Ken Burns

When things calm down, the Brits sort of retreat.

He goes, oh, no, no, no, it's just going to get worse.

It's going to get worse.

And so you meet these characters that sound an awful lot like characters that occupy our large media space.

And it was occupying the large media space of the colonists from New Hampshire.

I live in a tiny village.

The Walpole Gazette was read all the way in Georgia.

People exchanged ideas and thought about things and were trying to figure out –

Even as late as the – even after Lexington conquered, even after the Battle of Bunker Hill, which is June of 75, even after the other things that were happening, by early 76, nobody's absolutely – not nobody, but there's not a majority will for independence, independency as they called it.

And then Thomas Paine comes in and writes this pamphlet, Common Sense.

And all of a sudden, people are going, oh, yeah.

And by June, there's a committee of the Second Continental Congress, and Franklin's in charge of it, and there's John Adams is on the committee, and there's a 32-year-old lawyer from Virginia named Thomas Jefferson who's given the first crack at doing this thing.

And what does he write?

He writes, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.

And Franklin...

who's the old man, the chairman, if you will, of this little committee, goes, uh-uh, we hold these truths to be self-evident.

Joe, there is nothing in the world less self-evident than the idea that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But as someone pointed out, it's the old lawyer's dodge.

You know, you just tell them that it's self-evident, not just sacred and undeniable, lovely phrasing on Jefferson's part.

But if you say self-evident, then we're not arguing about this thing.