The second sentence is the one everybody knows. "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." It is quoted in civics classes, engraved on monuments, and invoked at every American anniversary. It is also, as the University of Chicago's Eric Slauter likes to point out, not what most readers in 1776 were paying attention to.
"We've become obsessed with the second paragraph," Slauter told the Chicago Sun-Times, standing before an enormous blow-up of the document at the Newberry Library, where he curated a separate exhibition this year. "What we know is most contemporary readers glossed over that. They cared a lot about the charges against the king. This is an indictment. The real meat of the declaration, what made it a declaration of independence and not a declaration of rights, was this part. You can tell it was important because it's in capital letters."
The part he means sits near the bottom, set in all caps: the former colonies are "FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES." That, Slauter argues, was the document's actual purpose — a manifesto of secession, not a charter of rights. The famous equality clause was, for its first readers, almost a footnote.
That gap between what the Declaration said and what later generations made it say is the subject of "Created Equal: The Premises and Promises of the Declaration of Independence," an exhibition on view at the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, on the first floor of the Regenstein Library at 1100 East 57th Street. It is free and open to the public, and it runs weekdays from 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. through December 11.
The show is unusual for reasons beyond its subject. It was curated by Slauter, a scholar of early American literature and culture, working alongside a team of undergraduate students. Together they assembled and interpreted rare books, manuscripts, and historical documents drawn from the Special Collections Research Center's own holdings. The result is a museum-quality exhibition built largely by undergraduates, drawing on materials that span the seventeenth century to the present, with a particular focus on Illinois.
"The Declaration's meaning has never been solitary or uncontested," Slauter said in a University of Chicago news release. "From the moment the document hit the streets in 1776, people have wondered what its authors meant and whether the philosophical premise that 'all men are created equal' should be understood as a political promise."
That question — premise or promise — gives the exhibition its title and its argument. The Declaration grounded the revolutionary right of a people to overthrow a government in the philosophical claim that all men are created equal. Some readers immediately recognized a political promise in those words, transforming a manifesto of secession from Britain into an American charter of liberty, equality, and rights. But the document's meaning has never been settled. Individuals and groups have put the founding words to radically different ends: demands for the equality of all persons, claims for the rights of states, even calls for the toppling of the government.
The exhibition invites visitors to experience the diverse responses to the Declaration in the age of the American Revolution, to consider how understandings unfolded over time, and to explore the conflicting interpretations that individuals and groups have proposed at significant moments in American history. It is, in that sense, less a celebration of a text than a history of its readers — the generations who discovered divergent meanings among its self-evident truths and, in doing so, kept remaking the country in the document's image.
The timing is deliberate. The exhibition commemorates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. The semiquincentennial has produced a wave of programming across Chicago and the nation, from a simultaneous worldwide public reading of the Declaration on July 8 — the anniversary of its first public reading in Philadelphia — to lecture series and gallery shows. At the Newberry Library, Slauter's separate exhibition, "Free and Independent: The Declaration of Independence and the Words That Made the United States," was anchored by a rare early copy of the Declaration and ran through mid-July. The UChicago show is a companion of sorts, but it stands on its own, and it is the one that will still be on the walls this fall.
Slauter is well placed to mount it. He is a scholar of early American literature and culture, and he has thought publicly about how the Declaration's words have been pressed into service across American history. In a Constitution Center essay, he noted that the document's stirring phrases are a testament to the power of ideas — and to the efforts of ordinary Americans to press them into service for change.
That theme runs through the Regenstein exhibition. The story of the Declaration, as the show frames it, usually centers on its revolutionary authors: prominent politicians such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and above all Thomas Jefferson. But the Declaration we know today is equally a product of generations of readers — individuals and groups who found meanings in its self-evident truths that the founders did not put there. The exhibition asks what story best suits our moment, a question it leaves open rather than answers.
For visitors, the appeal is partly the argument and partly the artifacts. The Special Collections Research Center holds rare materials that are not ordinarily on public view, and the show puts them in conversation with one another across more than three centuries. The Illinois focus gives the national story a local anchor, tracing how the founding words circulated and were contested in the state that would become home to both abolitionists and defenders of slavery, to Lincoln and to the legal machinery of Jim Crow.
There is no ticket, no timed entry, and no capacity limit. The gallery is open to all, and visitors to the University of Chicago Library may obtain an entry pass as needed. It is the kind of exhibition that rewards slow reading — a room full of old paper and older arguments, assembled by students who spent a quarter or more deciding what the Declaration means and why it still matters.
What they concluded, in the end, is that it means more than one thing, and always has. The premise was equality. The promises were whatever each generation decided to make of it — and the fight over those promises is not over.