Our Declaration

Allen refers repeatedly to the importance of her relationship with her students to her reading of the Declaration. She also stresses the importance of her family as her first teachers about equality, slow reading, and the value of education. Our Declaration is an explicitly educational work: Allen takes it upon herself to correct the common view that the text is about freedom more than equality. Allen also casts virtually every citizen as a student of the past, present, and future when she argues that virtually all individuals have some capacity to contribute to our understanding of whether our governments are working.

The Declaration, and Allen’s reading of it, relies heavily on natural imagery, especially water imagery and navigation. The image of human events as a “river” informs both Allen’s reading of the text and her use of John Locke to argue that humans have the capacity to interpret their lives and make judgments about the future. Human beings are part of nature, in Jefferson’s argument, and have a drive to survive and pursue happiness. This motif is also implicit in the Declaration’s criticisms of the king: Tyranny is unnatural to human flourishing, and thus the colonists are justified in their decision to revolt.