JULY 4 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

These memorable words are the second sen tence in the Declaration of Independence that the Second Continental Congress adopted on July 4, 1776. They echo down through all of American history. They are one of our sacred texts of liberty.

It is virtually certain, though, that the man who wrote that declaration and the men who adopted it did not actually believe that all people were created inherently equal.

The Declaration of Independence was a public statement explaining why representatives of 13 colonies were engaging in an act of mass treason, declaring themselves no longer subjects of their king. The declaration was meant to persuade the people of the colonies to support the independence that it declared. It was a statement by, a statement on behalf of, and a statement to the political nation of which its author and the men who adopted it were a part.

That political nation consisted of the people who could by their public actions uphold or wreck the movement for independence. They consisted exclusively of adult, white, property-owning men.

It was those men, and those men only, who ran the local governments and churches, who served in the general assemblies, who raised the taxes and recruited the soldiers who could win or lose independence. Those were the men who had to be persuaded that declaring and fighting for independence were the right things to do.

Not one of the members of the Second Continental Congress is known to have believed in July 1776 that women (even adult, property-owning women), indentured servants, enslaved laborers, children, criminals, or Indians should take part in those processes. The members of Congress regarded those people as not free agents with independent willpower and a stake in the welfare of the society that entitled them to take part in its governance.

The words "all men are created equal" in the context of the declaration's purpose meant that the men who undertook to claim independence had a perfect natural right to take that act - kings and nobles and aristocrats in Great Britain notwithstanding.

Something that happened in Virginia supplies evidence for understanding that in Philadelphia and in Williamsburg in 1776 "all men" did not necessarily mean all men.

A few weeks before Congress acted in Philadelphia, the fifth and last of the Revolutionary Conventions took a similar action in Williamsburg. When George Mason's draft for the Virginia Declaration of Rights was first reported to the floor of the convention, it provoked instant debate.

Mason had written words very similar to the words Jefferson wrote, but other delegates objected that Mason's words, "all Men," implied an equality between slaves and owners of slaves and suggested the moral propriety of freeing the slaves. Mason had obviously not thought about that, and he agreed to have the language amended. The convention inserted a short phrase, "when they enter into a state of Society," into Mason's text.

As amended and adopted, the Virginia Declaration of Rights states, "That all Men are by nature equally free and Independent and have certain inherent Rights of which when they enter into a state of Society they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their Posterity."

Slaves, who did not voluntarily enter into the society that was represented in the convention, were therefore not entitled to the same rights as the convention's white men who claimed the rights for themselves. The amendment of Mason's words in Williamsburg informs us about the meaning of the almost identical words that Jefferson wrote in Philadelphia and that Congress did not stop to think about and amend.

The words "all men are created equal" nevertheless had powerful and unintended consequences for the new nation. People who read those words in 1776 and afterward read them more literally than their authors intended. It is possible to understand much of American history as attempts to make a reality out of the ideas that the unintended promise of those words implied.

If all men were created equal, then slavery had to go. The anti-slavery movement was based squarely on those ideas.

If all men were created equal, then all men should be allowed to vote as well as to pay taxes and fight the country's wars. By the 1850s almost all free white men almost everywhere could vote and take part in public affairs. American Democracy is based squarely on those ideas.

If "all men" were read to mean "all human beings," then all adult people should be allowed to vote, too. The women's suffrage movement was based squarely on those words.

The moral authority of the 20th-century civil rights movement was also based squarely on those words.

The moral authority of the women's movement during the final decades of the 20th century was also based squarely on those words.

The international leadership role that the United States has tried to play and that many nations have assigned to it is also based squarely on those words.

Thomas Jefferson and the prosperous adult white men in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776 set out to create a nation that would protect their own rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By their words and deeds, though, they began more than they intended. That powerful idea, that dream, is at the heart of American history and of the meaning of American citizenship.

Our whole history is, in many ways, an attempt to fulfill the promise of universal freedom and equality embodied in five simple words, "all men are created equal."
Brent Tarter is an editor and historian at the Library of Virginia.