At two o’clock in the afternoon on August 17, 1858, Abraham Lincoln rose to address a crowd gathered at the Fulton County Courthouse in Lewistown, Illinois. He came to answer Senator Stephen Douglas, who had given a speech in Lewistown the day before. According to newspaper reports, Lincoln spoke for two and a half hours and had more listeners at the end of his remarks than when he began. The speech he delivered was not simply part of a campaign to challenge Douglas for the U.S. Senate seat. It was an act of recovery—an effort to recall the meaning of the American Founding at a moment when its principles were contested and under strain.

Lincoln spoke on that occasion of the evil of slavery existing in the American colonies when the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776. “These communities, by their representatives in Old Independence Hall,” he recounted,

said to the whole world of men: “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.” This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.

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A long excerpt from Lincoln’s speech at Lewistown supplies the epigraph for Matthew Spalding’s The Making of the American Mind: The Story of Our Declaration of Independence. The choice is apt. Written on the eve of the nation’s Semiquincentennial, Spalding’s book is itself an extended act of recovery, offering a wise, accessible account of the origins, meaning, and continuing significance of America’s founding document.

A longtime student of the founding and now Kirby Professor in Constitutional Government and Dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College, Spalding is clear about his undertaking. The Declaration, he argues, is the founding’s central act, articulating the principles that give the American experiment its coherence and legitimacy. Spalding’s project flows not just from love of country but from a conviction that “America is a good country, even a great country, perhaps the greatest, not because it is perfect—it is made up of imperfect human beings with original sin and their share of reoccurring wrongs—but because it is dedicated to, and constantly aspires to uphold, permanent principles about human liberty that are true.”

Spalding tells the story of “how in the summer of 1776 a band of iron men from thirteen separate colonies banded together and declared independence from—and declared war against—the most powerful nation in the world.” The Declaration is “the defining act of the great drama that is the American Founding,” he observes, and for Americans today the Declaration must remain central to civic education.

Spalding notes, with a nod to Saint Augustine, that we must know something before we can love it, and so we “must know the Declaration if we truly are to love America.” To know the Declaration, we must know its history, and Spalding gives an overview of the imperial crisis, canvassing the major players and the political disputes of the Stamp Act Congress, the colonial response to Parliament’s coercive acts, the convening of the First and Second Continental Congresses, the commissioning of George Washington as general of the Continental Army, and the debate over the drafting and adoption of the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776. The historical narrative is well-paced and provides the necessary context to consider the document’s meaning.

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The Declaration’s meaning takes us beyond history to nature. Although the colonists often invoked their rights as British subjects, the ultimate ground of their claim was not in the contingencies of history but in the permanence of nature. “They were convinced their cause was just,” Spalding argues, “and informed—as we shall see—by permanent truths, just as they were themselves subject to eternal judgment for the rectitude of their intentions.” The founders’ frequent appeals to nature grew out of the classical natural law tradition, which was transmitted to the colonists through the Christian engagement with classical philosophy, and especially Cicero. This tradition was preserved among the Protestant Reformers and in the Anglicanism of Richard Hooker (in whom C.S. Lewis once claimed to have found the highest, most beautiful expression of the classical natural law tradition).

The 17th-century English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes rejected the classical tradition, but the Americans rejected Hobbes. Instead, they embraced the republican theorists among Hobbes’s contemporaries, especially Algernon Sidney and John Locke—both of whom invoked Hooker as an authority. Here Spalding is careful to note, for those who have ears to hear, that the Americans embraced an American Locke—read as a proponent of Christianity and natural law—without giving credence or paying much attention to his skeptical epistemology. The founders were not Lockeans, Spalding concludes, but they did adopt and use Locke’s “political arguments to great effect in their cause.”

Nor were many of the founders deists or pantheists. It is common in some academic circles to read the Declaration’s opening appeal to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” as a paean to religious skepticism, making God a distant and disinterested clockmaker, or conflating God and nature altogether. Yet as Spalding notes, the most widely read poem of the most popular poet in the colonies was Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man,” which treats nature as a preamble to faith and speaks of a soul that “looks through Nature up to Nature’s God” and finally “knows, where faith, law, morals, all began / All end, in love of God, and love of man.” The duality between nature and nature’s God, creation and Creator, is part of the broadly ecumenical classical tradition. “It is unfathomable,” Spalding points out, “that a Congress that publicly prayed together and worshipped together (regularly attending different church services in Philadelphia) and issued proclamations calling for days of prayer and fasting would approve an anti-religious or even a purely secularized Declaration.”

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The Declaration’s ecumenical appeals to reason and revelation, to nature and nature’s God, united the pious men and the mere politicians among the founders to forge a practical solution “at the level of politics and political morality.” Reason and revelation alike were enlisted in support of the Declaration’s political teaching, which itself was an expression of the American mind, as Thomas Jefferson put it a year before his death on July 4, 1826 in a letter to Henry Lee. Jefferson claimed for the Declaration’s authority “the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.” John Adams, who served with Jefferson on the Declaration’s drafting committee and who died, like Jefferson, on the Declaration’s 50th anniversary, gave his own list of sources that shaped the American mind. In a 1775 letter, Adams included Plato, Livy, and James Harrington as additional sources of America’s “revolution-principles” and the “principles of nature and eternal reason.” And, of course, the Bible remained the most cited and influential text in the Revolutionary era, as recent scholarship by Carl Richard and Daniel Dreisbach makes clear.

Spalding’s exposition of the meaning of the Declaration of Independence draws on classical and Biblical sources that shaped the American mind. The second paragraph of the Declaration begins with an assertion: “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.” G.K. Chesterton remarked that America is “a nation with the soul of a church” because it is “the only nation in the world founded on a creed.” The Declaration is less argument than assertion: We hold these truths. Yet the claim that there are truths for the human mind to behold indicates a foundational premise of human freedom. “The Declaration of Independence is built on the assumption that the human mind is capable of knowing the truth of things,” Spalding writes. “To hold a truth is to grasp its reality as an object of thought, which the mind freely responds to and embraces as knowledge. The metaphysical freedom of man is axiomatic to the Declaration and the world of the Founders.”

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The truths the founders hold are said to be self-evident. This does not mean that the truths are evident to all selves, but it does mean that they are the kinds of propositions that are known as soon as their terms are known, neither requiring nor admitting of additional proof. The first self-evident truth in the Declaration is that we are all created equal. Jefferson’s original rough draft had said that it was a “sacred & undeniable” truth that “all men are created equal & independent” and “from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable.” The familiar wording of the final draft changes “sacred & undeniable” to “self-evident” (an edit perhaps from committee member Benjamin Franklin) and claims that “all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights.” To one who knows the terms by which a man is defined, the truth of the proposition of human equality is self-evident.

There are many respects in which human beings are naturally unequal, and critics of the Declaration rightly worry about the leveling effects of egalitarianism in education, art, and culture. But the founders understood equality in a more basic sense. “All Men are Men and not Beasts,” John Adams wrote. “Men and not Birds: Men and not Fishes.” Men have a sense of justice, deliberate rationally, and are morally responsible for their actions. Once the terms of man as a moral and rational being are known, it is self-evident that no man was created to rule over another despotically or without his consent. This sense of equality, Adams thought, was “the true Principle of all our Rights and Duties to one another.”

The founders recognized that this claim of human equality makes the despotic institution of slavery a great affront to human nature. “The signers of the Declaration, and the Founders in general, including the slaveowners among them,” Spalding acknowledges, “knew that slavery violated the truth of the Declaration.” In this respect, his book stands in a long tradition that sees the Declaration as both a statement of principle and a promissory note. The subsequent history of the United States—most notably the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments—is a working-out of America’s founding principles. Quoting the Continental Congress’ 1783 address to the states, for example, the principal architect of the 14th Amendment, John Bingham, said to Congress in 1866: “Let it be remembered that the rights for which America has contended were the rights of human nature.”

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One sense in which human beings are equal is in the equal rights of human nature. A right, Spalding notes, recognizes a claim of duty on someone else. The Creator endows human beings with rights that are unalienable—that is, they cannot justly be violated by, or surrendered to, any human authority. Among these rights are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” a phrasing that encapsulates the totality of our unalienable rights and could include within them an endless array of additional rights falling into subcategories. In an Aristotelian sense, the three unalienable rights in the Declaration correspond to “life, independent life, and the good life”—our being, our freedom, and our flourishing. Governments are instituted among men to secure these rights, and the just powers of a government among natural equals derive from the consent of the governed. Men have rights and duties, and one of their duties is to provide, prudently, new guards for their future security when a form of government repeatedly fails to protect their rights.

To satisfy the judgment of prudence, Congress submitted facts to a candid world: a list of 27 charges against the English king. The charges against George III move the argument from nature back to history, and to the constitutional dispute between the colonists, Parliament, and the crown. Spalding groups these charges broadly into three categories: abuses of executive powers by the king (charges 1-12), usurpations of the American colonies’ historic constitutional powers (charges 13-22), and the withdrawing of legal protections from, and waging war against, the colonists (charges 23-27).

These broad groups of charges each correspond to numerous provisions that would be included in the U.S. Constitution a decade later. The Constitution reflects certain judgments of prudence based on the experience of history about how best to organize the powers of the government to effect the safety and happiness of the people. Although human nature endures, prudential judgments about constitutional forms vary based on innumerable contingencies and genuine discoveries in the science of politics. The new constitutional form declared by Congress in 1776 is of “free and independent states” united together in a federal system of dual sovereignty, a constitutional union in need of perfection but nonetheless marking the conception of the United States of America. The men who affixed their names to the Declaration of Independence did so mutually pledging their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world and proclaiming their reliance on the protection of divine Providence.

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Spalding is right to resist accounts of the founding as purely secular or purely Lockean, even if he tends to smooth over tensions between classical teleology and modern natural rights, between Christian theology and Enlightenment rationalism, and between principle and practice. The Making of the American Mind is primarily a work of civic recovery for a broad public audience. It engages longstanding scholarly debates without relitigating contested questions or sparring with academic rivals. It limns the 18th-century American mind in order to shape the 21st-century American mind by reminding educated citizens—in our age of civic amnesia—what the Declaration says and why it still matters.

To advance this civic purpose, the book closes where it began—in the Year of Our Lord 1858. A month before his speech in Lewistown, Abraham Lincoln addressed a crowd in Chicago. Considering the great prosperity of the United States of America, he commented,

We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years and we discover that we were then a very small people in point of numbers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a vastly less extent of country,—with vastly less of everything we deem desirable among men,—we look upon the change as exceedingly advantageous to us and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that happened away back, as in some way or other being connected with this rise of prosperity.

There we discover “a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers,” who “fought for the principle that they were contending for.” And with gratitude, Lincoln says, we realize “that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us.”

For Lincoln, as for Matthew Spalding, the story of our founding is a national saga, a tale of the heroic deeds of old from men of renown. Yet they were, still, men—none perfect, many with a share of the vices and virtues of their age. As Spalding reminds us on the Declaration’s 250th anniversary, these imperfect men gave to us “a good country, even a great country, perhaps the greatest.” For the degree of prosperity that has come to us today and the blessings that remain our birthright, we owe America our gratitude, knowledge, and love.