Two hundred and fifty years on, however, it’s time to move past the fixation on Jefferson’s intent. It was never realistic to think that the meaning of a document suffused with revolutionary possibilities could remain within the parameters of Jefferson’s personal beliefs, however we might divine them. Through the exertions of Black Americans and others concerned about progress toward a more just society, the Declaration has been given life and purpose beyond what we take to have been its author’s sight. Perhaps their intentions are what matter most now.
For the substantial number of Americans who have wished over the years to exclude Black people from the polity, Jefferson’s intent has always been paramount. As one argument goes, Jefferson and other members of the founding generation did not think African Americans were equal to white people; therefore, they were not endowed by the Creator with the rights that European Americans claimed in 1776. This particular message has been delivered in the United States in countless ways in everyday life and in powerful venues at crucial moments.
Notably, the idea that Black people were simply not part of the Declaration’s “all” was at the center of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. The infamous 1857 ruling held that people of African descent were not citizens of the United States. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney looked to his version of history and found that “neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.”
Taney’s decision was more than a statement about how legal status determined the right to citizenship, or, we might say, the right to be called an “American.” It was one thing to explain why the enslaved, treated by law as property, were well outside civic equality. It was quite another to do what Taney did in extending the prohibition to free Black Americans, who, by 1857, could have been the product of generations of legally free people who had paid taxes, fought in American wars, and, in some cases, voted and held office. In Taney’s formulation, even people born of white mothers and Black fathers in states that determined a child’s status by that of their mother were ineligible to be citizens. Taney’s issue, of course, was race. For him, being white was the basic requirement for being an American.