I'm headed to the American
Philosophical Society
in Philadelphia to
meet with its librarian
Patrick Spiro he
studies documents
dating back to the time
of the country's founding.
What you're looking
at here is one
of the first printings of the
Declaration of Independence.
The first section
is the Preamble.
And this is where they
talk about life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.
And the idea is that
individuals should
be free to do these
things, and government
is constituted to
protect those freedoms.
And what the King has done
is broken that contract,
broken that trust.
And so they have to
be freed from the King
in order to be free
to do what they want.
Now, can you say that
this was the first time
a group of people
decided that they
wanted to be free to do whatever
the heck they wanted to do?
Well, I think it's the
first time that it was
ever written in a official way.
But this is not the only
version of the Declaration
of Independence that survives.
The other document I
want to show you is this.
Thomas Jefferson's draft of the
Declaration of Independence.
And you can see on the
side, there's these notes.
Yeah?
Once Congress got
their hands on this,
they started changing
words, changing meanings.
I think the most notable one
is, in that famous phrase,
that people are endowed with
certain unalienable rights,
Jefferson originally wrote,
inherent and inalienable
rights.
Inherent rights, which
Jefferson used several times,
means that all people are
born with these rights.
OK.
So if these rights
are not inherent,
then you're not
necessarily born with them?
Only a few people
are born with them.
And that applied
only to white society.
White, male society.
Yes.
Yes.
