Matthew Spalding, The Making of the American Mind: The Story of Our Declaration of Independence, (Encounter Books, 2026). Winner of ISI’s 2026 Conservative Book of the Year Award
“When forced, therefore, to resort to arms for redress, an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our justification. This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind…”
– Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825
In The Making of the American Mind, Matthew Spalding presents a close reading of The Declaration of Independence that draws on insights from history, literature, political philosophy, and theology, all the while remaining an accessible work of American political thought. Each chapter analyzes a section of the Declaration to elucidate central concepts and comment on academic and popular disputes. Throughout the book, Spalding returns to the above quote from Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Henry Lee. In response to Lee’s question about the origin of the ideas expressed in the Declaration, Jefferson wrote that he had summarized the “plain and firm” arguments, principles, and sentiments of the American people at the time of the Revolution. Spalding’s book makes those “common sense” views of the eighteenth-century revolutionaries accessible to Americans today. Spalding has crafted a work that will elevate the reader’s “instinctive patriotism,” founded on their love of people and place, into a “reflective patriotism,” a “spirited attachment to American self-government as well as a reasoned devotion to the general principles of natural right and human liberty.”11. Spalding, The Making of the American Mind, 4, 41.
One of the book’s themes—“whether the Americans are a people”—stands out as particularly controversial, insightful, and useful for America’s present concerns. Spalding did not directly address contemporary questions, like mass migration, multiculturalism, or birthright citizenship, that have provoked renewed controversy about American citizenship and peoplehood, but his interpretation of the Declaration bears on these questions. With support from dozens of outside sources, he showed that both the American creed and culture—its universal principles and its people—contributed to the nation’s foundational greatness. Ultimately, Spalding understood the Declaration as a “dogma of civic faith.” He followed G. K. Chesterton, who viewed America as the “only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.”22. Spalding, The Making of the American Mind, 98, 194. Spalding recognized the English Protestant origins of the revolution, but his creedal conception of American greatness suggests that the Declaration’s natural rights principles can persist without retaining that inheritance.
Although the following account might suggest otherwise, Spalding did not forget the “one people” who founded the United States, the God they worshipped, or their posterity who must preserve it. A significant portion of the book tracks the history of the American people leading up to the revolution. The American founding generation was English “more than anything else” and “overwhelmingly Christian and overwhelmingly Protestant,” and those Protestants were “mostly Calvinist.” The English common law, the classical tradition, and the common-sense Scottish Enlightenment (as opposed to the skeptical French Enlightenment) all informed the thinking that made the Declaration possible. Spalding suggested, though never explicitly stated, that the one American people can continue without these traits because they are secondary to a commitment to the principles of the Declaration. In religious life, for example, “we usually associate” the “natural-law arguments” used to support the Declaration with “Roman Catholicism.”33. Spalding, The Making of the American Mind, 52, 67, 85. Some traditions might support the Declaration’s principles as much, perhaps more than, the tradition whose ideas formed the document.
Whether Americans maintain their founding inheritances or not, Spalding asserted that they do not constitute the essence of the one people. Rather, the love of the American place, people, and way of life must be “transformed into firm commitments with real substance,” including a civic education in “the creed of America’s civic life and political identity, its temporal scripture and epic poetry:” the Declaration of Independence, which is the “source of America’s true greatness.” The creed contained therein “draws us to things that are beyond the material, allowing us to see a world imbued with meaning and to grasp the transcendent truth that sets us free.” The Declaration’s claims “transcend history, consanguinity, place—as important as those all are.” In the perennial debate about the source of America’s greatness—the creed or the clan—Spalding concluded that the creed “unites us as a people in common purpose and gives meaning to our common citizenship.”44. Spalding, The Making of the American Mind, 4, 7, 10, 235-236. He defended the idea that the Americans are one people who were reared in English Protestantism, the common law, and the classical tradition, but their peoplehood today depends, above all, on a commitment to the Declaration’s self-evident truths.
Spalding argued that the Declaration created a new political order with a new understanding of citizenship and peoplehood. The new idea no longer relies on ties of ethnicity, language, or religion. Colonial Americans became “one people” sometime between their immigration to the New World and the Continental Congress’s adoption of the Declaration. They did not primarily become a new people, distinct from the British, through shared ancestry, culture, history, land, or language. Instead, the Americans by the time of the revolution had developed “perhaps the most crucial aspect of nationhood,” namely, a set of “common beliefs and principles.” Spalding wrote that the “old distinctions of tribe, race, or ethnicity—of Athenian or Spartan, pagan or Jew, Anglo-Saxon or Gallic, Catholic or Protestant—are no longer the determining factor of political legitimacy or nationhood.” The common beliefs, then, encompass natural rights philosophy and the common law but no longer include Christian faith, let alone the Protestant tradition, whose adherents included the “vast majority of the signers.” Cultural, ethnic, racial, and religious bonds remain “very important, but they are not the basis of civic identity.” Whatever importance these historical, organic, and spiritual connections have left in other spheres, they do not have much of a relationship to citizenship, peoplehood, or political legitimacy. The new ground of American citizenship and peoplehood comes from mankind’s “equal humanity under the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” which Spalding here frames as accessible by universal natural theology or philosophy.55. Spalding, The Making of the American Mind, 86, 197-198.
As the Declaration made ethnic and religious inheritances irrelevant criteria in determining what constitutes a people, Spalding also asserted that the Declaration rejected allegiance to a sovereign authority as a condition of peoplehood. The Declaration renounced “the British idea of political sovereignty,” which does not recognize “a separate collective entity called ‘the people’ other than the subjects that emerge because of a pre-existing British sovereign.” The natural rights tradition supports Spalding’s claim. Under the social contract theory, a people can come into existence by compact before the creation of a sovereign state, and a people can retain its collective existence after the state’s dissolution. The existence of peoples apart from states makes the right to revolution, and the entire natural rights theory, possible. By the time of the Declaration, the Americans were already a separate and distinct people, albeit one formed of a “loose coalition of states with a strong shared identity.”66. Spalding, The Making of the American Mind, 28, 195, 206. Despite the absence of true national sovereignty at the time of the revolution, the Americans had already become one people.
A few thoughts of my own, in response: In his letter to Lee, Jefferson insisted that he was not “aiming at originality of principle or sentiment.” Outside of the Declaration, the American founding generation did not uniformly recognize common political principles as the sole or exclusive basis of citizenship or peoplehood. Instead, they appealed to both natural rights principles and the “old distinctions” that Spalding claimed the Declaration excluded from the criteria of civic identity: religious creed, ethnicity, language, customs, and even allegiance. In Federalist 2, when John Jay recognized that God gave “one connected country to one united people,” he listed their political principles as one source of their bond, but he mentioned ancestral blood in the first place and spilled blood in the last place. The Americans are “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.”77. John Jay, Federalist 2. Religion and political principles occupy the central positions, but they find their support in ancestry and war. Likewise, James Madison in Federalist 14 did not see the nation’s unity exclusively in the American people’s assent to a common creed; rather, “the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defense of their sacred rights, consecrate their Union…”88. James Madison, Federalist 14. The blood of ancestry and the blood poured out in war combine to set apart the nation from all others. The first Congress put these ideas into the Naturalization Act of 1790, and they persisted until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
Like ancestry, the English language characterized the American people. In his Dissertations on the English Language, Noah Webster described Americans as the “children” of Great Britain, but he asserted that “as an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.” While Americans will develop an independent language, “English is the common root or stock from which our national language will be derived,” and eventually North Americans will consist of “a hundred millions of men, all speaking the same language.”99. Noah Webster, Dissertations on the English Language. Allegiance to the Union also defined American peoplehood, though they could always alter or abolish their federal government without dissolving themselves as a people. In his Farewell Address, George Washington wrote that the American people’s “unity of government,” or their allegiance to the federal government of the United States, “constitutes” them as “one people.”1010. George Washington, “Farewell Address.”
Spalding correctly showed that American citizenship, more than citizenship in any other nation, depends on commitments to natural rights: equality, consent of the governed, and the protection of life, liberty, and property. Adherence to these principles, however, cannot replace religion, ancestry, custom, or language—those “old distinctions” that serve as the natural foundation of peoplehood. The Founding Fathers proclaimed their natural rights principles in the Declaration not to supplant that old ground of citizenship or to direct us toward transcendent meaning, but to define and secure their primary political aim: the one American people’s liberty, independence, safety, and happiness. When we see the Declaration as a document intended to draw us away from the material, to elevate us from local attachments to transcendent meaning, we might forget that politics exists to secure “the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life,” as C. S. Lewis put it.1111. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 199. When the Declaration’s truths become the “real substance,” the American people, place, and way of life can become instruments to secure abstractions.
Spalding demonstrated that the Declaration’s principles unite the American people in a way that transcends the old distinctions of civic identity, but Americans cannot aspire to a unity of political principles unless they have a shared foundation in natural affections. Spalding began the book with this reflection, noting his own progress from an instinctive American patriotism to a reflective American patriotism. In The Four Loves, Lewis acknowledged the necessity of moving from natural loves to spiritual loves: “As the family offers us the first step beyond self-love, so [love of nation] offers us the first step beyond family selfishness…” Spiritual loves cannot thrive unless built on a foundation of natural affections—from family and homeland to language and tradition. In the case of the nation, the natural affections can lead to a deeper unity in shared political commitments or, if disordered, an uglier national selfishness. The love of family and nation can “become rivals to spiritual love: but they can also be preparatory imitations of it…”1212. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 24. The fact that natural affections for a nation and way of life can distort or undermine political principles does not mean that we can safely discard them.
Nearly everyone acknowledges the dangers of an excessive attachment to one’s people and way of life, but the opposite dangers have been neglected. “As Chesterton says,” Lewis wrote, “a man’s reasons for not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners are very like his reasons for not wanting his house to be burned down; because he ‘could not even begin’ to enumerate all the things he would miss. It would be hard to find any legitimate point of view from which this feeling could be condemned.”1313. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 23-24. The founders, like Lewis, felt no shame in loving their own, in defending their way of life, or in basing their civic identity on foundations far more organic and parochial than the pure and timeless principles of the Declaration. An insufficient attachment to the old distinctions of tribe, language, and religion would subvert the natural affections that make possible a reflective dedication to the ideals of the Declaration.
