Ten Myths About America's Founding Documents

Over the centuries, all three of the United States’ founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights—have, like undersea treasures, become encrusted with a thick coating . . . of mythology. Americans think of the Declaration of Independence as a bold protest against government by kings and queens, though it never actually denounces monarchy. Today most people’s favorite clause from the Declaration of Independence is “created equal,” but delegates to the Continental Congress who signed it cared less about individual rights than states’ rights. Over the next hundred years, though, black and white Americans opposing slavery and males, as well as females supporting women’s rights, transformed it into a universal declaration of human rights. Few people today realize that one of the most pressing motivations for the men like Madison and Washington who wrote the Constitution was to roll back what Hamilton called the “excess of democracy” unleashed by the American Revolution. Today the most beloved clauses of the Constitution are in the Bill of Rights, which the framers of the original Constitution not only didn’t write but resolutely opposed. We owe our most precious freedoms to the men and women who hated the original Constitution and agreed to it only after being promised a Bill of Rights.

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