“We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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.”
In his recent book “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written,” historian and biographer Walter Isaacson declares that sentence from the Declaration of Independence to be “the greatest sentence ever crafted by human hand.”
Isaacson makes his case for this assertion in this 80-page book by first explicating the sentence phrase by phrase, unraveling its meaning, and discussing the controversies it has generated. He mulls over the meaning of “we,” he describes why Benjamin Franklin deleted Jefferson’s “sacred and undeniable” and inserted “self-evident,” and he looks at “all men are created equal” in an age of slavery and unenfranchised women. He rounds out this analysis with a chapter on the American Dream, one of the branches that grew from this tree of liberty, and ends with a few documents pertinent to the Declaration, including a copy of Jefferson’s “Original Rough Draught” and the Declaration itself. …