Don Wildman

I mean, the phrase self-evident was initially going to read, we hold these troops to be sacred.

Sacred and undeniable.

And Franklin is the one that crosses this out and replaces it with self-evident.

Because his new nation in his mind and others was one to be founded on reason, not on the dictates of religion, which is also a big kettle of fish in those days.

Exactly.

There are obvious contradictions in these words that will play out until current times.

Jefferson was a slave owner, owned 600 enslaved people, as were many of the signers of the Declaration.

Women, of course, had no legal rights.

Native populations completely excluded from any of this.

When you sit around, you're writing a book on this right now.

How do you reconcile all of this for yourself?

Well, and the irony of it being written by a man who was enslaving and others who signed it speaks to the strange double psychology of this document.

That very much is the psychology of America in evolving over time.

And it's as if they almost said too much about it.

And they wrote this ideal of existence, not realizing what they were writing and what they were signing.

As if it was, you know, cart before the horse almost.

And historically, that's exactly what happens.

Yeah.

Founding document of the United States of Unintended Circumstances.

We often talk about how dangerous it was for the founders.