AMERICAN SCRIPTURE: Making the Declaration of Independence.<i> By Pauline Maier</i> .<i> Alfred A. Knopf: 304 pp., $27.50</i>

Pauline Maier claims here that “I bear no animus toward Jefferson,” even though she told American Heritage that he is “the most overrated person in American history.” This book makes one wonder how she treats people who do earn her animus. Her Jefferson lied on his tombstone, calling himself “Author of the Declaration of Independence.” Maier repeatedly says that he was only “the draughtsman,” not the author. He fostered idolatry toward himself and his document, hoping the very desk he wrote it on would be “carried in the procession of our nation’s birthday, as the relics of the saints are in those of the Church.”

His Declaration was inferior to that of any dozen or so “declarations of independence” written at the local level, since their “legislatures had offered a more effective case for Independence by concentrating on a handful of specific events of 1775 and 1776 and arguing that they left America with no good alternative to separate nationhood.” What she likes about these “declarations” is that they were addressed to action, to practical necessity, not to fancy ideas, whereas Jefferson had to be rescued from his own weird ideas and hysterical rhetoric by that joint group of brilliant editors, the Congress.

These editors dashed cold water on a man who had worked himself into a meaningless lather. According to Maier:

“Jefferson heaped on the British people an anger like that he had invested in the King, an anger that took form in a flood of words. The passage [of the Declaration] is coherent. . . . But Jefferson, it seems, couldn’t let it go at that. In lines full of passion he went on--it almost seems he couldn’t stop--overleaping natural pauses, heaping one denunciation on another:

“ ‘We must endeavor to forget our former love for them, and to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.’

“There was another natural ending. But no:

“ ‘We might have been a free and a great people together; but a communication of grandeur and freedom it seems is below their dignity.’

“Done? Not quite, although anger was beginning to dissolve into melodrama:

“ ‘Be it so, since they will have it; the road to happiness and to glory is open to us too; we will climb it apart from them and acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our eternal separation.’ ”

“Du calme, Madame,” Maier seems to be telling Jefferson, and her mockery is effective in its way. But the fact that Jefferson is not just frothing at the mouth might have been picked up in his use of the classical treaty formula for “enemies in war, in peace friends.” And the fact that this is no mere momentary ebullition (Maier makes much of the fact that Jefferson was working under the pressure of a deadline) can be seen from similar passages written earlier, in calm moods. In his draft of a reply to Lord North’s proposed settlement (June 10, 1775), he talked of “those bonds of amity with our fellow subjects which we would wish to remain indissoluble.” In the “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms” (June-July, 1775), he expressed a hope “to continue the connection with their friends [in England] . . . thro’ warmth of affection”--i.e. not to do what the Declaration says it is doing (in a passage retained by Congress): “for any people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another.”

These earlier (and many later) passages prove that Jefferson was not just carried away by anger in his draft of the Declaration but voicing a settled attitude toward the role of amity as the basis of political union. Jefferson based this view on classical concepts of philia, as elaborated in the Enlightenment’s unsentimental emphasis on the role of sentiment in morality. One does not have to agree with Jefferson, or think it appropriate for the Congress to adopt this position in its final draft, to see that it is a position, reached by a line of thought, not the mere spasm of a harried man with no time to write rationally.

But Maier is not much interested in lines of thought. She admires what she calls the many local “declarations of independence” because they show little if any interest in theory. They are practical, based on community consensus, not a single person’s idiosyncrasies. She is impressed by the fact that these establishments of local revolutionary government were “everywhere remarkably alike.” I am reminded of the awe felt for the Greek translation of Jewish scripture (the “Septuagint”) because all of its 70 translators supposedly came up with the same text, individually, that they jointly approved.

In fact, Maier, who mocks the idea of Jefferson as a Moses bringing God’s word down from the mountain, has a surprisingly providential view of the voices rising up toward the mountain. The inspired Volk expressed itself uniformly in the separate declarations, and even in the elected Congress (which became a joint genius at editing Jefferson’s text). One is given the impression that Jefferson was an obstacle that had to be swept aside for the authentic revolutionaries to get down to business.

Actually, Maier does not quite pursue her line of thought to its logical conclusion. She grudgingly accepts the Declaration as amended by Congress, especially since it incorporated the essence of representative Richard Henry Lee’s motion, voted July 1, “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

That motion passed. Congress had declared independence. Maier’s hero, John Adams, said July 1 should be celebrated as the real date of a separate political existence. The document passed on July 4 was just the explanation “to a candid world” of what had been effected three days earlier. Why did we need the later Declaration at all?

Perhaps we didn’t. Certainly no one thinks the Revolution would have failed without it. Most of its hold on people now comes from its Nachleben--which Maier also deplores. For one thing, the glorification of the Declaration has made people think of the founding generation as demigods, which causes disillusionment with our more ordinary politicians. But Lincoln treated Jefferson as a demigod, and it did not seem to shrink him. For that matter, Washington’s contemporaries and immediate successors treated him as a demigod, as Maier’s hero Adams complained with exasperation, and it did not shrink the whole founding generation.

Maier begins and ends her book with satirical descriptions of people lining up to do reverence to the document in the National Archives as if it were something holy in itself. She practices a little academic one-upmanship by quoting those in the line who do not understand the real history of the Declaration. What angers her is the way these people treat Jefferson and the founders generally, as something special, when they were really just like us.

But she treats the founders’ whole generation as different from ours. The Volk that, with inspired unanimity, drafted the favored declarations, or whose representatives were a septuaginta of editorial infallibility, have dwindled now to idolators of a parchment. She mocks “the people” doing reverence, in the name of the people who took action--so, by her own account, the founders were not just the same.

But Maier has more serious charges against the Nachleben of the Declaration. Lincoln was wrong not only in treating Jefferson as a demigod but in the reasons for his reverence. Lincoln wrote in 1859:

“All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Lincoln praises just what Maier abominates: the introduction of theory into a “merely revolutionary document.” Besides, he got Jefferson’s theory wrong, Maier says, on what he took to be Jefferson’s main point, that “all men are created equal.”

It is certainly true that Lincoln misread Jefferson’s meaning (as part of what I have called a “sleight of hand”). Jefferson, like other Enlightenment figures, thought men were equal in their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and had the authority to revoke government when it denied those rights based on their natural equality. But when it comes to revoking government, not everyone had an equal right to act. Women, for instance, could not vote for American independence, take part in drafting and passing the Constitution or hold political office. That shows that “all men” is not generic for humankind, as many think. It defined the rights of the citizen, the Homo politicus--which, for Jefferson as well as for Rousseau and others, excluded not only slaves and idiots but women and children.

When notions of equality broadened early in the 19th century, people began reading the Declaration in a new context. This was a long process, quickened by the way Transcendentalists, like Theodore Parker, paved the way for Lincoln. But it was a fairly easy step to say that a broadened definition of equality still led to a broadened understanding of its consequences (i.e. broader claims to the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness).

Maier is having none of this. Though she argues in general against taking the Declaration’s phrases separately (as theory) rather than cumulatively (as rhetoric), this anti-theorist gets finicky on points of theory when she says that “all men are equal” is meant to refer only to man in the state of nature, which is restored with the dissolution of government. But the equality comes and goes in a nanosecond as a new government is set up, taking humankind out of the state of nature and therefore out of the equality that exists only there. In our case, it went by too fast for women to get their natural equality and help create the new government.

According to Maier, the new government was set up against equality. If so, how can one reform that government when it denies the equal rights to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness? It is not surprising, perhaps, that one who professes no interest in Jefferson as theorist should misstate his theory.

The afterlife of the Declaration is a story of what might be called creative misreadings, not an unusual thing in history. Political theorists misread Roman history to claim that the Roman government was based on “mixed government” and a separation of powers. Many, including Justice Anthony Scalia, misread “The Federalist” as a defense of states rights rather than of central government. Sometimes these misreadings are benign in their effect, sometimes not. It would be hard to claim that the Declaration, variously read and misread, has not been a blessing to this nation.

Henry Adams, who was as amused by the glorification of Jefferson as Maier is disgusted, treated the man’s effect as a comedy of errors. Jefferson often accomplished the opposite of what he intended--as when he strengthened the central government during his presidency, while trying to weaken it. Many odd effects flowed from his words and reputation, but Adams saw that, through all vicissitudes of accident and inadvertence and misunderstanding, Jefferson always seemed to bob up on top--testimony to his powerful link with Americans’ optimistic gift for self-reinvention, their willingness to cut away the past and launch themselves blithely into the future. It can seem a sappy attitude, but something of it breathes through most of Jefferson’s words, including those of the Declaration. This has made Jefferson a living symbol as well as a person who lived in one era, and Adams understood that symbols can be as complex, and as full of consequences, as events.