There is a breed of historians known, colloquially, as “cold water” historians for their drive to pour analytic “cold water” on the politically or historiographical fashionable arguments. Pauline Maier most certainly belongs to this historiographical polar bear club.[1] As anyone who read her New York Times obituary (or any other, really) knows, Maier is famous for describing Thomas Jefferson as “overrated.”[2] Her wonderful American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence brings the most powerful weapons of the skeptical historians— context and contingency—to bear on that central document of American political and national identity.

Maier makes several downright revolutionary moves in her interpretation of the Declaration and the movement toward American independence, more broadly. The most important, and most challenging to the common assumptions of historians and laypersons alike, is that there is nothing truly original about the Declaration. Maier sees the document “as a statement of political philosophy, [it] was… purposefully unexceptional in 1776.”[3] This is a wonderful historiographical two-step around one of the more tortured interpretive battles about the Declaration—if it was “Lockean” natural rights or Scottish “common-sense” that most impacted Jefferson at his drafting table.[4] This analytic move allows Maier to shift to fresh analytic terrain by drawing careful attention to the political and institutional necessities of 1776. The Declaration of Independence in American Scripture becomes, perhaps, a less revolutionary document and more a document of the Revolution.[5]

The most important context, then, for the Declaration is the state and local “declarations of independence” and the moves within the Continental Congress towards authorizing the states to form their own independent constitutions—all of which precede the adoption of the Declaration by Congress. This has the wonderful benefit of broadening this story to include common men on the ground in specific communities and their dialectical relationship with developments on the proto-national political scene.[6] It suggests that movement towards independence was a much more a popular movement (at least within politicized whites) than much of Congress-Jefferson dominated scholarship suggests.[7] This aspect of American Scripture links with Maier’s broader purpose of de-centering the political philosophy of Declaration from our analysis and making the document quite clearly a product of the context of 1776.

Maier’s process-centered understanding of the Declaration of Independence has the added benefit of pushing Jefferson to the side. Direct antecedents to Jefferson’s draft, such as the English and the Virginia Declarations of Rights, get much more space than they usually do in such narratives.[8] Maier breaks from the standard practice of referring to the document produced in the summer of 1776 as “Jefferson’s Declaration.”[9] For Maier this is a deep misunderstanding of the Declaration. At every level Jefferson’s colleagues, in the drafting committee and the Congress more broadly, reshaped and sharpened the Virginian’s prose. The final document, then, is truly “Congress’s Declaration”—“[b]y exercising their intelligence, political good sense, and a discerning sense of language, the delegates managed to make the Declaration at once more accurate and more consonant with the convictions of their constitutes, and to enhance both its power and its eloquence.”[10] Such is the power of a good editor.

All of this taken together is a deep challenge to Americans’ common perception of the Declaration. This deflating the trans-historical importance of the Declaration has drawn sharp criticism. Fewer critiques are sharper than that of Gordon Wood, her colleague in the “Harvard circle.”[11] Wood argues, in his review of American Scripture, that Maier “was so committed to critical contextual history – in getting the story of 1776 right – that she has no sympathy whatsoever with the symbolic memory that has grown up around Jefferson in the last two centuries.” She “ought to have a little more compassion for a people who lack common origins as well as most of the most of the other ordinary attributes of nation building.” For documents like Declaration or the Constitution what’s really important is not their history or context, but the tradition which emerged around them. This tradition is what gave great men like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. the discursive tools to challenge the great American evils of slavery and segregation. For a “critical historian” like Maier to seek challenge this tradition through “correcting obvious myths” is to deny Americans the heritage and tradition necessary to create politics in the present.[12]

Such criticism misses the mark. Maier is rightly remembered as “historian’s historian,” focused first and foremost interested getting the past “right.” In American Scripture, which I consider her greatest work, such an interpretive position has a deep and important political purpose. By restoring the Declaration to its original historical context Maier hopes to liberate it from the ossifying shrine some Americans have erected around the document. That the Declaration, according to one its modern attendants, has “been untouched by human hands for forty-three years” symbolic of the tragic nature of this process.[13] The Declaration, for Maier, was made human hands – not a hand, be it Jefferson’s or even Congress’s. It is a living document. Independence, and thus the United States, was made by the American people and thus its legacy should be restored to the hands of the people. Enshrining the memory of the Declaration as a product of Jefferson’s hand or its reinterpretation by Lincoln or, even, King ignores the multifaceted and contingent contexts out of which the American nation emerged. Placing heritage over history is, in Maier’s words, at “war against our capacity, together, to define and realize right and justice in our time.”[14]

That capacity is the gift of historicism and critical history. By returning such vital parts of the American political tradition to their original historical contexts, critical history begins to liberate us from the dead hand of the past. Documents like the Declaration of the Independence and institutions like the government created by the Constitution are not shrines demanding genuflection by modern Americans. They are a large and important legacy, ours to do with what we need and will.