National Treasure: Michael Auslin on the Declaration of Independence's two simultaneous lives

The Declaration of Independence has had two simultaneous lives. One is the life of its ideas, the life that scholars pay the most attention to: a life of fits and starts, surprisingly forgotten in the first years after the Revolution, then returning with a vengeance amid sectional conflict in the 1830s, during the Progressive Era, and again during the Civil Rights Movement.Its second life is as a material document. It is an engrossed parchment rushed away from advancing British troops twice in its life, carried by carriage and train across the United States, tucked away in archives and cellars, displayed in patent offices and libraries, and eventually enshrined in a helium-filled case under carefully controlled conditions.As Michael Auslin argues in National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America, these two lives cannot be separated. Americans did not merely preserve the Declaration because of what it said. They preserved it because the physical document itself became a national relic—an object that connected generations of Americans to the Revolution and to one another.Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is the author of numerous books on American and international history and writes The Pawtomack Packet, a Substack devoted to the history of Washington, D.C.