A250: The Declaration’s Promise

-This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It also appears in the May/June issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. Following the trauma of the American Civil War, Walt Whitman published “Democratic Vistas,” a tough but ultimately optimistic appraisal of America’s democratic promise. In it, Whitman reminisced about the nation’s founding and the echoes of the past from his youth: “The old men, I remember as a boy, were always talking of American independence. What is independence?” Throughout the work, Whitman explores this question as well as the social and political fissures that needed to be traversed after the war. Amidst that wreckage, Whitman held firm to his belief in the United States’ adherence to a democratic ideal and to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration gathers the political thought borne of the Enlightenment and combines it with the activism of the American revolutionaries. It emphasizes ideas such as freedom of speech and religion and equality between people. Those principles redounded in surprising ways throughout the nation’s history from the 18th century to the 21st. This is the major theme of the Library’s new exhibit, opening tomorrow, based on the…

Read full article on Library of Congress Blogs →