Michael Hattem

It's the world that is the sort of intended audience, as the introduction makes it seem.

And then the other thing about the preamble is that the preamble is unnecessary.

for the moment.

For this specific moment of July of 1776, the preamble is not necessary.

What was needed was the list of the grievances and probably the introductory paragraph.

If it didn't have the preamble, the Declaration would have served the purpose that it was intended to serve in July of 1776, but it would not have had the subsequent impact on American history and on world history.

Well, that's why you see the only mention, the only sort of religious illusions in the entire document is this idea of the laws of nature and of nature's God.

And that's a direct reference to the natural law ideas.

Yeah.

But particularly Enlightenment era natural law ideas and then also the fact that men are endowed by their creator with unalienable rights.

And that's the idea of natural rights, that you are born with rights and they are not given to you by – they're not bestowed upon you by the government.

Right?

But those are the only religious illusions and they are not denominationally specific for a reason.

I mean, the fact that many delegates were slave owners, the fact that Jefferson himself was a slave owner,

And then they wrote and approved these words.

In some sense, to me, that's an expression of what the historian Edmund Morgan called the American paradox.

The coexistence of slavery and this ideal of liberty

You know, is something that has been rooted in in the United States, even going back to the beginning of the colonial period almost.

Right.

So it's sort of, you know, it's it is and it is an expression of this of this, I wouldn't say hypocrisy.