six holds that all men are created equal. The eighteen forty-eight document holds that all men and women are created equal. The seventeen seventy-six text speaks of certain unalienable rights and the later one of certain inalienable rights, which is a variation in wording rather than in meaning. And the grievance clause is transformed. The Declaration of Independence states that the history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations. The Declaration of Rights and Sentiments states that the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.
In practice
A convention claiming the founding document by editing it, rather than by writing a new one of its own from the beginning.
Where people slip
The third change is the sharpest and it is the one usually missed. In seventeen seventy-six the tyrant is one named man, a king, and the remedy is independence from his government. In eighteen forty-eight the tyrant is men collectively, and the rest of the sentence is left standing. That substitution makes the grievance permanent and domestic rather than political and foreign, and it means the remedy cannot be separation. Note also what the strategy costs and what it buys. By borrowing the most familiar sentence in American public life, the convention made its claim impossible to dismiss as foreign or novel, and it bound its cause to a document its opponents also revered. Unit 06 entry 0757 covers the original, including its reference to merciless Indian savages, which is a reminder that a founding text can be claimed by people it did not include.
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