First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

by Thomas E. Ricks

The second paragraph is probably the key passage of writing in all of American history. In it, Jefferson sets forth the beliefs of these people who are declaring themselves a new nation upon the Earth. We can all recall how it begins: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” The last five words of that sentence sweep aside millennia of unequal births and preordained lives and define these new Americans as a people who subscribe to a revolutionary belief. In the context of the late 1700s, it is even a bit pugnacious: Do you think you are better than us? In this new nation, all people—or at least all white men—would have equal standing before the law. That was a Hutton-like leap of the imagination.