Introduction

As we begin our year-long study of the American Constitutional Order, it’s our pleasure to introduce Dr. Adam Seagrave, who will give the keynote address for Valor’s inaugural convocation. Dr. Seagrave is Associate Professor in the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. He is a distinguished scholar of American political thought and the author of four books, including The American Conversation and The Accessible Federalist. His most recent work is Race and the American Story, and his first book, The Foundations of Natural Morality, explored John Locke’s thought on natural law and natural rights that deeply influenced the American founders.

Dr. Seagrave’s intellectual endeavors extend far beyond his own writing. He has also served as the inaugural managing editor for the prestigious journal American Political Thought and founded Starting Points, a journal for public-facing scholarship. He is a nationally recognized leader in civic education and has been honored with the American Legion National Education Award for his transformative work developing K–12 curricula. He serves as the Director of Academic Affairs for the Teaching American History Project, which seeks to preserve what is distinctively good about America by supporting teachers and students in the study of primary-source documents related to the American experiment.

Dr. Seagrave comes to us today with the perspective of a philosopher, a historian, an educator, and a public intellectual. Please join me in offering a warm welcome to Dr. Adam Seagrave.

Dr. Seagrave’s Remarks

Thank you so much, Daniel, for that generous introduction—really well done, excellently done. Like everything that I’ve encountered here at Valor—the staff, the teachers—I’ve been so impressed with all of you and with what you’ve built here. It’s truly my honor and privilege to be a part of your Convocation Day today.

Thank you all for letting me be a part of it, and thank you to everyone at Valor for the work that’s gone into this great event.

So, we’re going to talk about what it means to be a Declaration people. That’s what I’d like to focus on today. And I’ll start with Abraham Lincoln.

Between his election in 1860 and his inauguration in 1861, Lincoln jotted down some thoughts about the Declaration’s principles and the Constitutional Union that have become more famous even than many of his public speeches. The Constitutional Union was, in his thought and statesmanship, focused on maintaining what we might call the “big-C Constitution”—the document that begins with “We the People”—in the midst of the secession crisis.

He was also aware, though, of the all-important “small-c” American constitution: the intellectual and dispositional state of the American people that underpinned and guaranteed the continued existence of the democratic-republican regime. This is what we might call a Declaration people.

But what is a Declaration people? What does it mean for a political culture to be defined by the words in the Declaration of Independence?

I think it means at least three things:

1. A people attuned to the eternal.

2. A people who see themselves as enmeshed in an ordered universe—governed by a natural law, the “laws of nature.”

3. A people who believe in the immeasurable dignity of the human person.

The first component, being attuned to the eternal, corresponds to a virtue we might call faith—not necessarily in the religious sense, but in the sense of an awareness of the spiritual, supernatural, immaterial realm that stands over and above the physical realm we sense.

The second component—recognizing the embeddedness of human life in an ordered universe—corresponds to the virtue of justice.

And the third component—the belief in the dignity of the human person—corresponds to the virtue of love.

So I’ll walk through each of these components and their corresponding virtues in turn, each as it has manifested in the American political tradition.

I. Faith – Attunement to the Eternal

The anchor text in the Declaration for this component is the phrase we’ve all heard more than any other: “All men are created equal.”

Too often, though, we focus on parts of that phrase that aren’t at its core. We focus on equality—what does that mean? We focus on all men—who was included or excluded? These are important questions, but I want to focus on the two words “are created.”

First, it doesn’t mean what we often paraphrase it to mean: that “all men are born equal.” That would fall to the critique of John C. Calhoun, who in the 1830s denied the truth of the Declaration and called it a “self-evident lie.” Because all men are not born equal—they’re born as infants! Infants aren’t equal to adults, nor equal to each other in countless ways. So “born” isn’t the right term; it’s created.

Second, notice the word are. The Declaration isn’t a historical statement about the past or future—have been or will be—but about what is eternally true now. “All men are created equal” speaks to a present and ongoing reality: an ever-living now, as Frederick Douglass later said.

Jefferson drew on the Virginia Declaration of Rights (June 1776), which said: “All men are by nature equally free and independent.” “Are created” thus means by nature. It’s an assertion about human nature itself—something eternal, not historical.

Prior English precedents like the Magna Carta or the English Bill of Rights grounded rights in inherited history—ancestral liberties, ancient customs—not in eternal truths. Jefferson’s Declaration, by contrast, was a fleeting but profound insight into the eternal nature of humanity.

Yet, Jefferson himself later lost sight of it when, in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), he speculated about racial hierarchies—a historical, not eternal, way of thinking. Likewise, the Dred Scott decision (1857) and later evolutionary or Marxist materialism all reflected that same drift toward historicism and away from eternal truth.

Lincoln, by contrast, recovered the eternal meaning. In his speech on the Dred Scott decision, he said the authors of the Declaration “did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality… They meant simply to declare the right.”

A century later, Martin Luther King Jr. likewise saw the civil-rights struggle not merely as social conflict but as “a struggle between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.”

He said, “There is something in the universe that unfolds for justice.” Time, he suggested, unfolds for us what is already eternally true.

So, to be a Declaration people is to believe that humanity itself—our created nature—stands outside of time. Individual human beings are born and die, but humanity endures eternally.

II. Justice – Life in an Ordered Universe

This second component corresponds to the phrase “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

To believe in natural law is to believe that the universe is ordered—not chaotic—and that we can come to know that order.

Prince Hall, a free Black American who petitioned Massachusetts to abolish slavery in 1777, appealed to this idea: “The great Parent of the universe has bestowed equally on all mankind a natural and unalienable right to freedom.”

Similarly, Frederick Douglass said in his speech on Dred Scott:

“The Supreme Court of the United States is not the only power in this world… Judge Taney may decide and decide again, but he cannot reverse the decision of the Most High… There is a law above all the enactments of human codes, unchangeable and eternal. Man cannot hold property in man.”

Martin Luther King Jr. elaborated on this in his Letter from Birmingham Jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”

He meant this literally: the universe is a moral web. To disturb justice in one place is to threaten justice everywhere.

King continues: “There are just laws and unjust laws… An unjust law is a human law not rooted in eternal and natural law.”

Thus, a Declaration people believes there exists a pattern laid in the heavens—a law higher than any human code—and that we can know it. That’s what education is for: to discover the order we did not create but can apprehend.

III. Love – The Immeasurable Dignity of the Person

Finally, the third element: belief in the immeasurable dignity of the human person.

This corresponds to the phrase “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

“Unalienable” means these rights can neither be taken away nor surrendered. They are woven into our very being.

Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration called slavery “a cruel war against human nature itself.” To violate another person’s rights, he argued, is to violate humanity itself.

This marked a historic reversal of the “divine right of kings.” The Declaration replaced it with the divine right of the human person—that sovereignty resides in every individual.

Frederick Douglass reaffirmed this in his Fourth of July Address: “Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty?”

And again, King in his Letter from Birmingham Jail: “Any law that uplifts human personality is just; any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

King’s agape—love because God loves—captures this virtue. As he said, “The only way to ultimately change humanity… is to keep love at the center of our lives.”

Thus, to respect human dignity is to participate in that divine love.

IV. Hope – For a Renewed Declaration People

So, in sum, the three virtues of a Declaration people are faith, justice, and love—each corresponding to the Declaration’sown words.

But as we approach the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, I propose we add a fourth: hope.

Hope that our political culture can once again be rescued by the saving principles of the Declaration.

Hope that we can hold on to our spiritual eyesight amid the distractions of the digital age.

Hope that our public policies will again be guided not only by material concerns but by the unseen things that gave rise to our great nation nearly 250 years ago.

Thank you.