Jim Dolan: Risking it all for freedom

We all know how quickly history gets rewritten. Worse, history sometimes gets repurposed to serve personal and political interests.

We hear people -- including presidents -- express the view that freedom, independence and democracy are somehow the natural state of mankind, the logical end to political and sociological evolution. "Let's take these concepts to benighted parts of the world," some modern thinking goes, "Let's allow it take root and flower." (Even if we have to fertilize things with an invasion.)

None of this thinking was widespread, let alone believed, when Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. Or when the draft was debated and reworked through a total of 86 revisions. Or, finally, when the Second Continental Congress approved it on July 4, 1776.

The signers of the Declaration risked everything they had, including their lives. Fittingly, their Declaration of Independence was crafted not to be read privately, but to be proclaimed. Their actions were shockingly bold for the time:

• Declaring freedom and equality as fundamental rights. Four score and seven years later, Abraham Lincoln eloquently summarized the Declaration, "Our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

• Thumbing noses at the most powerful country in the world. The Declaration clearly specified the "Facts" of "absolute Tyranny" committed by the British crown -- egregious facts like imposing taxes without consent, depriving people of the benefit of trial by jury, plundering seas, ravaging coasts, burning towns, and destroying the lives of the people.

• Asserting the right to self-government. "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed" -- not a king.

• Almost certainly assuring that war would be fought, and that it would be on their farms and in their yards. Great Britain's keeping standing armies in the colonies in times of peace was one of the "Facts" of "absolute Tyranny."

• Risking everything for an unproven set of ideas. Jefferson acknowledged that English philosopher John Locke provided great inspiration for the Declaration, but Locke merely wrote treatises. He didn't declare independence or fight a war and risk everything to achieve that independence.

The signers of the Declaration had to know they were signing their own death warrants. Indeed, Benjamin Franklin warned that the signers must hang together "or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

The rest of the world watched this colonial rebellion with varying degrees of surprise, fascination, disdain. We forget that the Declaration was a dramatic and strategic inflection point in history -- and we forget the difficulty of disseminating the momentous news of the Declaration in 1776.

The night of July 4, shortly after the Continental Congress voted approval of the document, Philadelphia printer John Dunlap, in an act of sedition, printed 200 copies of it. Off those copies flew to be read in public squares and assemblies around the colonies and to announce a revolution. George Washington read a copy to his troops. Freedom through information delivered via horseback.

Today we transmit information in ways the founding fathers could never have fathomed, all over the world almost instantaneously. Freedom through information delivered by whomever, however, whenever and wherever. Freedom through information.

The technology is evolved, but in basic needs we're in the same place we were 232 years ago. That's history that cannot be rewritten, let alone repurposed. Freedom and self-government didn't get here through some sort of natural evolution. We have it today because of the nerve and vision of a handful of revolutionaries living in a world much different from ours.

So if you go to the Minnesota History Center to see the Declaration of Independence now on display, you can marvel at its age and good condition, you can think about how far we've come as a country, and you can thrill at seeing such a rare and important document. But most of all, you can think about the brave people who crafted and signed the Declaration, and be grateful for their boldness.

Jim Dolan is chairman, president and chief executive officer of Minnesota-based Dolan Media Co., the presenting sponsor of the Declaration of Independence exhibit at the Minnesota History Center. One of the 25 remaining original copies of the Declaration is on display through May 18.