Before 1776, Americans owed “perpetual allegiance” to the king as a “debt of gratitude” in return for having been born under his protection, a debt which could not be thrown off or canceled without the king’s permission.
These were the hallowed dictates of the English common law that William Blackstone, the acknowledged authority on the common law, openly acknowledged was an inheritance from the feudal system, the “mutual trust or confidence subsisting between the lord and vassal.” It is significant that Blackstone never uses the word “citizen” in his four-volume commentary, instead using “subject” and “subjectship” throughout. Evidently, under the common law, there are no citizens properly so-called, only subjects.
The Declaration of Independence made the startling announcement that the American colonists were “absolved of all Allegiance to the British Crown.” This was a clear violation of the common law. It was a revolution and a radical break with the Old World and its attachment to feudalism. For the first time in history, consent of the governed became the sovereign element. The American Revolution transformed subjects into citizens, and citizens were expected to assert rights and accept the obligations of citizenship.
The Revolutionary War was fought because King George III resisted Americans’ attempt to dissolve “perpetual allegiance” by force of arms. In the 1783 Treaty of Paris, King George was forced to recognize America as an independent, sovereign nation. The founders had argued in the Declaration of Independence that resorting to revolution was both a right and a duty because it was the right that guaranteed all other rights.
President Abraham Lincoln understood the close connection between the “rights of human nature” disclosed in the Declaration of Independence and the importance of assimilation. On July 4, 1858, Lincoln appeared before a group of immigrants and referred to the founding generation as a race of “iron men” who fought to secure rights and freedom for the nation.
Most of you here today, Lincoln said, cannot trace your ancestry to those “iron men,” — you have no connection to them by blood. But when you look through that “old declaration,” Lincoln advised, you see that their central moral principle was stated very simply: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” And it is through this principle, Lincoln told his immigrant audience, that you have the right to claim your relation to those “iron men” quite as certainly as though you are the “blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that declaration.”
Assimilation, Lincoln held, is best achieved by a common dedication to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. This unity will be the nation’s strength. Today, of course, we are confidently assured by political leaders, Republicans and Democrats alike, that “diversity is our greatest strength.”
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This is an oft-repeated meme. We know, and common sense insists we know, that diversity is the solvent of society. Where there is no common good, where people are encouraged to make demands on society based on a host of idiosyncratic claims, the common good and unity of society dissolve into tribalism or worse. Today, the progressive Left says that the “melting pot” is “racist” and “imperialist.” Lincoln was wiser: It was the idea that “all men are created equal,” regardless of ancestry or country of origin, that was a unifying principle. This is something that the progressive Left has always denied.
Was Thomas Jefferson nonetheless a hypocrite because he was a slave owner when he wrote “all men are created equal”? This was Justice Roger Taney’s argument in the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford case. But Taney was wrong. Jefferson was a revolutionary thinker, not a historicist. Besides, the only question is whether “all men are created equal” is a true statement in determining the fundamental political question of who should rule and who should be ruled. If it is true, and I say with Lincoln that it is, then perhaps we need more hypocrisy.
Edward J. Erler is a professor emeritus of political science at California State University, San Bernardino. He is the author of The US in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation State (Revised and Expanded Edition 2025) and Prophetic Statesmanship: Harry Jaffa, Abraham Lincoln, and the Gettysburg Address (June 2025).
