Heather Cox Richardson on "contradiction at the heart of who we are as Americans"

David Rubenstein: "Thomas Jefferson wrote a sentence that Walter Isaacson has said is the greatest sentence ever written. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' How could he have written that when he was a slave owner?"

Heather Cox Richardson (@heathercoxrichardson): "Oh, I think he couldn't have written it unless he was a slave owner, which sounds weird, but that's the very contradiction at the heart of who we are as Americans. When those men looked out at their fields full of enslaved people and said, we are all created equal, they were writing out of we all the people that didn't look like them, didn't sound like them, didn't have the same kind of money they did. And by getting rid of the vast majority of humanity, women, people of color, black Americans and so on, they could say, oh yeah, we're all created equal. But the genius of our age, from their declaration of that to the present, and I hope beyond, is recognizing that those principles, even though they had limits on them, don't have to have limits on them for us. And that's exactly what happened. As soon as the declaration comes out, you have people like Phillis Wheatley, the black poet from Boston, writing, to an indigenous preacher saying, those are great principles and we feel the same way and that's what we've been doing ever since. That's what America is, is people who weren't included saying, hey, we should be in that, too. And expanding the boundaries of that extraordinary sentence."

SUNDAYAmerica's Book Club with Heather Cox Richardson 6pm ET on CSPAN

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