How the Declaration of Independence Changed the World

Thomas Jefferson's original rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, written in June 1776, including all the changes made later by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and other members of the committee, and by Congress. Credit: Library of Congress

Jefferson places the Declaration before the Continental Congress, seen by engraver Edward Savage based on a painting by Robert Edge Pine. Credit: Library of Congress

Heather Whipps is a freelance writer with an anthropology degree from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Each Monday, this column turns a page in history to explore the discoveries, events and people that continue to affect the history being made today.

In between mouthfuls of hot dogs and potato salad, Americans on this July Fourth might actually ponder those famous phrases scrawled near the top of the Declaration of Independence:

"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."

When he penned the Declaration in 1776, Thomas Jefferson had an inkling of the consequences it held for the 13 colonies, who were announcing their intention to break free from the shackles of British rule. What he may not have anticipated, however, were the widespread effects his powerful words would also have around the world.

The Declaration of Independence didn't just change the course of American history, but created a ripple effect that nudged a host of other nations toward independence, making a revolutionary poster boy of Jefferson in the process.

The Enlightenment

Britain's vast army was already on its way towards New York Harbor when Jefferson sat down to compose the Declaration in June of 1776, beginning:

"When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

The ideas Jefferson expressed, which justified the reasons for revolt with a list of charges against the British king, weren't original. A number of global texts written during the highly charged Enlightenment years of the 17th and 18th centuries included similar ideals about liberty and the right to self-determination, and Americans throughout the colonies were already promoting the progressive worldview in newspapers and schoolbooks.

It was the fiery political climate into which the Declaration was born that made Jefferson's words so important. When his final draft was edited and adopted by Congress on July 4th, the statement signified independence, but it also solidified the path to all-out war, and not just in the new United States.

Liberty gets going

Immediately after it was printed, the Declaration sparked worldwide debate on the legitimacy of colonial rule.

Several countries used the document as a shining beacon in their own struggles for independence and adopted Jefferson as their figurehead. Jefferson himself predicted that American independence would be a catalyzing force — a "ball of liberty," he called it — that would soon make its way across the globe.

First came France, whose revolution in the 1780s and 90s drew upon the American experience and literature for inspiration. Jefferson happened to be a minister to France at the time and became an ardent supporter of the revolutionaries, even helping to draft a charter of rights in support of a new republic, eerily similar to the one he'd written just over a decade prior.

With its mother country France in disarray, another colony inspired by the American Revolution sought independence in the late 18th century. Haiti had been a profitable sugar and coffee colony for centuries, known as one of the cruelest plantation islands in the Caribbean. Led by freed slave Toussaint L'Ouverture, who quoted both France and America's declarations to stir the uprising, Haiti achieved its own liberty in 1804. Ironically, former slaves in Haiti had used the Declaration of Independence as a model in their fight for freedom while the document gave no such rights to slaves in the United States.

In the years that followed, themes from the Declaration were sourced and reinterpreted for further independence movements in Greece, Poland, Russia and throughout South America. A world of empires was gradually turning into a world of sovereign states.

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