Jefferson not only had models to imitate, says Maier, but capable editors to see that he imitated them well. As for content, Jefferson adapted freely from two newly drafted Virginia documents, his own preamble for the state constitution and George Mason’s influential Declaration of Rights.

In form and tone, its pedigree was English, pointing unmistakably to the Declaration of Rights of 1689, by which Parliament asserted its claims against the crown in the Glorious Revolution.

The Declaration of Independence, she reminds us, did not spring fully formed from the Virginian’s head in a few hours of inspired composition. The standard account of the Declaration’s making, she argues, consists overwhelmingly of myths conceived long after the events of 1776.įor Maier, putting 1776 in its proper context means, above all, cutting Thomas Jefferson down to size. Where the naive Fourth-of-July celebrant sees towering heroes, deeds without precedent, and a “sacred text” containing philosophical insights of astonishing originality, Maier finds the intransigent complexity and continuity of history. Such reverence, she believes, has no place in our attitudes toward the American past, least of all toward the Declaration of Independence, whose red-white-and-blue bunting she aims to strip away in American Scripture. The Declaration is its centerpiece, held above the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in what looks like a tabernacle, or perhaps a monstrance, the device used to display the host on special days of adoration. Resembles the awesome, gilded, pre-Vatdcan II altars of my Catholic girlhood, raised three steps above where the worshippers assembled. The structure, Maier observes in her new book, The “Charters of Freedom,” as the famed documents are labeled, occupy a massive, self-proclaimed “Shrine” of bulletproof glass and bronze. What she found there deeply distressed her. On a hot July afternoon several years ago, Pauline Maier, a professor of history at MIT, took a break from an academic conference in Washington and set out for the National Archives, curious to see the aging sheets of parchment with which Americans declared independence in 1776 and, more than a decade later, established a national government. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence

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