It was only a letter.

The Continental Congress agreed to separate itself from Great Britain, and this being something of a big deal as these things go, they figured they should explain themselves. “A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation,” was the way they put it. They assigned a team to put this explanation together, and that team agreed that Thomas Jefferson, who was a pretty good writer, would create the first draft.

The resulting document contains, mostly, a list of grievances against King George III. For instance, “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” Few of us can explain what exactly that means over two hundred years later. But there’s a little more to it than that. At the beginning of the document, there are some words that contain the heart, and the soul, of this new nation: “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. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

It was not just a revolution of one people against another, it was a revolution of thought. It was a declaration not just of grievances but of universal rights, that such rights not only existed, but that it was government’s job to protect those rights, and that government was not some force from the outside but found its source of power in the consent of the people being governed. Lincoln summed it up 87 years later: “Our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

It changed the world.

David McCullough talks about the men who did it, concentrating on George Washington, without whom… Well, it’s hard to imagine: