America's founding promise of equality remains contested 250 years later

Fifty-six delegates from all 13 colonies signed the Declaration of Independence after the Continental Congress adopted it on July 4, 1776. The document that began with Thomas Jefferson’s draft now stands 250 years on as both a founding text and a reminder of how far the nation’s promises were from the lives of many people who lived under them.

The Declaration’s most famous phrase, “all men are created equal,” drew from Enlightenment thought and earlier language in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, but its meaning has never settled. Library of Congress materials note that the phrase has been debated since the document was created, with some readers treating “all men” as a universal claim and others arguing that Jefferson and the other authors intended to exclude women and children. That dispute has outlasted the men who wrote it.

A committee of five was appointed on June 10, 1776 to draft the Declaration: Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston and Roger Sherman. Jefferson wrote the first draft. The finished text was engrossed on parchment, and on August 2, 1776, the signatures began to go on one by one. John Hancock signed first, and the original signed copy is now held by the National Archives.

The document’s language of liberty sat inside a society in which slavery remained central to the economy and social order. At Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate depended on hundreds of enslaved men, women and children to maintain the household and plantation. Washington later questioned slavery and, in his will, became the only Founding Father to free the people he enslaved. That record underscores the contradiction at the heart of the founding: a nation announcing equality while resting on bondage.

The National Archives says the Declaration is not legally binding, but it remains a powerful statement of the principles on which the nation was built. It has endured as a symbol because its promise was larger than the world that produced it, and because that promise has kept being claimed, narrowed and renewed in every generation since 1776.